Thursday, July 22, 2021

Seventeenth-Century Books as Pictorial Props

Adam Bernaert
Vanitas Still-Life
ca. 1665
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Simone Cantarini (il Pesarese)
Sibyl Reading
ca. 1630-35
oil on canvas
Banca Popolare dell' Adriatico, Pesaro

Jan Lievens
Portrait of Anna Maria van Schurman
1649
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Court Buffoon called El Primo
ca. 1636-38
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Thomas Wyck
Scholar in his Study
before 1677
oil on canvas
Hallwyl Museum, Stockholm

David Teniers the Younger
The Alchemist
ca. 1652
oil on panel
Royal Collection, Great Britain

attributed to Pierfrancesco Cittadini
Portrait of a Lady holding a Book
before 1681
oil on canvas
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham

Frans Pourbus the Younger
Portrait of Giovanni Battista Marino
ca. 1621
oil on canvas
Detroit Institute of Arts

Jusepe de Ribera
Crates
1636
oil on canvas
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Simon Vouet
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1620-21
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Carlo Dolci
Portrait of Sir Thomas Baines
ca. 1665-70
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Giovanni Serodine
Portrait of the Artist's Father
1628
oil on canvas
Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland

Frans Hals
Portrait of an Elderly Lady
1633
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Willem van der Vliet
An Allegory
1627
oil on canvas
private collection

Pieter Codde
Young Man Smoking and Ignoring his Studies
ca. 1630-33
oil on panel
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

"What can we expect when we vie with one another every day in admitting to degrees any and every impecunious student drawn from the dregs of the people who applies for one?  They need only to have learnt by heart one or two definitions and distinctions, and to have spent the usual number of years in chopping logic – it matters not what progress they have made or of what character they are; they can be idiots, wasters, idlers, gamesters, boon companions, utterly worthless and abandoned, squanderers and profligates; let them only have spent so many years at the university in the capacity, real or supposed, of gownsmen, and they will find those who for the sake of profit or friendship will get them presented, and, what is more, in many cases with splendid testimonials to their character and learning.  These they procure on leaving from persons who unquestionably jeopardize their own reputation by writing them.  For (as one saith) doctors and professors think of nothing save how from their various professions, and especially those which are irregular, they may further their own advantage, and benefit themselves at the expense of the State.  Our annual university heads as a rule pray only for the greatest possible number of freshmen to squeeze money from and do not care whether they are educated or not, provided they are sleek, well groomed, and good-looking, and in one word, men of means.  Philophasters innocent of the arts become Masters of Arts, and those are made wise by order who are endowed with no wisdom, and have no qualifications for a degree save a desire for it.  Theologasters, if they can but pay, have enough learning and to spare, and proceed to the very highest degrees.  Hence it comes that such a pack of vile buffoons, ignoramuses wandering in the twilight of learning, ghosts of clergymen, itinerant quacks, dolts, clods, asses, mere cattle, intrude with unwashed feet upon the sacred precincts of Theology, bringing with them nothing save brazen impudence, and some hackneyed quillets and scholastic trifles not good enough for a crowd at a street corner.  This is that base and starveling class, needy, vagabond, slaves of their bellies, worthy to be sent back to the plough-tail, fitter for the pigsty than the altar, which has basely prostituted the study of divinity." 

– Robert Burton, from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)