Seventeenth-Century Imagery from Northern Europe

Master of the Procession
Feast of the Wine (The Procession of the Ram)
ca. 1650
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Master of the Procession
Gathering of Gamblers with Hurdy-Gurdy Player
ca. 1660
oil on canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Theodoor Rombouts
Card Players
ca. 1620-30
etching
British Museum

Roelant Savery
Mountain Landscape with Woodcutters
1610
oil on copper
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Jacob van Ruisdael
Landscape with the Ruins of the Castle of Egmond
ca. 1650-55
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Adriaen van de Velde
Pastoral Landscape with Ruins
1664
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

From the Book on the Nature of Things

In the Beginning

Chaos: mass without master, substance uncontrolled by subject. The unintelligible force of the world.

The Human Abyss

The human soul where all opposites contend; thus chaos always newly and furtively forming.

What Then Is the Body?

A passing handprint; a thin wave in the voice of time.

Bargaining with Time

Futility of discourse. A rage of wind in the trees.

Grave Discomfort

The prison of self-consciousness. Insomnia of the ego.

The Sensation of Grace

To be like a fish suspended in a net, caught up in the web of the world.

Temptation Disguised as Thought

To follow an argument, abstractly, to its conclusion.

Intuitive Conjecture

The suspicion of the inconsequence of being. 

Perplexing Fact

Imagination, itinerant, travels independent of us, performing in all of the provinces.

Premature Sorrow

The violation of trust by knowledge.

What is Remembered

The loam of dusk rising under the luminous bow of summer.

Maturity of Sorts

To abandon simplicity and climb the tilted ladder of paradox.

The Sensation of Nostalgia

Unexplained night winds; a chill patterned with longing.

Where Does the Soul Reside?

Under the cover of darkness, having been routed by evil.

The Pursuit of the Good

To find out where the soul is hiding from evil.

Forgetfulness of Objects

The mirror's silver which forgets, even quicker than the mind, the green ripeness of apples.

Concluding Hypothesis

And then, if the soul exists – what a thicket it lives in!

– Ellen Hinsey (The White Fire of Time, Wesleyan University Press, 2002)

Ignaz Elhafen
Battle Scene
ca. 1680-85
cedar-wood relief
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Ignaz Elhafen
Battle Scene with Amazons
ca. 1680-85
cedar-wood relief
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

attributed to Jacques Blanchard
Charity
ca. 1635-36
drawing
Harvard Art Museums

attributed to Lucas Kilian
Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes
ca. 1602
wash drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Lucas Vorsterman and Peter Paul Rubens
Lot's Daughters fleeing Sodom
ca. 1615-20
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Pieter Crijnse Volmarijn
Panthea before Cyrus the Great, King of Persia
before 1679
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Peter Paul Rubens and workshop
Study for St Sebastian
ca. 1620
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Artist after Peter Paul Rubens
Study of Two Nude Warriors
17th century
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Seicento Scene-Making

Paolo Piazza
The Annunciation
1602
oil on alabaster
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Sébastien Bourdon
Christ receiving the Children
ca. 1655
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Ludovico Carracci
Vision of St Francis of Assisi
ca. 1602
oil on copper
Art Institute of Chicago

Guercino
Return of the Prodigal Son
1619
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Luca Giordano
Abduction of the Sabine Women
ca. 1675-80
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Interdiction

Aπαγορευω.

It is said that we can no longer use the old words.

Either, they carry in their script the imprint of our inhumanity: the memory of the naked bodies burned as the classical strains played;

Or, contain their own blueprint of destruction: the way a seed harbors in its cells its final, latent corruption.

We have become afraid of them, the old words, as if we could escape punishment if, for once and for all, they were forbidden utterance in the public squares.

As if we could walk out to where the river joins the deep, where the tides plow and reap the untouchable air. There beyond boundaries, voices.

Yet even where silence and the river Styx merge, there are gestures which must be transcribed.

And I have listened to your voice at sundown, breaking with grief, undone by the bludgeoning tool of the eternal sorrows.

The way that Priam grieved, in the old words, the broken body of his son.

And heads are still brought openly to the market place as if in triumph.

The old words have blood on them.

But here, under the blackened sun, there are things, in the trammeled, the ruined, the old words, which must still be said.

– Ellen Hinsey (2002)

Lorenzo Garbieri
Christ crowned with Thorns
before 1654
oil on canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Anonymous Artist working in Italy
Adam accepting the Apple from Eve
17th century
oil on paper
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Anonymous Artist working in Italy
Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden
17th century
oil on paper
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Giuseppe Maria Crespi
Wedding at Cana
ca. 1686
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Titian
Allegory of Venus and Cupid
ca. 1600
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Pedro de Orrente
St John the Evangelist on Patmos
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Raffaello Vanni
St Catherine receiving the Stigmata
1655
oil on canvas
Chiesa di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, Pisa

Raffaello Vanni
St Catherine receiving the Stigmata (detail)
1655
oil on canvas
Chiesa di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, Pisa

Anton Mozart
Israelites crossing the Red Sea
before 1625
oil on alabaster
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

European Mannerism (Sacred and Profane)

Jan van Hemessen
Judith with the Head of Holofernes
ca. 1540
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Giorgio Vasari
Temptation of St Jerome
ca. 1541-48
oil on panel (unfinished)
Art Institute of Chicago

"When artists and writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries examined the tensions and distortions, the visual and emotional surprises of the years around 1520, they characterized these developments as a decline and referred contemptuously to what they called maniera (manner).  This is derived from the Italian word mano (hand) that signifies the ascendancy of manual practice – and especially the art of drawing – over visual observation and intellectual clarity.  The assertion of a post-High Renaissance decline in central Italian art persisted throughout the nineteenth century; the decline was generally attributed to the excessive imitation of Michelangelo, to the pernicious influence of Giulio Romano, or to both.  Shortly before World War I, in an artistic atmosphere charged with the revolutionary developments of twentieth-century art, works of this period that had been condemned or ignored for more than three hundred years began to excite sympathetic interest."

 – Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, originally published in 1969, revised by David G. Wilkins and reissued by Abrams in 1993

Giorgio Vasari
Study for Allegory of Two Quartieri of Florence
ca. 1563-65
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Giulio Cesare Procaccini
Virgin and Child with Angels
ca. 1610
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

attributed to Pellegrino Tibaldi
Pan
before 1596
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

attributed to Francesco Primaticcio
Sacrifice of a Bull
ca. 1550-60
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Callisto Piazza
Beheading of St John the Baptist
before 1561
oil on panel
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Abraham Janssens
Jupiter rebuked by Venus
ca. 1612-13
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

attributed to Federico Barocci after Raphael
Cumaean Sibyl
ca. 1556-66
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Federico Barocci
Head of Swooning Virgin
(study for The Deposition)
1568-69
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Jacopo Bassano
Virgin and Child with the young St John the Baptist
ca. 1560-65
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Alessandro Vittoria
The Annunciation
ca. 1583
bronze relief
Art Institute of Chicago

follower of Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro
Marcus Curtius plunging into the Chasm
ca. 1550-95
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Joachim Wtewael
Battle between Gods and Giants
ca. 1608
oil on copper
Art Institute of Chicago

Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) in Spanish-Ruled Naples

Jusepe de Ribera
Man with Turtles
ca. 1615-16
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Jusepe de Ribera
Hecate - Procession to a Witches' Sabbath
ca. 1620
oil on copper
Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London

Jusepe de Ribera
The Lamentation
ca. 1620-25
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Jusepe de Ribera
Drunken Silenus
1626
oil on canvas
Museo di Capodimonte, Naples

"When Caravaggio came to work in Naples in 1606-1607, the Mannerists were in full command of the situation, and he never swayed artists like Fabrizio Santafede, Gian Bernardino Assolino, Gerolamo Imparato, and Belisario Corenzio from their course; they continued their outmoded conventions, largely indebted to the Cavaliere d'Arpino, through the first half of the seventeenth century.  The only exception to the rule was Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, called Battistello, the solitary founder of the 'modern' Neapolitan school who, in opposition to the Mannerists, developed his new manner based on the deeply felt experience of Caravaggio.  . . .  He had a younger rival in the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera who, after journeys through Italy, settled in Naples in 1616 and soon painted Caravaggesque pictures utterly different from those of Caracciolo.  While the latter hardened and stiffened the more flexible style of the master in an attempt at rendering internalized drama, the former loosened and externalized what he had learned from Caravaggio by an aggressive and vulgar realism and a painterly chiaroscuro with flickering light effects.  Ribera found a powerful patron in the Duke of Osuna, the Viceroy of Naples, who appointed him court painter, and later viceroys and Neapolitan nobles were equally attracted by his art.  It is an interesting phenomenon that Ribera's passionate and violent pictures satisfied the taste of the Neapolitan court society.  What attracted them was probably the essentially Spanish sensual surface quality of Ribera's realism – his permanent contribution to European Seicento painting."

– Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, originally published in 1958, revised by Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu and reissued by Yale University Press in 1999

Jusepe de Ribera
Christ among the Doctors
ca. 1630
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Jusepe de Ribera
Penitent St Peter
ca. 1628-32
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Jusepe de Ribera
Martyrdom of St Bartholomew
ca. 1626-32
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Jusepe de Ribera
St Bartholomew
1651
oil on canvas
Yale University Art Gallery

Jusepe de Ribera
St Bartholomew
ca. 1633-35
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Jusepe de Ribera
Heraclitus
1634
oil on canvas
private collection

Jusepe de Ribera
Portrait of a Musician
1638
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art (Ohio)

Jusepe de Ribera
Jacob with the Flock of Laban
ca. 1638
oil on canvas (trimmed on left side)
National Gallery, London

Jusepe de Ribera
Penitent St Peter
before 1652
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Jusepe de Ribera
St Jerome
ca. 1640
oil on canvas
Harvard Art Museums

Jusepe de Ribera
The Hermit
before 1652
oil on canvas
Aberdeen Art Gallery