Fantastic landscape with monks by Tobias Verhaecht

 

In Flanders, at the dawn of Mannerism, the landscape emerged as a pictorial subject capable of depicting both the unseen distances and the prosaic aspects of everyday life, straddling the real and the imaginary. Fantastic landscapes thus gave rise to sacred and secular myths and fables, particularly under the brilliant brush of the painter Joachim Patinir (c. 1480–1524), the inventor of the panoramic landscape, who excelled at creating the illusion of depth through pale, bluish horizons. He was followed in this vein by Herri Met de Bles (c. 1500–c. 1560), a pupil and presumed nephew of Patinir, and also by Hieronymus Bosch (1500–1515).

Both Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625) and Tobias Verhaecht (c. 1560–1631) continued this tradition of spiritualising nature. Tobias Verhaecht, from Antwerp, is notable for having broadened his horizons during his travels in Italy, to Florence and Rome, in the 1580s, where he painted large-scale frescoes. His fame made him a highly sought-after teacher: he counted Peter Paul Rubens amongst his pupils between 1592 and 1594.

He excelled in the art of the dreamlike, almost ghostly landscape, thanks to his use of a very subtle, cool colour palette ranging from green to blue. In the painting housed at Aulteribe Castle, a fortified town stands atop steep cliffs. This is an ideal city looming in the distance, whilst in the foreground monks are busy with mundane tasks, leading a donkey back, preparing soup or chopping wood. On the left of the painting, a man prays at the foot of a rudimentary cross. Curiously, a couple breaks away and moves away from this scene, which functions as an oxymoron, revealing a sort of ‘spiritual triviality’.

The paradox of the world’s forces unfolds within this microcosm, where the simple, the wondrously bizarre and the suggested romance coexist. The naturalistic precision of the brushwork and the misty dreamlike quality of the distant landscape reveal the profound inner turmoil of the human psyche.

Fables of the Flemish Landscape in the^{16th Century} – Bosch, Brueghel, Bles, Bril, Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 6 October 2012 to 14 January 2013, Paris, Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2013.