Maarten van Heemskerck's Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Cult of Ruins 9004380469, 9789004380462, 9789004380820

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Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome

Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History General Editor Han van Ruler (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Founded by Arjo Vanderjagt

Editorial Board C.S. Celenza (Georgetown University, Washington DC ) – M. Colish (Yale University, New Haven) – J.I. Israel (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) – A. Koba (University of Tokyo) – M. Mugnai (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) – W. Otten (University of Chicago)

VOLUME 287

Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History General Editor Walter S. Melion (Emory University)

VOLUME 31 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsai

Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome Antiquity, Memory, and the Cult of Ruins By

Arthur J. DiFuria

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: DiFuria, Arthur J., author. Title: Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome : antiquity, memory, and the cult of ruins / by Arthur J. DiFuria. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2019. | Series: Brill’s studies in intellectual history, ISSN 0920-8607 ; Volume 287 | Series: Brill’s studies on art, art history, and intellectual history ; Volume 31 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018043203 (print) | LCCN 2018043652 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004380820 (Ebook) | ISBN 9789004380462 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Heemskerk, Martin van, 1498–1574—Criticism and interpretation. | Ruins in art. | Classical antiquities in art. | Rome (Italy)—In art. Classification: LCC NC263.H37 (ebook) | LCC NC263.H37 D54 2018 (print) | DDC 741.9492—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043203

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0920-8607 isbn 978-90-04-38046-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-38082-0 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix List of Illustrations xvii Introduction 1 Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome 1 Drawings in Berlin and Scattered to the Four Winds 6 The Historicized Van Heemskerck and Karel Van Mander’s  Schilder-Boeck 14 Van Heemskerck’s Drawings and Memory 24 Van Heemskerck and the Cult of Ruins 29

Part 1 Imagining the Eternal: Maarten van Heemskerck Before Rome Introduction 37 1 The Possibility of a pre-Roman Maarten van Heemskerck 39 Collection, Invention, and Netherlandish Antiquity  c. 1510–25 39 The Status of the Ruin in Netherlandish Visual Culture  c. 1510–25 48 The Roman Journey’s Status in the Netherlands and Van  Heemskerck’s Road to the Eternal City 51 2 The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel’s Workshop 59 Prototype, Imitation, Emulation, Invention 59 Van Scorel, Van Heemskerck, and the Ruin 67 Leaving Van Scorel’s Workshop: Landscape and the  Wanderjahr Drawing 71

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Part 2 Drawing the Eternal: Van Heemskerck in Rome Introduction 79 3 Drawing Ruins in Post-Sack Rome 81 Rome’s Post-Sack Milieu 81 Drawing, Collecting, and the ‘Chaos of Memory’ 86 Ruins in Post-Sack Rome 94 Raphael and Van Heemskerck’s Ruinscapes 97 Charles V’s Triumphal Procession 105 4 Memory and Maarten van Heemskerck’s Eternal Eye 109 Discovering the Vestiges of Ancient Rome in the  Frame 109 The Compelling Space and the Epochal Time of Van  Heemskerck’s Ruinscapes 118 Artistry and Roman Topography as Memory 128 5 The Copious Hand 135 An Abundant Technique 135 Van Heemskerck’s Pre-Roman Technical Inheritance: Pen  and Ink Hatching, Netherlandish Realism 140 Towards Finish: The Flexibility of Van Heemskerck’s Pen  and Ink Process 146 Ink Washes, Chalk, Texture: Performance 153 Mimesis, Performance, and Function 156

Part 3 Remembering the Eternal: Van Heemskerck After Rome Introduction 165 6 Invention, Collecting, Antiquarianism 167 Reinventing Rome: Panorama with the Abduction of Helen  Amidst the Wonders of the World 167 Memory and Invention After Rome: Van Heemskerck’s  Drawings in the Netherlands 183 Van Heemskerck’s Inventions After the Antique: Means and  Modes 191 In Reminiscor: Reading the Ruins 204

Contents

7 Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning 217 A Summa of the Self 217 Coming of Age: The Signature Ruin and Netherlandish  Antiquarianism 229 Van Heemskerck’s Drawings and Hieronymus Cock’s  Præcipua aliquot Romanae Antiquitatis Ruinarum 235 Self-Portrait before the Colosseum’s Antiquarian  Audience 239 8 Regnum, Reform, and Ruin 245 Van Heemskerck and the Destruction of Art in the ‘Age  of Art’ 245 Before the Beeldenstorm, After the Antique 250 1569: The Rhetoric of Ruination 263 Epilogue 282 After Van Heemskerck, After the Antique: A Continuum of  Pictorial Memory 282

Part 4 A Catalog of Maarten van Heemskerck’s Roman Ruin Drawings A Note on the Catalog 289 In and Around the Forum 293 Forum Romanum 293 Capitoline Hill 300 Palatine Hill 307 Arch of Titus 319 Colosseum 322 Arch of Constantine 331 Septizonium 335 Forum Nervae 338 On the Quirinal Hill 340 Frontespizio di Nerone 340 Baths of Diocletian 345 Trofei di Mario 347 San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure 348

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On the Tiber’s East Bank and On the Interior 349 Porticus Octaviae 349 Forum Boarium 351 Piazza del Popolo 356 Pantheon 358 In and Around the Vatican 360 Banchi and Borgo 360 St. Peter’s 363 Belvedere 371 Near the South Wall 375 Baths of Caracalla 375 San Giovanni in Laterano 378 Temple of Minerva Medica 381 Porta Maggiore 383 Pyramid of Cestius 384 Further Afield: Otium 386 Tivoli 386 Villa Madama 388 Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia 389 Broad-View Panoramas 389 Sculpture Collections, Gardens, and Cortile 396 Architectural Fragments 409 Fantasia 413 Single Sheets with Multiple Copies after Maarten van  Heemskerck: The so-called De Vos Sketchbook 415 Deattributions 420 Deattributions from Maarten Van Heemskerck 420 A Deattributed Group of Drawings in Berlin:  ‘Anonymous C’ 429 A Brief Explanation and List of Previous  Deattributions 435 Notes 441 References 497 Index 514

Preface and Acknowledgments In the summer of 1987, at the tender age of 20, I was fortunate enough to take some English literature classes at Cambridge University’s Gonville and Caius College. One rainy morning, unable to pull myself out of the Fitzwilliam Museum, I uncharacteristically skipped class. I had initially gone inside to see a breathtaking exhibition, William Blake and his Contemporaries, which I had finished viewing in plenty of time to make it back to campus. However, as was my tendency in my 20th year, I lingered. That it was raining buckets gave me the perfect excuse. I began to wander through the permanent collection and soon found myself face to face with my own future, though I did not know it then. There, smiling at me with restrained pride from his Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1] was Maarten van Heemskerck. At the time, I knew nothing of him, let alone that he had been to Rome and had made the beautiful drawings this book now presents. The Fitzwilliam’s wall text filled me in on these matters concisely, however. At the very least, I was able to understand the basic idea in the painting before me. As I was about to move on to another work, my eye caught what is arguably the painting’s most important detail. The silhouette of Van Heemskerck’s torso ever-so-slightly overlaps a trompe l’oeil cartellino that appears to be pinned to a painting behind him. As we stand before this painting, then, he stands in front of another one, apparently of himself in the act of drawing the Colosseum. In that minutia, so easy to miss, Van Heemskerck had used a flat surface to differentiate spaces and times. I stood before him and thought about it all for a minute. As a young American male accustomed to big boisterous things, I was not at all used to seeing such a mix of the subtle and the profound. He kept smiling back at me at me as if, I imagined, he knew that he had me somewhat spellbound. “Hmph,” I thought. “Very clever man.” I walked away to look at more paintings. While it is not as if I walked straight out of the Fitzwilliam and into Van Heemskerck studies that afternoon, that canny self-portrait nagged at me. I recall vividly that upon returning to Philadelphia at the end of the summer, I occasionally took a crack at explaining it to family and friends. Of course, my ekphrases failed quite miserably. And then, as flings between 20 year olds and old master paintings often go, I forgot about the self-portrait. Fall courses awaited, as did the rest of my 20s. In retrospect, however, I now know that making Maarten’s acquaintance in the Fitzwilliam that day was tantamount

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to a push, however gentle, in the direction that ultimately led me to write this book. Each time I subsequently encountered Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, it was akin to meeting up with a formidable old acquaintance whom I knew I hadn’t quite sussed out yet. Along the path from the Fitzwilliam to here, many wise and generous gatekeepers have guided me. I am surely the more fortunate that our paths crossed. In 1990, Susan Stewart and Alan Singer brought me to Rome for the first time on Temple University’s Summer Theory in Rome program. They gave me the Eternal City in a way I would wish upon any student. We read Vico, Kant, Adorno, Althusser, and many others. We took walks, drank espresso, and debated incessantly. We also occasionally drew the ruins and vistas before us. I returned home from that summer ready to spend the rest of my life thinking and talking about art, Rome, and most of all, its ruins. I also realized that after having spent so much time in the midst of great cultural productions, some of which were half lost, art and architecture’s physical aspect would always remain close to the center of my concerns. Where these aspects of the object are subject to discursive accrual, I realized, we find the true record of its history. Conversely, where the object itself is subject to erasure, we have oblivion, a tragic loss. I therefore began to find in the ruin an especially important exemplum for all of my art historical concerns. The ruin embodies the urgency with which we must privilege the object. It was not until the late 90s, when I began researching a master’s thesis on Paduan nobleman Alvise Cornaro (1467–1566) under the excellent direction of Tracy Cooper and Marcia Hall, that I began to find a more specific focus for my studies, an object to which I could bring these interests. In all of the books I could find on sixteenth century Italian architecture, stunning drawings of Rome’s ruins always caught my eye. A glance at their captions always revealed their authorship by the same artist: the one who had painted that ingenious self-portrait at the Fitzwilliam with which I had sparred. After completing my master’s thesis, I went to the University of Delaware because in my search for a suitable program, it had become clear to me that in Newark, I had found the highest concentration of art historians in sympathy with my own experiential, object-based approach to the discipline. Linda Pellecchia encouraged me to write about what it was like to be in a building, to walk through a city, to experience the built environment. In December 2001, she went so far as to take our Urbanism in Renaissance Rome class to the Eternal City for a week. David Stone and H. Perry Chapman took me and my graduate school classmates anywhere they could to ensure that we

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shared space with old master drawings and paintings. I am therefore ashamed to admit that in 2003, when I received approval for my dissertation topic on Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome, I didn’t want to take the time to do further research. I was in too much of a hurry. I had a full-time teaching job waiting for me and I wanted to start writing. After all, I told Linda, I had been to Rome several times already. Likewise, I insisted to Perry, I had seen photographs of Van Heemskerck’s drawings in books. What more did I need? Of course, they told me I was wrong. There could be no substitute for going back to Rome, Linda argued. I must consider the ruins from amidst them, from Van Heemskerck’s vantage point. Nor could there be any substitute, Perry held, for handling Van Heemskerck’s drawings. I knew they were right, so I rolled up my sleeves and started writing applications for fellowships. I am deeply indebted to the University of Delaware and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for funding my initial research. They facilitated work in Brussels, Haarlem, London, Besançon, Rome, and Berlin, where the bulk of Van Heemskerck’s drawings live. The night before I left for Berlin, with packing complete, I turned on the television and was happy to come across Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987). It portrays Berlin as a city populated by unseen angels who can hear the thoughts of its citizens. One such angel falls in love and opts to become human, mortal, so he can be with the woman who is the object of his desire; his decision newly affords him the senses of touch, smell, and taste. The backdrop for much of this story’s entry into the haptic is the Berlin of Potsdamer Platz, just before unification, still looking every bit the war-torn place it had become in the post-WWII denouement that gave way to the Cold War and the city’s infamous East-West division. I soon discovered that this was near the institution holding Van Heemskerck’s drawings: Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett. I had received a warmly worded email of welcome from Kupferstichkabinett’s Chief Curator of Dutch and Flemish Prints and Drawings, Holm Bevers (thank you, Holm), which I had printed out and kept at the ready among my travel documents in case I needed authoritative proof of my license to conduct research there. As is the case with every world-class collection of old, important, and beautiful things, the Kupferstichkabinett keeps its holdings behind multiple forms of protection. Every morning for four months, with ample sheepishness and good humor, the Kupferstichkabinett’s art handlers required me to fill out the same retrieval request form, even as they knew full well what I was there to see. The handler

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would disappear into an elevator. After what seemed like an eternity he would emerge bearing the two bound albums containing hundreds of drawings by Van Heemskerck and the artists in his circle. It didn’t take long for me to realize how right Perry was; holding and beholding Van Heemskerck’s drawings, sharing space with them, meant learning their terrain, perhaps glimpsing their maker’s mind and, if I was awake enough, gaining insight into the nature of things. One day a few weeks into my research, perhaps after the initial thrill of viewing the drawings had worn off a bit and a workaday feeling had begun to cast its pall, my mind began to wander. One of Van Heemskerck’s drawings showed me the profundity in its fragility. Holding it up towards the window – custom fitted to filter out the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays (yet another form of protection) – I saw that Van Heemskerck had inked the sheet heavily enough to compromise the paper’s structural integrity; though it was nothing new to be able to see right through one of these drawings, this one’s flimsiness struck me differently on that particular day. It occurred to me that any one of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people who have ever handled these drawings could have destroyed them with the mere turn of a finger. And yet, no one had. Nor had any accidental form of harm come to them. What a marvel of humanity that is. Since their ink dried, these drawings had been suspended in a state of perpetually forthcoming ephemerality that generation after generation has staved off. We, a community of caretakers stretching back 500 years, have preserved them. In so doing, we have preserved the cultural, historical, and biographical memories they contain. Despite five centuries worth of destruction and renovation right outside my window onto Berlin, these fragile records of artistic vision had not only survived, they had lost little of their original beauty. That day, when I left the Kupferstichkabinett, I could no longer see Berlin, Rome, Van Heemskerck’s drawings, and art history as discrete concepts. Rather, I had come to learn that they live on a continuum where the distance in time’s passing is elastic, mutable. Every day, I walked through renovated sites of WWII bombing to get to these drawings. Daily, I passed the ubiquitous remains of the Berlin wall. Likewise, Van Heemskerck had walked through Rome’s ruins a mere five years after the city had been sacked, when fears of a second sack were real and warranted. Rome’s historical vulnerability, embodied in her ancient ruins, had become Rome’s present in the 1530s, contemporary conditions manifest in every fallen ancient cornice, every crag of every substructure, every half-lost building. I could no longer take for granted the survival of humanity’s great achievements or

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the events of the past as somehow distant. Neither could Van Heemskerck, I imagined. As I write this in the summer of 2017, it is almost exactly thirty years after my first encounter with Maarten in Cambridge. I am now further removed from that discovery than he was from his Roman journey when he painted the self-portrait. However, very little has changed. Out my window, it is raining just as hard today as it was when I found him in the Fitzwilliam. With his compelling art, he continues to lure me from my responsibilities. His drawings still sit in the Kupferstichkabinett where others will find them. Surely, the drawings will humble future audiences as they have me.

…

Over the long period from the conceptualization to the fruition of this work, a veritable village of colleagues and loved ones have helped me in addition to those I name above. I should therefore start by asking for forgiveness from readers who know they played some part in this book’s production but do not find their names in the acknowledgements that follow. It is only the caprice of my memory, not my lack of appreciation for your help, that has caused my omission of your name. Earlier versions of several sections in this book have already appeared in print. In 2008, Anna De Floriani and Maria Clelia Galassi published my first exploration of Van Heemskerck’s Clades Judaeae Gentis, an inscrutable series of prints that again receives analysis at book’s end. Perry Chapman and Joanna Woodall encouraged my exploration of Van Heemskerck’s self-portrait, which I completed for them in draft form in 2007. They published the resulting essay in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (2010). This book’s chapter 7 expands those findings. Alexander Marr welcomed and commented incisively on my essay about Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome’s collections, which he published as part of a special issue on collection imagery in Intellectual History Review in 2010. Tatjana Bartsch and Ilja Veldman, both of whom possess seemingly limitless knowledge of the Berlin albums, gave me the opportunity to publish my developing thoughts on the relation between Van Heemskerck’s drawings and memory; parts of that essay, which I wrote in 2009, and which first appeared in Tatjana’s excellent Rom Zeichnen volume of 2012, appear in revised form throughout this book. Walter Melion was in the audience for my first talk on Van Heemskerck – on the Sunday afternoon of a conference, when most conference participants have

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gone home. He has critiqued, encouraged, and welcomed my work ever since; essays of mine appear in two of his edited volumes for Brill Publishing, Imago Exegetica (2014) and Personification (2016), respectively. I have reworked parts of them for inclusion in this book’s final chapter on Van Heemskerck’s evolving response to the sixteenth century image debate. This book would not have appeared without Walter’s support, or the gracious patience of Brill Publishing’s Senior Acquisitions Editor, Arjan van Dijk. I am also indebted to my blind peer reviewers, whose suggestions greatly improved it. Allan Ceen’s vast knowledge and love of the Eternal City, his generosity, his enthusiasm for Van Heemskerck’s drawings, and his insistence on this project’s worth sustained me through several difficult early phases. Twice, Allan opened his Studium Urbis to me for sustained research. He offered me unlimited access to his vast cartographic holdings as well as his unending vigor for Rome’s urban fabric, an unsurpassed resource unto itself. If this book offers what appear to be nuanced thoughts on the elusive line where Van Heemskerck’s fidelity to Rome’s landscape ends and his inventiveness with it begins, it is due to Allan’s willingness to discuss my findings with me (always with Giambattista Nolli’s map of Rome nearby for consultation, of course). So many others have commented on the essays and conference papers in the run up to this book’s completion that I fear its main audience will find that it offers them little that is new. Larry Silver has always willingly served as a quick reader and copious commenter. He read drafts of many of the articles I mention above and improved them greatly with his thoughts. His generous offer to have me present my developing thoughts on Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman period at the University of Pennsylvania’s 2010 Art History Colloquium helped me immeasurably; the community of University of Pennsylvania art historians and graduate students in attendance offered smart, challenging questions that enabled me to think through how best to approach the most obscure phase of Van Heemskerck’s career. Ethan Matt Kavaler and Ed Wouk read drafts of the resulting chapters and saved me from making several fundamental mistakes. As I worked my way through my ideas about Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Roman collections, Kathleen Wren Christian read a draft of the resulting essay and responded by giving generously of her vast knowledge on the topic. Marcia Hall read an early draft of my chapter on Van Heemskerck in post-Sack Rome, as did Gillian Malpass. Their encouragement of my work provided a timely boost to my morale at a point when it felt as if I might never finish this

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book due to the rigors of relocation, adapting to a new job, and the joyful demands of being a newly minted husband and father. Laura Giles and John Marciari read an early draft of this book’s chapter on Van Heemskerck’s technique and offered their substantial expertise and advice on short notice. Tianna Uchacz read and responded to an early draft of my essay on Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus print and Lesa Mason, Patricia Butz, and Alfred Acres offered astute critiques and encouragement of my analysis of Van Heemskerck’s Caritas triptych. Fellow Van Heemskerck scholar Shelley Perlove offered counsel, commiseration, and comradery at key moments in this process; her vast experience with writing – and finishing – excellent books has been invaluable to me. There is also no way I could have written this book without the sympathies, advice, and consideration of my colleagues and students at the two institutions where I have worked while writing this book: Moore College of Art and Design and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Maureen Pelta and Jonathan Wallis deserve special thanks. While each served as Chair of Liberal Arts at Moore, both gave me the room in my teaching schedule to continue making progress on this work. Maureen, as focused on Correggio as I have been on Van Heemskerck, contributed a particularly resonant and ceaseless brand of intellectual curiosity to my discursive universe that helped me to formulate my approach and then articulate the thoughts you find in these pages. Likewise, my colleagues at SCAD provided an unfailing network of support. Deserving of special thanks is Gabriela Jasin, a colleague whose knowledge of the early modern period I respect and admire greatly. She was always a ready sounding board for my concerns with some of the more vexing problems in this book’s execution. The same should be said of Geoffrey Taylor, first my Chair of Art History and then my Dean of Liberal Arts. His expertise on Roman topography’s signifying capacity was a boon to me as I parsed Van Heemskerck’s drawings. Moreover, he championed this project in every way he could, including allowing me to teach classes on the artistic pursuit of antiquity and ruins. Doing so helped me to lessen the distance between professional pursuits and the classroom, making the latter more enriching for all, and former closer to the forefront of my thinking as I tried to make progress. Geoff was always ready with timely, eloquent, and sincere letters of recommendation in support of my applications for financial support from SCAD. Paula Wallace, SCAD’s founder and President, awarded me with a Presidential Fellowship in the summer of 2011. Without that funding, I would not have been

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able to complete my study of Van Heemskerck’s drawings living in places other than Berlin. Robert Eisinger and Judith von Baron were also instrumental in my receipt of that fellowship. The Historians of Netherlandish Art also helped with their award of a fellowship as the expenses for image reproduction rights began to mount. Last, but far from least, the personal and emotional support of my friends and family has forever left its mark on me. At various points during this book’s production, Maxx Stoyanoff Williams, Dean Rozensweig, and Dave Doughman opened their homes to me when I needed lodgings in Berlin. Without their generosity, I would not have had the time I needed to examine Van Heemskerck’s drawings repeatedly and in detail. I can find no adequate way to thank my love, wife, confidante, and best friend, Nancy Wenzel-DiFuria, but I will try here. As I continued to plod towards this project’s proper completion, she modeled patience before our children, Luc and Anna. They are only 10 and 5 respectively, but their impressive capacity for understanding that daddy was busy with his book is due entirely to their mother’s gracious example and her awe-inspiring ability to show them how to be good, fair-minded people. Nancy has also always given me a sympathetic ear, sage practical advice, and unconditional love. She is my inspiration. I should also add that the fruit does not fall far from the tree, as they say; my in-laws, Bob and Terry Wenzel, graciously hosted their grandchildren on several occasions, some of which were for extended terms, enabling me to make progress at a more rapid clip. Finally, my parents deserve the most thanks of all. Their mix of determination, humility, and good humor is at the core of me. Their support for my pursuit of what I love, academia, and this project in particular, has been unceasing. Their belief in my ability to complete this book has been unflagging. Their love has driven me. They are this book’s true authors. It is theirs.

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Johannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Hieronymus Cock “Ancient Coffered Barrel Vault,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum (The Small Book of Roman Ruins and Buildings), 1562, Registration number 1983, U.314, ink on paper, 153 × 208 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 13 Maarten van Heemskerck, Annunciation (“Drapers Altarpiece,” closed), 1546–47, Object number, os I1-136d, oil on panel, 261.5 × 122.5 cm., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (In long-term use from the Royal Mauritshuis Cabinet of Paintings), photo by Margareta Svensson 18 Karel van Mander, Continence of Scipio, 1600, Object number SK-A-4690, oil on copper, 44 × 79 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 20 Maarten van Heemskerck, Belvedere Torso, 1532–c. 37, Inventory Number 79D2 63r, ink on paper, 133 × 210 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 21 Hendrick Goltzius, “Phaeton,” Four Disgracers, 1588, Registration number 1853,0312.236, ink on paper, diameter, 330 mm. (trimmed), Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 21 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Ruins on the Palatine, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 87v, ink on paper, 196 × 147 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 28 Jan Gossart, Neptune and Amphitrite, 1516, Inventory Number 648, oil on oak, 188 × 124 cm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin 42 Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, Object Number RP-P0OB-1155, ink on paper, 251 × 192 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 43 Jacopo de’ Barbari, Mars and Venus, 1509–10, Object Number RP-P-OB-1859, ink on paper, 292 × 178 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 44 Jan Gossart, Colosseum, 1508–09, Inventory number 12.918, ink and black chalk on paper, 202 × 268 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 47 Lucas van Leyden, Jael and Sisera, 1517, Object number RP-T-1912-25, ink on paper, 269 × 200 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 51 Jan Gossart, Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?), 1520–25, Museum number, 1951.6, oil on oak panel, 43.18 × 31.12 cm., Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH 53

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Jan van Scorel, Mary Magdalen, 1530, Object number SK-A-372, oil on panel, 66.3 × 76 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 60 Maarten van Heemskerck, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1530, Inventory number 1961.9.36, oil on panel, 57.7 × 74.7 cm., Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 61 Jan van Scorel, Mountain Landscape with a Bridge Spanning a Ravine (the Sainte Baume), c. 1519, Registration number 1909.0109.07, ink on paper, 205 × 153 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 63 Omnia ydola corruerunt intrante ihesu in egiptum and Egiptii fecerunt ymaginem virginis cum puero, Woodcut Illustration from Dat speghel der menscheliker behoudenisse (n. p. 1470/71), chapter XI. By permission of the Huntington Library (RB 104685) 65 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Portraying the Virgin, 1532, Object number os I-134, oil on panel, 168 × 235 cm., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, photo by Margareta Svensson 66 Jan Van Scorel, View of Bethlehem, c. 1520, Registration number 1928,0310.100, ink on paper, 173 × 298 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 69 Jan van Scorel Workshop, Adoration of the Three Kings, 1530–35, Inventory Number 23542, oil on panel, 114.2 × 86.5 cm., Centraal Museum, Utrecht 70 Master of the Good Samaritan (follow of Jan van Scorel), The Good Samaritan, c. 1537, Object number SK-A-3468, oil on panel, 74.7 × 86 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 71 Jan van Scorel, Entry into Jerusalem (central Panel of the Lokhorst Triptych), c. 1526–, Inventory number 6078a, oil on panel, 79 × 147 cm., Centraal Museum, Utrecht 73 Jan van Scorel, Tower of Babel, 1530, Inventory number G.A. d 132, oil on wood, 58 × 75 cm., Ca’ d’Oro, Galleria Franchetti, Venice 75 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Death of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, and the Capture of Rome,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, Registration number 1868,0208.59, ink on paper, 155 × 228 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 82 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Pope Clement VII Besieged in the Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, Registration number 1868,0208.60, ink on paper, 155 × 230 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 83

Illustrations 3.3

3.4

3.5

3.6

3.7

3.8

3.9

3.10

3.11

3.12

4.1

Maarten van Heemskerck, Vulcan’s Forge, c. 1535–36, Inventory number DO 4290, oil on canvas, 166.5 × 207 cm., National Gallery, Prague 88 Maarten van Heemskerck, Triumph of Bacchus, c. 1536–37, Inventory number 990, oil on panel, 56 × 106.6 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 88 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Statue Court of the Palazzo della Valle-Capranica, 1553, Registration number 1947,0319.26.141, ink on paper, 290 × 420 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 93 Baldassare Peruzzi, Theatrical Perspective with the Symbolic Monuments of Rome, c. 1530, Inventory number 291 A, pen and ink wash on paper, 56.8 × 71.5 cm., Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence 94 Hermannus Posthumus, Tempus Edax Rerum (Landscape with Roman Ruins), 1536, Inventory number GE 740, oil on canvas, 96 × 41 cm., Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna / SCALA, Florence 95 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Gideon Destroying the Altar of Baal,” The Story of Gideon, 1561, Object number RP-P-1961-433, ink on paper, 203 × 251 mm., Rijksmseum, Amsterdam 101 Harmen Janszoon Muller after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Susanna Accused by the Elders),” The Ten Commandments, c. 1566, Registration number 1949, 0709.16, ink on paper, 210 × 247 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 101 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “People of Ninevah Repenting Upon Hearing Jonah’s Prophecies,” Story of Jonah, 1548–52, Object number RP-P-BI-6583, ink on paper, 178 × 120 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 102 Sebastiano Serlio, “Scena Tragica,” The Five Books of Architecture, II, 1545, Accession number 37.56.2(1–5), f. 25, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of W. Gedney Beatty, 1941 102 Polidoro da Caravaggio, “Noli me Tangere,” Story of Mary Magdalen, 1525, fresco, Fra Mariano Fetti Chapel, San Silvestro al Quirinale, Rome 104 Anonymous Roman Artist (formerly attributed to Etiénne Du Pérac), “View of the Forum Romanum,” Disegni de le Ruine di Roma e Come Anticamente Erono, 1574, MS number M.1106, ff. 16v–17, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York, photo by Janny Chiu 114

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Illustrations 4.2 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, North End of the Forum Romanum, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 12r, ink on paper, 196 × 147 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 114 4.3 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Panorama of Rome from the Capitoline Hill, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 91v and 92r, ink on paper, 198–200 × 787 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 118 4.4 Hendrick van Cleve, Panorama of Rome from the Esquiline Hill, 1585, Inventory number 6606, ink on paper, 249 × 393 mm., Fondation Custodia / Frits Lugt Collection, Paris 118 4.5 Circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, “View of the Forum Romanum,” Codex Escurialensis, c. 1500, f. 20r, Copyright Patrimonia Naçional, Madrid, Real Biblioteca de El Escorial 122 4.6 Circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, “View of the Arch of Constantine and Colosseum,” Codex Escurialensis, c. 1500, f. 28v, Copyright Patrimonia Naçional, Madrid, Real Biblioteca de El Escorial 122 4.7 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Foreshortened View of the Colosseum, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 59v, ink on paper, 196 × 147 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 123 4.8 Circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, “View of the Colosseum,” Codex Escurialensis, c. 1500, f. 41v, Copyright Patrimonia Naçional, Madrid, Real Biblioteca de El Escorial 126 5.1 Simon Frisius, “Portrait of Maarten van Heemskerck,” Pictorum Aliquot Celebrium Praecipuae Germaniae Inferioris Effigies, 1610, Object Number RP-P-1907-367, ink on paper, 199 × 124 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 138 5.2 Lucas van Leyden, The Archangel Gabriel Announcing the Birth of Christ, 1520s, Accession number 2008.253, ink and traces of black chalk on paper, 211 × 165 mm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 142 5.3 Maarten van Heemskerck, Torso of a Youth from Casa Santa Croce, 1532–c. 37, Inventory Number 79D2 61v, ink on paper, 128 × 204 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 155 5.4 Francesco Salviati, Seated Youth, c. 1530, Registration number 1946,0713.519 red chalk on paper, 413 × 293mm, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 155 6.1 Maarten van Heemskerck Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World, 1535–36, Accession number 37.656, oil on canvas, 147.3 × 383.5 cm., Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD 170 6.2 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Frontespizio di Nerone c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 82r, ink on paper, 188 × 281 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 187

Illustrations 6.3 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulchre and Receiving Gifts from the Three Men, 1549, Inventory number 2008.31.1, ink on paper, 286 × 427 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT 190 6.4 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle, 1571, Inventory number S.I 54637, ink on paper, 173. 325 mm., Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, Prentenkabinet, Brussels 194 6.5 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Elders Trying to Seduce Susanna,” The Story of Susanna, 1563, Registration number 1949,0709.141, ink on paper, 206 × 251 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 195 6.6 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Three Holy Women at the Sepulchre,” The Fall and Salvation of Mankind Through the Life and Passion of Christ, 1548, Object number RP-P-OB-7340, ink on paper, 197 × 248 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 196 6.7 Unidentified Engraver after Maarten van Heemskerck Job on the Dunghill with his Wife and Three Friends, 1556, Object number RP-P-1988-297-20, ink on paper, 208 × 299 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 196 6.8 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Flight into Egypt, 1547–51, Object number RP-P-OB-7316, ink on paper, 208 × 361 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 197 6.9 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Satan Smiting Job with Boils, 1548–50, Object number RP-P-1966-384, ink on paper, 384 × 255 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 198 6.10 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Samuel Anointing Saul, 1549, Object number RP-P-BI-6494X, ink on paper, 401 × 256 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 198 6.11 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Balaam and the Angel (left half), 1554, Object number RP-P-BI6502X, ink on paper, 276 × 420 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 199 6.12 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd,” Story of Jonah, 1566, Object Number RP-P-1988-297-11, ink on paper, 205 × 247 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 200 6.13 Anonymous Engraver after Maarten van Heemskerck, Habakuk Bringing Food to Daniel in the Lion’s Den, 1556, Registration number 1874,1212.450, ink on paper, 295 × 420 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 201

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Illustrations 6.14 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Triumph of Death, c. 1565, Registration number 1937,0915.271, ink on paper, 190 × 262 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 201 6.15 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Servant Forcing a Fellow Servant to Pay his Debt,” The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, 1554, Registration number 1949,0709.200, ink on paper, 265 × 192 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 202 6.16 Harmen Jansz Muller after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Blessed are they who do Hunger and Thirst After Righteousness (The Presentation in the Temple),” The Eight Beatitudes, c. 1566, Object number RP-P-1982-15 ink on paper, 210 × 250 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 203 6.17 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Dangers of Human Ambition, 1549, Accession number L 1965/133 (PK), ink on paper, 433 × 507 mm., Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, photo by Studio Buitenhof, The Hague 206 6.18 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, c. 1545, oil on wood, 207.5 × 144.2 cm., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, France 208 6.19 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck?, Casa Sassi Cortile and Sculpture Collection, 1553, Registration number 1928, 0313.176, ink on paper, 375 × 298 mm. Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 208 6.20 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape, 1547, Inv. No. G117, oil on wood, 105 × 161 cm., Lichtenstein Museum, Vienna 210 6.21 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape, 1552, Registration number 1996,0608.16, ink on paper, 230 × 427 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 213 6.22 Dirck Volkertzoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Ruth and Boaz, 1548, Registration numbers 1949,0709.42 (left) and 1949,0709.43 (right), ink on paper, 287 × 432mm (left) and 284 × 427mm (right), Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 212 7.1 Maarten van Heemskerck, Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, 1553, Inventory number 103, oil on canvas, 42.2 × 54 cm., Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England 217 7.2 Dirck Jacobz, Portrait of Pompeius Occo, 1531, Object number SK-A-3924, oil on panel, 66.5 × 55.1 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 221

Illustrations 7.3

7.4

7.5 7.6

7.7

7.8

7.9

7.10

7.11

7.12

7.13

7.14

Follower of Jan van Scorel, Portrait of Anabaptist David Joris c. 1540–45, Inventory number 561, oil on panel, 88.9 × 68.4 cm., Kunstmuseum, Basel, Germany 221 Attributed to Jan van Scorel, Portrait of a Humanist, c. 1540, Inventory number P02580, oil on panel, 67 × 52 cm., Museo del Prado, Madrid 222 Jan van Scorel, Portrait of a Man, c. 1520, Inventory number GE854, oil on panel, 47 × 41 cm., Lichtenstein Museum, Vienna 222 Lucantonio degli Uberti after Francesco Rosselli, View of Florence (the ‘Catena Map’), c. 1510, Inventory number 899-100, ink on paper, 58.5 × 131.5 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 223 Hieronymus Cock, “Ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1551, RP-P-1882-A-6450, ink on paper, 226 × 282 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 225 Virgil Solis after Léonard Thiry, “Artists Drawing a Ruin Fantasy,” The Little Book of Architectural Ruins, 1550–62, Museum number E.2858-1910, ink on paper, 150 × 102 mm., Victoria and Albert Museum, London 226 Simon Novellanus after Pieter Bruegel the Elder “River Landscape with Mercury and Psyche,” Allegorical Landscapes, 1595, Registration number 1870,0625.648, ink on paper, 269 × 338 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 227 Anonymous Artist known as the ‘Master of Oxford’ (active c. 1510–20), Architects and Scholars Studying Before the Colosseum, c. 1515, Inventory number LO1028A.2WA2008.22, fol. 15v, ink on paper, 333 × 235 mm., The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 228 Lambert Sustris, Landscape with Classical Ruins and Women Bathing, c. 1552–53, Inventory number Gemäldegalerie, 1540, oil on canvas, 101 × 150 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 231 Joannes van Doetechum after Maarten van Heemskerck, Ruin Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, 1552, Object number RP-P-1968-174, ink on paper, 275 × 377 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 233 Hieronymus Cock after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1551, RP-P-1882-A-6455, ink on paper, 226 × 299 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 237 Hieronymus Cock after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Colosseum,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1551, RP-P-1882-A-6441, ink on paper, 302 × 223 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 237

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Illustrations 7.15 Hieronymus Cock / Johannes or Lucas van Doetechum after Maarten van Heemskerck, “View from Palace of Septimius Severus towards the Colosseum,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1561/1578, RP-P-1985-211, ink on paper, 245 × 325 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 238 7.16 Maarten van Heemskerck, Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater, 1552, Inventory number P819, oil on wood, 75 × 121 cm., Musée des BeauxArts, Lille 240 8.1 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Lawrence Altarpiece (Interior), 1538–42, oil on panel, 5.2 × 7.36 m., Domkyrkan Linköping, Sweden. Photo by Margareta Svensson 251 8.2 Maarten van Heemskerck, Caritas, c. 1545, Inventory number GG2683, oil on panel, 715 × 365 mm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna 253 8.3 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Heliodorus Driven from the Temple, Object number 1549, RP-P-1965-788, two plates, 36.7 × 27.1 cm. (left plate): 36.6 × 27.0 cm. (right plate), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 257 8.4 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Self-Portrait Frontispiece,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4109, ink on paper, 142 × 200 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 263 8.5 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Destruction of Ai and the Stoning of Achan,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4116, ink on paper, 140 × 201 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 265 8.6 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom,” King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, 1569, Object number RP-P-OB-5940, ink on paper, 203 × 252 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 267 8.7 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Destruction of the Temple of Samaria,” King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, 1569, Object number RP-P-1890-A-15414, 194 × 253 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 269 8.8 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Josiah Celebrating Passover,” King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, 1569, Accession number, 65.587.8, ink on paper, 195 × 250 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 270 8.9 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Fall of Babylon, 1569, Accession number: 65.587.8, ink on paper, 238 × 413 mm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 271

Illustrations 8.10 Hartman Schedel “Destruction of Babylon,” Weltchronik, 1493, Call No. D17.S34 1493b, f. 25, 65, ink on paper, USC Libraries, Special Collections 271 8.11 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Lot and his Family Leaving Sodom,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4113, ink on paper, 141 × 202 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 278 8.12 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Lot Making Love to his Daughters,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4114, ink on paper, 141 × 201 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 278 8.13 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Drunkenness of Noah,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4110, ink on paper, 139 × 201 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 279 8.14 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Amphitheatrum,” The Eight Wonders of the World, 1572, Registration number 1875,0710.2822, ink on paper, 215 × 262 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 283 8.15 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Pyramids of Egypt,” The Eight Wonders of the World, 1569 Object number RP-P-1904-3298, ink on paper, 211 × 257 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 283 8.16 Hendrick Hondius in the manner of Maarten van Heemskerck, Landscape with Ruins, 1590, ink on paper, 344 × 275, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 285

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Introduction

Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome

When artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498, Heemskerck–1574, Haarlem) left Haarlem for Rome sometime in the early summer of 1532, he embarked on a journey that would soon transform Netherlandish visual culture.1 Though he only stayed in the Eternal City for approximately five years, he produced the earliest, most complete corpus of Netherlandish drawings of Rome now known to us. Rome’s imagery pervades the art he made during the forty years after he returned to Haarlem. Above all else, Van Heemskerck’s Roman and post-Roman oeuvres reveal his exhaustive knowledge of – and his unceasing inventiveness with – the Eternal City’s treasure trove of antiquities: sculptures, picturesque vistas, and the main focus of this book, architectural ruins. With great subtlety, his art also broadcasts his absorption of the work of Netherlandish and Italian artists who preceded him in the study of Rome’s antiquities: pioneers of Netherlandish antiquarianism, Jan Gossart (c. 1478–1532), Jan van Scorel (1495–1560), and Italian luminaries, Raphael (1483–1520), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and the esteemed artists in their orbits. Reflective of this pictorial erudition, also evincing a literary intelligence buttressed by his associations with the intellectual elite of the Low Countries, Van Heemskerck’s art shaped a Netherlandish vision of antiquity of unprecedented nuance and inventiveness. The famous corpus of drawings Van Heemskerck executed during his Roman stay is central to the art he made after his visit to Rome. During the mid-sixteenth-century, his Roman drawings were exceptional for their abundant quantity, quality, content, and variety. Hundreds of extant drawings show Rome’s antiquities via an impressive range of compositional motifs, media, and techniques. Their status as an extraordinary record of Rome as Van Heemskerck rendered it in the 1530s makes them a sufficiently compelling topic for a sustained study. However, they form an even richer object of inquiry because they comprise among the most complete founding documents of the antiquarian interests that had overtaken Netherlandish culture by the middle decades of the sixteenth century. No scholar has studied Van Heemskerck’s corpus of Roman drawings as a single body of work since the early decades of the 20th century, when Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger published an annotated facsimile of the two bound albums in Berlin containing

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_002

2

Introduction

most of them.2 With their consummate archeological knowledge, Hülsen and Egger identified most of the architectural, sculptural, and decorative monuments appearing on each sheet in both albums. However, they did not intend their work to address the importance of Roman antiquity – or the ruin in particular – for Van Heemskerck’s artistry and Netherlandish visual culture. Despite the ruin’s omnipresence in Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre and its pervasiveness in the art of some of his contemporaries, these topics have received insufficient attention since the publication of Hülsen and Egger’s facsimile. While Van Heemskerck and his Roman drawings have generated considerable discourse, they have only recently begun to elicit analysis for their relation to his broader artistic vision. Moreover, scholars have yet to sufficiently situate his Roman drawings in relation to the origins of Netherlandish antiquarianism, let alone explain their genesis. Finally, to date, we lack analyses of their relation to the conditions Van Heemskerck encountered in Rome and the Low Countries during his post-Roman phase.3 As the first synthetic, in-depth exploration of the richness of Van Heemskerck’s antiquarianism vis-à-vis his ruin imagery Maarten Van Heemskerck’s Rome represents a step towards remedying these conditions. Unlike many of his Netherlandish antiquarian contemporaries, who showed a much less acute or sustained interest in ruin imagery, Van Heemskerck was a catalyst in making the Roman ruin a major element of sixteenth-century Europe’s pictorial lexicon and a staple of early modern Netherlandish visual culture. Placing the idea of the ruin at the center of a book on Van Heemskerck follows his own suggestion; with his self-portraits [figs. 7.1 and 8.4] he is the only Netherlandish antiquarian artist to build an artistic identity around drawing the ruin. During and after his Roman sojourn, Van Heemskerck executed paintings featuring ruins for Italian and northern European patrons.4 His prints, many of which also feature ruins, circulated widely, disseminating his name across Europe. Clearly, Van Heemskerck saw the ruin not only as an instructive symbol for the loss, recovery, and reinvention of the deep past as he and the artists and humanists in his circle practiced it in their visual and literary spheres. Even where his post-Roman antiquarian art does not bear ruins its figures and scenery are reconstitutions of them, inventions of new antiquities he created out of his knowledge of the fragments of the old. In three parts, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome locates the origins of his interest in ruins, his means for drawing them, and his later use of them, in a confluence of events that encouraged his cultivation of

Introduction

the rhetorical potency of ruin imagery, a continuity in memory. The thread that binds the origin, production, and function of Van Heemskerck’s Roman ruin drawings is their role in retrieving, recreating, and thus perpetuating the memory of antiquity. In every phase of his career, he and the artists in his extended circle made and used drawings to this end. Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome’s antiquities and vistas functioned discursively, as tools for the assimilation of motifs, and as devices for the revitalization and continued cultivation of the ancient past. Seen in this light, his Roman drawings, especially his landscape drawings of the architectural vestiges of ancient Rome, tap an exceptionally rich mnemonic vein. In the fullest sense, they functioned in the same general way that Renaissance collections of antiquities functioned for their patrons: in Richard Goldthwaite’s seminal phrasing, they served as “instruments for the creation of culture.”5 For Van Heemskerck, they performed as a virtual repository of the Rome he curated via his selection of monuments and views, a compendium of motifs and methods of imaging, a storehouse of several forms of knowledge at once: historical, pictorial, cultural, and even autobiographical. This book describes Van Heemskerck’s approach and response to the richness in the Roman ambient over the course of his career. Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome is the first book to elucidate the ways in which the Haarlem artist’s pre-Roman period impacted his subsequent activities in Rome. Part 1 situates Van Heemskerck’s early engagement with Netherlandish artistic practices of the 1510s and 20s within the cultural crosscurrents that prompted the rising interest in antiquity among artists and patrons. Two concise chapters describe Netherlandish assimilations of antiquity and clarify the importance for Van Heemskerck of his predecessors to Rome, Jan Gossart and Jan van Scorel. The specific nature of the impact of these Netherlandish masters on Van Heemskerck’s art has thus far eluded us. The first chapter explores the status of the ruin in Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman ambient and the growth of the Netherlandish artistic journey to Rome after the advent of Gossart’s sojourn there in 1508–09. Trekking to Rome as the artist in Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) and Philip II of Burgundy’s (1464–1524) entourage earned Gossart considerable prestige, an encouragement to the next generation of Netherlandish artists to pursue the antique manner. Utrecht painter Jan van Scorel is thought to have studied briefly under Gossart before embarking on an extended wanderjahr that brought him to Carinthia, Venice, Malta, and the Holy Land. Van Scorel’s travels culminated in Rome, where he served his boyhood

3

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friend, Pope Adrian VI Boeyens (r. 1522–23), as steward of the Vatican’s collection of antiquities. He then returned to the Netherlands and established thriving workshops in Utrecht and Haarlem, where Van Heemskerck assisted him from 1527–30.6 The great biographer and historian of early modern northern European artists, Karel van Mander (1548–1606), alleges that Van Scorel’s high reputation for producing work in an antiquarian manner attracted Van Heemskerck, who was only three years Van Scorel’s junior and already 29 years old by the time he secured a situation assisting him.7 Part I’s second chapter thus portrays Van Heemskerck’s maturation in Van Scorel’s workshop, his assimilation and critical revision of the methods and motifs he received as they channeled their way through Van Scorel’s Haarlem hub. Part 2 of Van Heemskerck’s Rome describes the indelible impact of Rome’s post-Sack culture on the artist’s developing aptitudes for antiquity and the ruin landscape. Three chapters explore the context for Van Heemskerck’s stay and his methods for drawing in Rome. Van Heemskerck was in the Eternal City a mere five years after the calamitous events that took place in the spring of 1527. At this time, Romans feared a second sack. I cast these conditions as an encouragement for Van Heemskerck’s developing fascination with Rome’s ruins, which embodied the city’s vulnerability in the wake of the Sack. Impulses to collect, preserve, and recreate the memory of antiquity coalesced in the Roman artistic and patronal circles Van Heemskerck navigated. Contextualizing his ruin drawings demonstrates their complex relations to these mnemonic imperatives. Van Heemskerck’s use of multiple compositional schemes, media, and techniques not only evinces his pictorial acquisition of the Roman landscape, but also the art of his contemporaries. More than a mere pictorial record of Rome, Van Heemskerck’s drawings are a collection of his responses to the Roman landscape, the tendencies he assimilated in the pictures he saw in it, and the art he encountered. Thus, by drawing the Eternal City, Van Heemskerck collected antiquity according to his own vision and experiences. His compositional schemes and striking techniques made them a vivid and thus memorable record of the city’s ancient visual aspect. The third part of Van Heemskerck’s Rome traces the impact of Rome on the artist’s prints and paintings. Van Heemskerck made art from within a circle whose principal members included humanist/ engraver Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert (1522–1590), humanist and poet Hadrianus Junius (1511–1575), artist, art dealer, and founder of Antwerp’s publishing house Aux Quatre Vents, Hieronymus Cock,

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and Antoine Perrenot (1517–1586), Bishop of Arras and First Minister to Charles V and Philip II. Part 3 argues for Van Heemskerck’s pictorial response to the ruin as a multivalent rhetorical instrument for crafting appeals to diverse viewers fanning out from the local to the global. Detailing the mechanics of the Roman ruin’s appearance in his post-Roman art, part 3’s first chapter lays plain the practical aspects of Van Heemskerck’s pictorial memory. In numerous examples, he translated the image of the ruin from his drawings into an extraordinary array of motifs after the antique, or “all’antica,” mnemonic modes of invention: memories of built examples, partial quotations from his drawings, and pure fantasie or inventions. In paintings such as Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape [fig. 6.20], and numerous prints including the copiously ruined Balaam and the Angel [fig. 6.11], the profusion of ruin fantasie, new buildings after the antique, and even entire cityscapes, spring from a commingling of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings with his pictorial memory of Rome and his complex notion of the Eternal City. Thus, the second chapter of Part 3 brings Van Heemskerck’s nuanced use of the ruin to bear on his fashioning of his own identity. His self-portraits commemorate the time he spent drawing Rome’s architectural ruins. Analyses of Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum have never noted that Van Heemskerck conceived it at the precise point in his career when his proliferation of ruin fantasie was peaking and he was gaining renown on the European stage as a master of ruin imagery. Part 3’s third chapter explores the audiences for Van Heemskerck’s antiquarianism. Here, I argue that he used the image of antiquity to prompt discussion among a broad range of viewing proclivities. Humanists, artists, patrons, collectors, and concerned citizens could all come away from Van Heemskerck’s art after the antique enriched on topics relating to the image debate and the tumultuous reigns of Charles V and his heir, Philip II. This chapter’s prime exemplum, Van Heemskerck’s Clades Judaeae Gentis series of prints [figs. 8.4, 5, 11–13], lionizes his Roman journey and argues for the importance of his Roman drawings for understanding the past’s relation to the present and the future.8 As recollective devices, these self-fashionings and images of ruins celebrate the importance of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings for the perpetual importance of ancient Roman istoria. As scenery evocative of Rome, yet never before seen due to its invented status, Van Heemskerck’s ruin landscapes extended the significance of their foreground narratives beyond their temporal, historical limitations. As a result, they promote a universalizing mode of viewing,

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suggesting to audiences that they draw associations between the istorie presented and their own milieux. Maarten Van Heemskerck’s Rome concludes with the first ever catalog to bring together all of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome’s ruins in state-of-the art digital photography. Here, his drawn collection of pictorial knowledge of the Roman past emerges in all its variety. The catalog contains entries for each drawing of secure or questionable attribution to Van Heemskerck, copies, and those thought to be copies of lost originals. The catalog’s most important function is to describe each drawing’s vantage point, subject matter, formal aspect, and its relation to other drawings, prints and paintings by Van Heemskerck and other artists. I thus bring to light Van Heemskerck’s pictorial exploration of antiquity and the artistry of his times as mediated by his drawings of Rome in all of their particular manifestations.

Drawings in Berlin and Scattered to the Four Winds

The fact that the majority of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings live in two bound albums in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett has expedited the study of his Roman phase. However, this concentration of most of Van Heemskerck’s drawings in one place has also distracted attention from his drawings living elsewhere. Scholars have therefore also neglected the possibility that Van Heemskerck gifted and traded some of his Roman drawings. Of the two albums in Berlin, the second is more suggestive of this type of distribution. While the first album has understandably received attention for its status as the remainder of the portable booklet of drawings Van Heemskerck produced in Rome, the second is comprised of larger sheets bearing drawings by Van Heemskerck and several others. Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger’s publication of both albums together under the misleading title, Die Römischen Skizzenbucher von Marten van Heemskerck, has obscured album II’s distinct qualities, making it all too easy for us to avoid consideration of the rich possibilities it contains. The Berlin albums contain a combined 172 sheets. Album I is comprised of 62 small rectangular sheets, roughly the same size, around 130 × 200 mm. Most of these drawings bear physical evidence that they were once bound. Their high finish – mostly in meticulously hatched in pen and ink, but also in delicately handled ink wash and red and black chalk – raises tantalizing questions about the function

Introduction

of the bound booklet in which they once appeared. As scholars have noted, these are not informal sketches that functioned as quick studies Van Heemskerck drew solely for practice and reference. This renders inadequate the traditional, rote nomenclature, “sketchbook.”9 What did Van Heemskerck intend for such a group of drawings, so carefully worked and bound together in a portable book? Although the high finish of many of these sheets indicates that he intended for it a function more elevated than as a series of reference sketches, it certainly could have also served that purpose. The high finish of the drawings in album I never prevented him from later referring to them when composing paintings or prints. He consulted his drawing of the Villa Madama’s sculpture garden [cat. no. 64] – an impressively polished specimen – to compose the backdrop for his print, “Three Women at the Holy Sepulchre” [fig. 6.6].10 Fifteen years later, he produced another more liberal variant on the same drawing for the setting of his “Elders Trying to Seduce Susanna” [fig. 6.5].11 However, the completeness of most of the drawings among album I’s previously bound sheets also suggests that the booklet functioned as something like a curated picture book of Rome. We imagine the book of drawings as a discursive object, something for fellow artists, engravers, etchers, print publishers, humanists, and cognoscenti (connoisseurs) or their Netherlandish counterparts known as liefhebbers (“art lovers”) to peruse while discussing art, antiquity, and the histories of the monuments appearing on each sheet.12 In addition to stoking viewing knowledge, such an exercise would spellbind any viewer with Van Heemskerck’s multifaceted command of his craft and of Roman antiquity. The dynamic compositions among the drawings suggest his pictorial intelligence. Their technique reveals his effortless hand. Their precision hatching also suggests Van Heemskerck’s potential as a composer of prints.13 Today, to leaf through album I is to receive a strong suggestion of all of these functions. However, the inevitable discovery of panoramas that Van Heemskerck originally drew over two horizontally oriented sheets now separated from one another in Berlin’s re-sequenced albums underscores the reality that the “sketchbook” is no longer intact. Further distancing album I from its primary source are two of its sheets, nearly the same size as those once bound together in Van Heemskerck’s book, which bear no physical traces of ever having been bound therein. They contain drawings previously believed to be Van Heemskerck’s. However, Ilja Veldman has deattributed them, giving them instead to “Anonymous B,” whom Nicole Dacos later hypothesized is lesser-known Antwerp artist, Michiel Gast (c. 1515–1577).14 In technique they are by a more

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deliberate hand than Van Heemskerck’s, one lacking the confident spontaneity we see on most of Album I’s sheets.15 Other sheets in the first album bearing Van Heemskerck’s hand are sized irregularly and thus do not appear to have been a part of his booklet of drawings.16 Unlike album I’s dependence mostly upon a single source, album II’s disparate assemblage must have resulted from astute collecting. An accrual of drawings after the antique that may have taken place gradually from the mid-sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, album II’s assemblage of drawings must be due in part to Van Heemskerck’s circulation of his large sheets. The drawings by Van Heemskerck in the second album average approximately 200 × 300 mm. Album II also contains renderings from the hand of an unknown artist whom Hülsen and Egger identified as ‘Anonymous A,’ an artist who shared Van Heemskerck’s interest in ruins and sculptures, but who was responsible for most of album II’s drawings of ornament. Nicole Dacos has since argued that ‘Anonymous A’ was Van Heemskerck’s travel companion in Rome, Hermannus Posthumus (c. 1512/14–before 1588).17 Album II also contains two more sheets that Veldman has given to “Anonymous B.”18 I have taken three more of album II’s sheets from Van Heemskerck and have given them to “Anonymous C.”19 The autograph Van Heemskerck drawings in album II further announce his broad technical range. Many contain his preferred pen and ink hatching technique. In these examples, the stroke is similar in width and spacing to those found in album I. However, since these sheets are larger, they invite the artist to draw in a larger scale. As a result, strokes appear thinner and hatches appear to be at finer intervals, although they are not. For example, compare album II’s consummate rendering of the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 26], on a large sheet, to album I’s famous drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1]. Other examples by Van Heemskerck in album II display liberal combinations of hatching, black chalk, and ink wash. Album II’s variety of hands, the larger scale of its drawings, and the impressive facture on many of the sheets we give to Van Heemskerck belie the primacy that album I’s smaller drawings receive in discussions of his Roman phase. The fact that there are autograph Van Heemskercks in places other than Berlin suggests that he may have circulated his drawings. A host of large autograph drawings that could have easily found their way into Berlin’s album II live in collections across Europe and the United States.20 Many are among the most impressive specimens Van Heemskerck executed and could have served as gifts to potential patrons, ready reminders of their maker’s prowess [e.g. cat. nos. 24,

Introduction

25, and 41]. The Kupferstichkabinett itself possesses two important drawings by Van Heemskerck not bound in either of their albums. One is a monumental ink wash drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 2]. The other is the only Roman sheet by Van Heemskerck’s hand containing an imagined architectural ruin, or fantasia [cat. no. 73]. Other drawings by Van Heemskerck appear in collections in Rome, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, Hamburg, and Düsseldorf.21 The presence in Rome of two carefully worked renderings of the Septizonium at different angles [cat. nos. 24 and 25] suggests that Van Heemskerck circulated some drawings before leaving the city. Their high finish and pristine condition suggest that they were gifts for display, drawings Van Heemskerck gave to admirers he gained during his time in Rome. He may have also sold them; Karel van Mander remarks that Van Heemskerck made money while he was there.22 We imagine similar scenarios for the drawings that are elsewhere. Their locations in so many places besides Rome and the Berlin albums could have also resulted from Van Heemskerck’s gifting them to fellow artists and potential patrons during his return journey. It is also possible that one of Van Heemskerck’s most important patrons, Antoine Perrenot (1517–1586), acted as an agent on his behalf and brought these fine drawings with him on diplomatic missions as small tokens of esteem that might also net his Haarlem friend some commissions.23 This type of scenario likeliest played itself out from the late 1540s to the end of the 1560s, as Perrenot matured into an important diplomat and Van Heemskerck approached his prime years. Further suggesting that the large sheets disseminated Van Heemskerck’s artistry beyond the confines of his workshop are two folios in a small book of drawings of Netherlandish provenance formerly attributed to Antwerp painter, Maarten de Vos (1532–1603) – but still known as the “de Vos sketchbook” – now belonging to the Rijksmuseum [cat. nos. 73–76].24 These sheets contain copies of extant Van Heemskerck drawings from both Berlin albums alongside other drawings of Rome bearing his compositional tendencies. The so-called “de Vos sketchbook” also contains a sheet bearing inventions closely related to Van Heemskerck’s painting, Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1]. Though some of the motifs on these sheets find no match among Van Heemskerck’s extant drawings, they may be copies after drawings he shared or gifted that are now lost. The sketchbook’s Netherlandish provenance suggests that its copies after Van Heemskerck resulted from the circulation of his drawings to fellow artists after his return home.25 Moreover, since the “de Vos sketchbook” contains copies of drawings from both

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Berlin albums, we know that at least some sheets from both groups of drawings were together and shared at an early point. Perhaps Van Heemskerck was not averse to allowing artists to copy from them on visits to his workshop, or while assisting him. Without a consideration of these sources away from Berlin, our understanding of the Berlin drawings – and Van Heemskerck’s approach to his art – is less complete than it could be. After Van Heemskerck’s death, subsequent generations of artists continued to use his Roman drawings as he had: as reference material to be shared.26 They passed into the hands of his nephew, Jacob Rauwert, and then to painter Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem (1562–1638), one of the artists at the center of a circle of artists that included Hendrik Goltzius (1558–1617) and biographer Karel van Mander, also a painter. Cornelis, the youngest and longest-lived of the three, possessed Van Heemskerck’s drawings until his death. The estate inventory from that time identifies an “excellently drawn book by Maarten van Heemskerck after the most handsome antiquities of Rome.”27 Some signs suggest that the artists in Goltzius’s circle were not averse to handling Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings as if they were their own. On a sheet in album I, for example, Cornelis inked a border around Van Heemskerck’s delicate chalk rendering of an arm of a sculpture.28 Perhaps a detail of the figure at left in the Quirinal Hill’s Dioscurii of Monte Cavallo sculpture group, this arm appears as the source for one of the imposing assailants in Cornelis’s Massacre of the Innocents.29 Cornelis composed and executed the painting as the central panel of the Drapers Altarpiece in Haarlem’s St. Bavokerk to match the shutters that Van Heemskerck had earlier painted for the triptych. Thus, Cornelis’s consultation of Van Heemskerck’s drawings was an expedient way of establishing continuity with the earlier work. Another drawing in album I portraying the base of Trajan’s column [cat. no. 72] bears similar inking. Roughly applied, the ink nearly saturates the paper. It does not appear to be contemporary with Van Heemskerck’s original rendering, but a later addition by another hand. In the 1620s, Cornelis continued what by then must have become a tradition of sharing Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings; there is no other way they could have found their way to Haarlem painter, Pieter Saenredam (1597–1664). The younger artist painted his Church of Santa Maria della Febbre, Rome in 1629 and his View of the Forum from the Capitoline Hill in 1633. The former dates from nearly a decade before the inventory drafted on the occasion of Cornelis’s death documented the Roman drawings among Cornelis’s possessions. Saenredam based these paintings on sheets now in the

Introduction

Berlin Albums.30 However, the particular drawing that provided the source for his view of Santa Maria della Febbre is one that Ilja Veldman gave to “Anonymous B.”31 If Veldman’s convincing deattribution from Van Heemskerck is correct, then we must entertain a few distinct possibilities regarding the life of Van Heemskerck’s corpus of Roman drawings in the years following his time in Rome. On the one hand, Van Heemskerck himself could have acquired drawings of Rome by others before bequeathing them to Rauwert. On the other, Rauwert could have begun the process of reassembling the sheets Van Heemskerck himself had circulated, grouping them with those by other artists. This second scenario accords with the preponderance of larger sheets by Van Heemskerck’s hand appearing in album II and also in far-flung locations. Subsequent owners of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings also could have contributed to the process of album II’s accrual of sheets from a variety of hands. For example, Saenredam could have added to the corpus the drawing that served as the source for his painting of Santa Maria della Febbre. After Saenredam, we begin to lose track of Van Heemskerck’s drawings. However, Jan de Bisschop’s Paradigmata Graphices Variorum Artificum indicates his having studied extensively Van Heemskerck’s drawings of sculptural antiquities. Moreover, his expressive views of Roman ruins in ink wash are reminiscent of Van Heemskerck’s, suggesting his careful attention to Van Heemskerck’s Roman vedute.32 Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings eventually came into the hands of the famous family of connoisseurs and collectors descended from Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774). Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett acquired the present albums in 1879 as part of the collection of architect Hippolyte Destailleur (1787–1852), who had acquired them from the Mariette estate.33 Either Mariette or Destailleur could have also played a determining role in the current configuration of both albums. However, Van Heemskerck’s continuous use of his own drawings in the forty years after Rome and their circulation during the interim between his death and the Mariette family’s acquisition of them renders conclusions on the matter exceedingly difficult. The disassembly of the small book of drawings now comprising album I, the circulation of the larger sheets, and the acquisition of sheets containing drawings by other hands could have begun at any point before the Mariettes acquired them. Even Van Heemskerck himself could have broken up album I’s booklet while beginning the process of acquiring the drawings by others now among those in album II. Thus, we do not know who is responsible for the current sequence of drawings in either album. It is possible that Mariette assembled

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them in the eighteenth century and that Destailleur acquired them already in a sequence close to their current arrangement. However, Destailleur could have also made changes ranging from minor to extreme. Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger went to great effort to discover the original sequence of the drawings in the first album, an attempt to reconstruct Van Heemskerck’s “sketchbook.” They based their proposed order on his uses of two sheets to make one panoramic drawing [e.g., cat. nos. 56 and 57] and the residue of red chalk many sheets left on the drawings facing them, which they touched when the book was closed. Some red chalk tracings are so strong and legible that they can be matched precisely with extant red chalk drawings. The original sequence Hülsen and Egger proposed around those sheets is thus plausible.34 However, most of the red chalk residue is faint. And Van Heemskerck did not make double-sheeted panoramas or use red chalk on every sheet. Therefore, although Hülsen and Egger’s endeavor accounts for the sequence of many of album I’s sheets, it must remain incomplete. If the sequence Hülsen and Egger proposed is even partially correct, it provides no confirmation that Van Heemskerck took a programmatic approach to drawing Rome’s monuments. He does not appear to have sequenced them by any ordering principle. Two examples suffice to suggest the importance of Van Heemskerck’s circulation of his drawings for the development of Netherlandish antiquarian art. Among the finer specimens in album II is his view towards the Colosseum from amidst the Severan ruins atop the Palatine Hill [cat. no. 9]. The drawing’s high degree of finish suggests its function as a formal display piece. At any point after Van Heemskerck completed it, the drawing should have enjoyed such elite status. A semicircular series of ruined arches advances towards the viewer, heavily foregrounded, giving way to a distant view of the Colosseum from its ruined side. Small figures explore the ruins as Van Heemskerck himself did, creating an analogic triangulation between artist, the figures portrayed, and the viewer who explores the drawing carefully; to explore the drawing is to act as do the drawing’s archeological explorers and its maker. Networks of thick, long, heavily applied strokes in the foreground convey the weight and girth of the palace’s ruined substructures. Progressively lighter strokes lead us to the distant background. Objects there appear in lightly applied delicate strokes, the drawn approximation of painting’s atmospheric perspective. However, the drawing stands as more than a testament to Van Heemskerck’s capacity for compelling composition and polyphonic facture. Sometime in the late 1550s or early 1560s, he shared it

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figure 0.1 Johannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Hieronymus Cock “Ancient Coffered Barrel Vault,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum (The Small Book of Roman Ruins and Buildings), 1562, Registration number 1983, U.314, ink on paper, 153 × 208 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

with at least one important viewer, who then shared it with Europe’s print collectors. Cropped and re-oriented horizontally, the drawing served as the source for one of the more memorable prints [fig. 7.15] in Hieronymus Cock’s second series of Roman ruins. The owner of the Antwerp publishing imprint, Aux Quatre Vents (“At the Sign of the Four Winds”), Cock was a frequent publisher of prints after Van Heemskerck’s compositions.35 Their collaboration forms compelling evidence of Van Heemskerck’s willingness to share his drawings with others. Another rich suggestion that Van Heemskerck was keen to cultivate the value of his drawings beyond his own studio appears in Cock’s print of an imaginary ruined barrel vault [fig. 0.1]. Its details are likely inventions of Cock’s. He was a capable draftsman in his own right, one who had been to Rome and had developed his own familiarity with the city’s ancient ruins. However, the barrel vault in this print shares a compositional affinity with a drawing appearing in the upper right corner of folio IX recto in the Rijksmuseum’s so-called “de Vos sketchbook” [cat. no. 74]. The motif appears on a sheet whose verso side contains other motifs that the artist copied from among Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, one of which is still extant: album II’s view of St. Peter’s under construction [cat. no. 42]. It is thus likely that the artist also copied the barrel-vaulted motif from Van Heemskerck. Cock’s print either resulted from his having seen a lost original by Van Heemskerck or, less likely, its small copy in the “de Vos sketchbook”. In either case, its relation to motifs in a sketchbook containing copies of Van Heemskerck’s drawings further suggests his circulation of them, the cultivation of an audience for them. Thus, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings did not have

Cat. no. 74, detail

Cat. no. 42, detail

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an insular life. When we view the Berlin albums, we gaze upon a set of motifs in the thick of mid-sixteenth century Netherlandish visual culture, images that preserved and promoted the memory of antiquity.

The Historicized Van Heemskerck and Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck

Despite Van Heemskerck’s unquestioned importance for the course of Netherlandish art, history has delivered him to us in somewhat fragmented form. Several factors have shaped this condition. His own versatility, for example, has variegated his place in art history since the publication of Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck. His Roman ruinscapes, moreover, have achieved a fame of their own, virtually separate from their maker and the remainder of his oeuvre. They make frequent appearances in books on Renaissance history and architectural history. There, however, they are not present as examples of his artistry, but as documents of Rome’s appearance in the sixteenth century. Also, the apparent familiarity of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings betrays their hitherto neglected innovative aspect, in the context of the sixteenth century and beyond. Some of them anticipate the Roman vedute that artists across Europe began producing in significant quantities at mid-century. Others display an imaginative aspect anticipating the capriccii that Claude Lorrain and Giovanni Battista Piranesi composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. And yet we have little discourse articulating Van Heemskerck’s position ahead of the curve.36 Perhaps the close visual kinship that his Roman ruinscapes share with the entire species of image that succeeded them has blinded us to their seminal status.37 Although Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings seemingly comprise a universe unto themselves, they only hint at the variety in his entire oeuvre. The prints he composed number over five hundred; their range of subjects and the complexity of their intellection indicates his exceptional pictorial intelligence and wit. His engagement with an elite humanist circle and Haarlem’s chamber of rederijkers or “rhetoricians,” a group of Netherlandish wits known for staging satiric farces of compelling intellection, encouraged the canny content of his prints.38 The preparatory sketches he composed for them reveal a consistently high level of craftsmanship that astonishes given their exceptional quantity. Many of Van Heemskerck’s one hundred

Introduction

plus paintings display his ability to imitate surface textures with a virtuosity rivaling Jan van Eyck’s. However, scholars have given insufficient scrutiny to his selective deployment of this highly mimetic, distinctly Netherlandish mode of picturing.39 He produced several historical landscapes, some monumental in scale, such as his Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1] and his Roman Landscape with the Good Samaritan.40 He also produced sacred panels by the score, many of which are extant, despite the alleged substantial attrition of his sacred oeuvre by midcentury iconoclasts.41 Each of Van Heemskerck’s categories of production has demanded its own scholarly approach. A few concisely focused studies identify rich points of intersection; Ilja Veldman has revealed the relation between Van Heemskerck’s art and his humanist milieu.42 Martin Stritt has offered an extended meditation on the relation of the Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World to his ruin drawings and prints.43 Aside from these studies, however, we have seen insufficient syntheses of the various elements of Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre, despite their shared indebtedness to his Roman experience. We also have few studies that pursue how his post-Roman antiquarianism resonated within its Netherlandish context, despite his production for Netherlandish audiences first and foremost. Thus, it is little wonder that scholarship on Van Heemskerck has tended towards myopia. Scholars have mostly focused on the intrinsic value of his art while doing little to relate it to that of his contemporary artists.44 Moreover, Van Heemskerck is little known beyond art history’s inner sanctum. His relatively obscure status is certainly due in part to a traditional misunderstanding of Netherlandish art after the antique. Recent publications have begun the process of nuancing Gossart, Van Scorel, Van Heemskerck, Frans Floris (1570– 1517), and the legions of sixteenth and seventeenth century Netherlanders who succeeded them in voyaging to Rome to absorb antique and contemporary Italian exempla. However, our understanding of these artists remains in need of continued development. In definitions of Netherlandish art, scholars have traditionally focused on the verisimilitude of surface textures that Van Eyck pioneered on the one hand, and the ostensible earthiness of Pieter Brueghel the Elder on the other. Few analyses express consciousness that such hard distinctions are arbitrary. Fewer still acknowledge that Van Heemskerck and his cohorts were adept at both of these modes and blended them with their antiquarianism where appropriate.

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Within these broader historiographic conditions, Van Heemskerck’s antiquarianism has occupied a falsely narrowed niche. No single explanation for this splintered state of affairs suffices. However, a close reading of the earliest biography of Van Heemskerck suggests it as the source of some of the most pervasive interpretative misunderstandings of his art. Found in Het Schilder-Boeck, Karel van Mander’s sprawling tome detailing the lives of northern European artists from Jan van Eyck to Hendrik Goltzius, Van Heemskerck’s biography has not received its due share of critical analysis.45 Scholars have tended to regard it as a basically reliable source for information on the artist.46 Walter Melion’s elaboration of Van Mander’s overall agenda suggests a more fruitful approach to Het Schilder-Boeck, however. Melion argues against a prevailing tendency to read the book’s details as if “excerpted from the fabric of the text.”47 While Van Mander’s biographies do indeed contain reliable historical markers, the author has embedded them within a larger text that develops overarching theoretical positions, themes that pervade the entire book and encompass the artistry of the individuals they historicize. Van Mander inserted topoi into his text, content he appropriated from classical literature, which he applied liberally to the biographies of his predecessors and contemporaries. In so doing, he set the lives he chronicled into various metaphoric relations to the ancients. Throughout the Schilder-Boeck, we find both types of discourse: information that we can verify with concrete forms of evidence, and a metaphoric, poetic, theoretical language. The Schilder-Boeck elaborates a distinctly northern, pictorially driven theoretical alternative to the ideas in the book that inspired Van Mander: Giorgio Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e achitettori. Also constructed as a sequence of biographies, Vasari’s book stages the historical development of a quality he called “buon disegno.” Bearing more mystical overtones than its English translation, “good design,” buon disegno is the artist’s God-given facility to compose harmonious works with good judgment. Disegno encompasses the three sister arts of sculpture, architecture, and painting after the antique. The relation of Vasari’s prescriptions to Netherlandish painting was of particular concern for Van Mander. His Schilder-Boeck contains glosses of some of Vasari’s biographies of Italian artists. Moreover, like Van Heemskerck, Van Mander himself had been to Rome and painted after the antique.48 Thus, we might expect his biographies to favor Van Heemskerck and other Netherlanders who went to Rome. However, within the Schilder-Boeck’s theoretical scheme, Roman antiquity appears as but one consideration in a multi-faceted pictorial universe promoting Eyckian

Introduction

verisimilitude, the importance of color, the centrality of the print medium, and what Melion aptly labels the “prestige of landscape.”49 We read particular aspects of Van Heemskerck’s biography most effectively when we remember their integration within Van Mander’s complex of thematic concerns before considering them more globally, within art history’s historiographic complex. There can be no doubt that Van Mander admired Van Heemskerck’s art. He subtitles Van Heemskerck’s biography with the laudatory phrase, “constigh vermaert schilder” (“artful and celebrated painter”). This is a unique accolade among all of the Schilder-Boeck’s biographies. However, this general admiration gives way to more specific points of criticism within the Schilder-Boeck’s larger theoretical scheme. As Melion has argued, Van Mander’s treatment of Gossart, Van Scorel, Van Heemskerck, and Floris echoes the “progressive scheme” in Vasari’s Lives.50 They are the paragons of Netherlandish antiquarianism: the artists from the Low Countries who went to Rome, confronted the art of the ancients, and returned home to pioneer a Netherlandish antiquarian manner. In Vasari’s scheme, artists from succeeding generations surpass their forbears. The biographies of the Netherlandish artists from Gossart to Floris offer a similarly progressive sequence. However, a comparison of Van Scorel’s and Van Heemskerck’s biographies reveals complexities within this general progress. While Van Mander’s telling of Van Heemskerck’s life indeed suggests his surpassing of Van Scorel in some ways, it privileges Van Scorel in others. Van Mander favors Van Scorel’s style (or “manner,” in Van Mander’s parlance) and describes ways in which Van Heemskerck’s Roman experience, which sparked his departure from Van Scorel’s style, compromised his art. Such expressions hold with the Schilder-Boeck’s overall historical agenda. Moreover, we also hear their echo in 20th century analyses of Van Heemskerck’s work.51 Van Mander’s description of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman period indicates that Rome adversely affected Van Heemskerck’s art. The author states that after Rome, Van Heemskerck “had altered his earlier way of working in the manner of Schoorel (sic.), but not, in the opinion of best painters, improved upon it.” Directly following, he has one of Van Heemskerck’s pupils parrot these sentiments to Van Heemskerck. Upon hearing that the “best painters” claimed that Van Heemskerck’s “earlier manner of painting after Schoorel was better than … afterwards when he had returned from Rome,” Van Heemskerck demurs: “son, [before I went to Rome] I knew not what I was making.”52 Following Van Heemskerck’s riposte, Van Mander offers a short, critical analysis of the painter’s “Drapers Altarpiece” [fig. 0.2],

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figure 0.2 Maarten van Heemskerck, Annunciation (“Drapers Altarpiece,” closed”), 1546–47, Object number, os I1-136d, oil on panel, 261.5 × 122.5 cm., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (In long-term use from the Royal Mauritshuis Cabinet of Paintings), photo by Margareta Svensson.

which he presents as a demonstration of “the difference” between Van Heemskerck’s manner before and after Rome.53 Van Mander describes the altarpiece in terms of its distractions. In the closed position, for example, we see an annunciation with a “strangely and richly decked out angel … who is reflected or mirrored by a smooth marble pavement.”54

Introduction

While van Mander does not offer direct criticism of the altarpiece’s architectural fantasie, his criticism of Van Heemskerck’s interest in painted architecture appears directly after his criticisms of the altarpiece. The Annunciation’s right distant background contains invented ruins combining motifs found in Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the unfinished St. Peter’s [cat. nos. 42 and 43], the Pantheon Cat. no. 43 [cat. no. 38], and the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16]. This prompts Van Mander’s assessment that Van Heemskerck’s “lavish pictures with many details” contradict Van Heemskerck’s own credo, “often in his mouth,” that “every painter who wants to thrive should avoid decoration and architecture.”55 Of course, the profusion of architectural fantasie in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre renders unlikely his espousal of avoiding it. The overwhelming visual evidence contradicting this puzzling claim recommends it as a literary device. Taken at face value, Van Cat. no. 38 Mander alleges that Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman practice contradicts his post-Roman theory. By having Van Heemskerck recommend avoiding decoration and architecture, but also laboring to point out that the artist made paintings displaying these elements copiously, the author has suggested that an unwitting Van Heemskerck did not know what he was making after Rome, not before. In a telling omission, the post-Roman painting by Van Heemskerck that receives the strongest praise from Van Mander – “easily the best painting of all there is to be seen following his return from Rome” – receives no linkage to Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, despite its reliance on them.56 For the charming, intimately scaled Triumph of Bacchus [fig. 3.4], Van Heemskerck culled its prominent display of a plethora Cat. no. 16 of motifs from his Roman drawings. This would seem to warrant Van Mander’s attention, but he makes no mention of the painting’s clear indebtedness to Van Heemskerck’s study in Rome. Van Mander also omits any direct discussion of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Roman ruins in landscape settings. This may seem puzzling in light of two of Het Schilder-Boeck’s most salient themes: attention to the finer points of drawing in the second chapter of his Book I, the Grondt or “Groundwork,” and a sustained argument for the importance of landscape throughout Het Schilder-Boeck.57 However, in the context of the Schilder-Boeck’s larger theoretical concerns, its sustained offering of alternatives to the authority of Vasari’s disegno, the specific ways in which Van Mander discounts Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings reveal his motives for doing so. We understand better Van Mander’s slight treatment of Van Heemskerck’s drawings by remembering that, in theory, the author privileges the painter who

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Cat. no. 47

Introduction

can paint directly onto the panel or canvas, with no dependency on drawings.58 In practice, however, Van Mander was certainly more than aware of the importance of drawings for the solutions on view in finished paintings. For example, he modeled the ruins for the backdrop of his Continence of Scipio [fig. 0.3] closely after those appearing in Van Heemskerck’s smaller drawing of the Baths of Caracalla [cat. no. 47]. In both images, a broken vault at left gives way to an arch through which we see more distant arches and other ruins. Further right, Van Mander’s ruinscape recedes to a series of circular buildings corresponding with Van Heemskerck’s rendering of the exterior of Santo Stefano Rotondo as it appears in the distance. Cornelis and Goltzius were no less inclined to mine Van Heemskerck’s corpus of Roman drawings. Cornelis derived his Disgracers figures from the falling figures in van Van Heemskerck’s Dangers of Human Ambition [fig. 6.17].59 These in turn are van Van Heemskerck’s ‘pictorial restorations’ of a sculpture fragment found among his Roman drawings, figures derived from his foreshortened drawing of the Belvedere Torso [fig. 0.4]. Goltzius later made prints of each of Cornelis’ Disgracers [fig. 0.5]. However, in the Schilder-Boeck’s broader theoretical universe, Van Mander values the intrinsic qualities of drawings, their display of technical virtuosity, and their importance

figure 0.3 Karel van Mander, Continence of Scipio, 1600, Object number SK-A-4690, oil on copper, 44 × 79 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Introduction figure 0.4 Maarten van Heemskerck, Belvedere Torso, 1532–c. 37, Inventory Number 79D2 63r, ink on paper, 133 × 210 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

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figure 0.5 Hendrick Goltzius, “Phaeton,” Four Disgracers, 1588, Registration number 1853,0312.236, ink on paper, diameter, 330 mm. (trimmed), Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

for the print medium. His choice to praise the technical aspect of Van Heemskerck’s drawings near the end of the biography is thus consistent with his near-obsessive meditation on technique in his general discussion of drawing in the Grondt. He praises them for their display of “precise hatching,” and “light, free” touch, but he does not specify if he is discussing Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome or his preparatory sketches for prints.60 The description’s combination of

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precision and spontaneity leaves the question open and maintains consistency with his pervasive argument that the practice of drawing is to be thought of in service to print.61 Finally, Van Mander’s discourse on landscape advocates for artists who focus on nature, not antiquity, when rendering the out-of-doors; Brueghel, Herri Met de Bles, Titian, and Muziano receive praise from Van Mander as paragons of landscape.62 By contrast, Van Heemskerck’s lack of interest in the natural landscape is apparent throughout the Berlin albums and the other drawings that remain from his Roman sojourn.63 Therefore, with pervasive subtlety, Van Mander’s biography of Van Heemskerck establishes a constricting starting-point for discourse on the artist. By suggesting that going to Rome was a catalyst for Van Heemskerck’s misguided departure from Van Scorel’s manner, Van Mander offers a tempered judgement of Van Heemskerck’s development of his own manner after Rome. He also implicates Van Heemskerck’s drawings in the development of this new, inferior post-Roman manner. The biography has had concomitant determining effects on Van Heemskerck studies. Where early modern art writers do not repeat Van Mander verbatim, we note a strong echo of his voice.64 The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw few discussions of Van Heemskerck’s paintings or his prints. No scholar related either body of work to his Roman drawings, which had received only archaeological analyses, identifications of the monuments they portray.65 Modern scholars have tended to perpetuate uncritically Van Mander’s claim of Van Heemskerck’s indebtedness to Van Scorel’s example. Such discursive machinations have compromised our perception of the originality in Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. Accordingly, specific omissions in the biography have also proven incipient in subsequent discourse on Van Heemskerck. For example, we continue to lack a nuanced understanding of what Van Heemskerck learned before Rome. Modern scholarship has perpetuated Van Mander’s lack of commentary on Van Heemskerck’s motives for drawing Rome. Likewise, the author’s discussion of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre lacks detailed attention to its indebtedness to the Roman drawings.66 Max Friedlaender was the first to suggest a pre-Roman identity for Van Heemskerck. He noted that Van Scorel was only three years older than Van Heemskerck and speculated that the Haarlem artist “was never Van Scorel’s apprentice in the proper sense.”67 However, Friedlaender did not pursue the implications in his insight, which is unfortunate. Doing so would have endowed the historicized Van Heemskerck with more control over his own pre-Roman

Introduction

development. Instead, Friedlaender’s analysis indicates the endurance of the terms by which Van Mander established Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman deficiencies. He measures Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre against Van Scorel’s and is even less forgiving of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman manner than Van Mander. Echoing Van Mander’s criticism of Van Heemskerck’s “inclination towards enriching ornament,” Friedlaender characterizes Van Heemskerck by emphasizing his “pursuit of grandeur” over restraint, his “clothes that cling to the body … as though they were themselves ornaments,” and his “noisy and blatant compositions.”68 Meanwhile, Friedlaender has precious little to say about Van Heemskerck’s drawings and his use of them in his post-Roman designs.69 In subsequent scholarship, paintings from the 1520s so close in style they could be either Van Scorel’s or Van Heemskerck’s have sparked discussions that have mostly reified Van Mander’s general portrayal of the pre-Roman Van Heemskerck as a Van Scorel pupil and imitator.70 Only somewhat recently have scholars begun the task of identifying Van Heemskerck’s hand in panels previously given by default to Van Scorel due to the older artist’s traditionally higher reputation. Unfortunately, none of these panels is securely datable to the years before Van Heemskerck entered Van Scorel’s workshop. Jefferson Harrison and others have given to Van Heemskerck paintings that we have traditionally thought were Van Scorel’s.71 Scholars have also attempted to parse their hands through scientific analyses.72 However, these modern studies, which give us more detailed information on Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman hand, do not explore the context or motivation for Van Heemskerck’s absorption of Van Scorel’s manner.73 Only Harrison and Rainhald Grosshans have examined the possibility that before Rome, Van Heemskerck possessed artistic sensibilities that extended beyond the scope of Van Scorel’s atelier.74 Still, no major study of Van Heemskerck’s Roman experience explores the possibility of Van Heemskerck’s indebtedness to Gossart, or the specific ways in which Van Scorel’s post-Roman studio practices might have shaped Van Heemskerck’s approach to Rome’s ruins.75 This particular repeated omission has left intact Van Mander’s simplistic notion that in Rome, Van Heemskerck simply followed a program that Van Scorel had already established.76 Thus, despite the relative scarcity and lack of variety of antiquities in Van Scorel’s post-Roman paintings, especially when compared to the abundance of antiquities in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman paintings and prints, no study has attempted to differentiate between their respective approaches to – or uses of – motifs after the antique. By stepping outside of the traditional, limited readings of

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Van Heemskerck’s relation to his pre-Roman milieu we can more properly assess the roots of his interest in drawing Rome’s antiquities and the effects of Rome on his art. In so doing, we are better able to situate his interest in the ruin more accurately over the course of his entire career.

Van Heemskerck’s Drawings and Memory

The relation of Van Heemskerck’s ruin imagery to early modern notions of memory is an expansive one that scholars have yet to acknowledge, which this book takes up.77 The ruin’s complex temporality is richly suggestive of memory’s supratemporality.78 Van Heemskerck’s frontispiece for his Clades Judaeae Gentis [fig. 8.4] series indicates his awareness of such associations. Cluttered with ruins, the print bears two portraits of Van Heemskerck – a portrait bust accompanied by text likening him to the ancient painter Apelles and an image of him drawing ruins as in Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1]. The base of the portrait bust bears an inscription describing ruins as reminders “from the past for the future.”79 Thus, the frontispiece’s juxtaposition of image and text suggests Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome’s ruins as vivid renderings of profound reminders of the passage of time, human achievement, and human error, abundant with myriad commemorative implications. Despite the obvious mnemonic charge of ruins in general and Van Heemskerck’s treatment of them in particular, we cannot be sure if the systems of artificial memory that evolved from antiquity into the early modern period motivated why or how he drew or reimagined Rome. Nor can we say with authority how or even if such “mnemotechnics” influenced the later reception of his ruin drawings. We know precious few specifics about Van Heemskerck’s intellectual life and we have no paper trail that leads conclusively to his direct and sustained engagement with mnemotechnics or any other aspect of the memory tradition. What we do know is that from the time Van Heemskerck assisted in Jan van Scorel’s workshop until his death, he was immersed in intellectually rigorous environments.80 Given the antiquarian bent of Van Heemskerck’s universe, its emphasis on knowing the past and producing new culture out of that past, a consciousness of broader, epochal forms of memory – cultural and historical – was doubtless an important and ongoing element of his discursive universe. Close looking at Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Roman ruins suggests that he worked from within a nuanced,

Introduction

critical consciousness of the relation of ruin imagery to memory and its productive counterpart, invention. Van Heemskerck’s Rome establishes broad lines of inquiry on the subject, with the hope of sparking further discussion. Scholarly developments suggest a lively interchange between early modern ideas about memory, ruins, and drawings. Seminal texts by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers have shown how varied and pervasive conceptions of memory were in ancient treatises such as De Memoria, Rhetorica Ad Herennium, De Oratore, and their medieval and early modern spawn, particularly the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.81 While thinkers from these periods differed on specific aspects of memory, they consistently indicated the fundamental dependence of recollections of the past upon notions of place (locus) – sometimes architecturally delineated – and images in the mind’s eye (imagines or phantasma) as iconic prompts for the classification, storage, and recollection of morally edifying knowledge.82 Yates and Carruthers also establish links between visual imagery from the late middle ages and the artificial memory systems described in memory treatises.83 Following their lead, Maria Fabricius Hansen has suggested that late medieval and early modern audiences looked specifically to images of ruins – not only in drawings like Van Heemskerck’s, but also in paintings and prints – as externalized imagines that served as reminders of specific loci, be they literary, historical, or actual.84 Just like ruins themselves, Hansen argued, images of ruins functioned as “places of contemplation of the past, and as such, places of memory.” Audiences could view such images as reminders “of the Fall and its consequences of death and oblivion.”85 Turning to drawing, David Rosand has shown that early modern artists regarded the act of drawing and the function of drawings as extending beyond the mechanics of artistry to include their cultivation of pictorial memory.86 By judiciously expanding the relation of memory to early modern imagery and artistic practices beyond the rigid rubric of artificial memory without dismissing it entirely, Hansen and Rosand remind us that in discussions of images, memory should be a subject of broader compass than we find in systematized mnemonic practices.87 Applying mnemotechnical systems to early modern drawings, prints, and paintings imposes false limitations on our interpretations of them. The critical awareness of artificial memory expressed by Albrecht Dürer and Desiderius Erasmus also suggests that we would be wise to think beyond such boundaries when considering Van Heemskerck’s ruin drawings in the context of memory.88

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Some recent scholarship addresses broader notions of memory in early modern cultural habits that promoted continuities with antiquity. Christopher Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction redresses the misapplication of the prevailing Italo-centric Renaissance paradigm to early modern German works that never did fit within the parameters of the traditional canon.89 Wood’s book thus challenges the perception of distance from the antique past in German antiquarian productions.90 For Wood, Michael Wolgemut’s and Albrecht Dürer’s continuation of Andrea Mantegna’s “Calliope” from his so-called Tarocchi embeds a temporal complex in which past and present fold onto one another. For Wolgemut and Dürer, Mantegna’s images served as “reliable stand-ins for antique works.”91 Wood explains such northern notions of antiquity as the result of the Holy Roman empire’s centuries-long inheritance and perpetuation of ancient Roman imperial authority. Such an interpretive scheme eviscerates traditional notions of memory’s necessity, even in antiquarian works of art that seemingly refer to the past, because it posits no perceived distance between past and present in maker or audience. Wood’s collaboration with Alexander Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance, argues similarly while focusing more on Italian productions.92 Both books, but especially the latter, also yoke pastness and temporality to early modern notions of artistic agency and identity. Creative acts embedding a continuity with the past, which the authors call “substitutions,” exist alongside – and even within – performative works, which distinguish themselves from past works in a linear progression of self-conscious development. For example, they describe the conception and construction of the temporary tegurio for St. Peter’s during its transition from old to new as Bramante’s invention, but also as “the capsule where the basilica’s ritual life continued uninterrupted.”93 Aside from their analysis of Bramante’s tegurio, Wood and Nagel avoid the ruin as a form of early modern temporality and Van Heemskerck as a purveyor of ruin images evoking several forms of memory. The ruin problematizes their interpretive model. As survivals of past productions, ruins are suggestive of continuity. However, as accruals of erasures, they embody temporal distance. In their fragmented state, the ruined remains of the past have not yet been subject to substitution while also being richly suggestive of a substitutive mode that inevitably produces an infinite range of authorial performances. Simultaneously foregrounding their pastness and their potential for future invention, ruins call attention to memory and imagination. As such, they exist outside of the system of seamless continuities Wood

Introduction

and Nagel identify. As an artist so intent on proclaiming his authorship, it is appropriate that Van Heemskerck gravitated towards the ruin and developed a crucial element of his pictorial idiom out of conspicuous inventions with it. As I point out in chapter 7, with his Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, Van Heemskerck uses the ruin and his own biography to situate his artistic identity within the ancient Roman past, the recent past, and the viewer’s consciousness of that relation. To work our way into the relation of Van Heemskerck’s Roman ruin drawings to early modern notions of memory, we begin by noting what is manifest; his entire corpus de facto comprises an accretion of cultural memory simply because it portrays the vestiges of antiquity. The repetition during the 1530s of the famous phrase “ROMA QVANTA FVIT IPSA RVINA DOCET” (“how great Rome was, as its ruins show”) – which appears in the upper margin of a drawing of the Palatine by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus [fig. 0.6] and on the ruins portrayed on the frontispiece to Sebastiano Serlio’s Terzo Libro – indicates the currency during the years when Van Heemskerck was drawing in Rome of the perception that ruins and cultural memory are linked. The proclamation indicates ruins as a universal reminder of ancient Rome’s immeasurable instructiveness for human history. The famous letter to Leo X in Raphael’s voice, likely the product of a collaboration between Raphael and Castiglione, puts a finer point on such notions by stating that “studying what may still be seen amid the ruins of Rome” buttresses against forgetting the past and, consequently, making the “feeble judgment” that ancient Rome’s achievements were “more likely to be fable than fact.”94 Further on, Raphael becomes even more specific about how to preserve the memory of the past where he voices his intention to “make a drawing of ancient Rome,” which will ensure that Leo “shall no longer be left in ignorance” of ancient Roman achievement.95 Without Rome’s ruins, then, we only have oblivion: the past no longer lies before us in our present and we are therefore unable to learn from the ancients, let alone match their achievements. Moreover, without images of ruins, we run the risk of losing what is left of the past forever. Surely, the unprecedented near-encyclopedic quantity of ruin drawings in Van Heemskerck’s Roman oeuvre suggests that the preservative utility in rendering ruins was not lost on him. He must have thought the corpus of drawings he was in the process of amassing was, among other things, a collection of images that could someday ensure against the total loss of the instructive memories that Rome’s

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figure 0.6 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Ruins on the Palatine, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 87v, ink on paper, 196 × 147 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

crumbling capitals, columns, and cornices had to offer. His drawings of monuments that are no longer extant, for example, express their full weight as ricordi. We come to his vedute showing the Trofei di Mario [cat. no. 31], Septizonium [e.g., cat. nos. 10, 13, 23, 24, and 25], Frontespizio di Nerone [cat. nos. 27 and 28], and Bramante’s St. Peter’s [cat. nos. 41–44] in a lapsed state of construction because, at the very least, they supply us with simulacra of how these now vanished or irrevocably altered buildings once appeared. What makes Van Heemskerck’s renderings of Rome’s ruins exceptionally relevant to memory in early modern thought is his deployment of conspicuous pictorial strategies to express two themes: ruinous decay over the course of millennia and the sensation of being amidst the ruins portrayed. By deliberately highlighting these themes and bringing them into contact with one another, Van Heemskerck

Introduction

made his drawings vivid, thus endowing his ruin drawings with a powerful, multivalent mnemonic charge. His nearly hyperbolic evocations of ruinous decay visualize the passage of time. They suggest nature’s slow, inevitable consumption of what is left of the vestiges of the ancient past. Thus, while prompting viewer’s memories by reminding them of how ruins bring us into proximity with distant pasts, they visualize the inextricable bond between past, present, and future. By the same token, Van Heemskerck’s forceful suggestion to viewers that they imagine themselves among Rome’s ancient exalted ruins serves as a signal to them to remember, associate, and imagine the various forms of knowledge they possessed in the related fields of art, its making and unmaking, Roman topography, history, and antiquity. In some of Van Heemskerck’s Roman ruin drawings, these devices are so emphatic that they trigger other mnemonically relevant associations: his process of conceiving and executing his drawings, the apparent dialogue between his artistic vision of the Eternal City and Rome’s topography, and his role as mediator between the Eternal City and his audience’s memory of it. Finally, such contemplations could help viewers achieve one of the most edifying aspects of memory according to Aristotle: the relating of one’s own experiences to shared ideas and events extending beyond the scope of the individual to approaching the universal.96 The usefulness of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings for his post-Roman oeuvre reveals his fascination with the Eternal City’s antiquities and their centrality for a pictorial language after the antique; but it also indicates much more. His interest in images of ruination suggests his recognition of the ruin’s capacity as a potent pictorial signifier. The comprehensive drawing process Van Heemskerck undertook in Rome – returning to the same site more than once, selecting different vantage points and distances, varying his technique – enabled his cultivation of a sophisticated pictorial language of the ruin. It also fostered his historical understanding of the ruin’s relation to his own times – a “ruin memory,” so to speak – that would allow his post-Roman istorie to challenge the limits of linear temporality. His ability to make rhetorical use of the ruin, whether portrayed in a ruined or reconstituted state, put Van Heemskerck in the vanguard of mid-sixteenth century European visual culture.

Van Heemskerck and the Cult of Ruins

The middle decades of the sixteenth century witnessed the full flowering in European visual culture of what we should call the “cult of

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ruins,” interest in the production and consumption of the ruin as a compelling, meaningful visual image. We find Van Heemskerck’s art in the thick of this phenomenon. The cult of ruins took root in Trecento Italy. In a letter of 1337, Petrarch’s high praise for ancient Rome’s remains, specifically his evocation of Roman space via a perambulating enumeration of the historical memories they embody, is prescient of the consciousness of the ruin that would prevail in the sixteenth century.97 Upon the papacy’s fraught return to Rome from Avignon in the Quattrocento, humanists expressed profound dismay at the sight of Rome’s ruins. Cristoforo Landino, for example, imagined Augustus distraught after returning to Rome from the hereafter and being unable to recognize his own monuments among city’s ruins, lost as they were to the ravages of time.98 A heightened archeological fixation on the city’s ruins in Raphael’s Rome gave way to a new rhetorical urgency and gravitas for ruins after the Sack of 1527. Leonard Barkan has highlighted this historical node of interest in historical sculptural fragments among Italian artists and humanists.99 It is easy to cast Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings as having arisen from these Italian circumstances, two centuries in development, culminating in the years leading up to the time of his Roman visit. However, while Van Heemskerck’s particular brand of ruin imagery is especially indebted to approaches to the Roman ambient he saw in the work of Raphael’s exponents and also owes a great deal to northern examples, it ultimately stands as his own unique pictorial development. His Roman drawings and post-Roman prints and paintings, moreover, helped to advance several pictorial categories that would become prominent during the mature and late phases of his career and after his lifetime. These include the ruin vedute or “view,” ruin fantasia or capriccio, and the use of ruins in the backdrops of prints and paintings as allusive, rhetorical historical markers. Many examples show Van Heemskerck drawing Rome in a mode that anticipates the Roman vedute, emergent in middle decades of the sixteenth century. The vedute is a category of image that crystallized in the mid-Cinquecento in part due to Van Heemskerck’s efforts. We find early glimmerings of the vedute’s emergence in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Barberini Codex (last quarter of the Quattrocento).100 There is no question of the Codex’s status as a vast record of Rome’s topography in its own right. Sangallo’s primary representational mode, however, was architectural; the Codex’s preponderance of plans and elevations is more prescient of the imagery in

Introduction

the mid-sixteenth century treatises by Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio than it is of the pictorial concerns we see Van Heemskerck explore in his corpus of Roman drawings. Sangallo did indeed take a pictorial approach to rendering the city’s ancient architectural aspect with some perspective views. These are only occasional, however, appearing on the margins of only a handful of sheets.101 The celebrated Codex Escurialensis [figs. 4.5, 4.6, and 4.8], which probably dates from the first quarter of the Cinquecento, shows an interest in Roman topography that expresses itself in pictorial categories closer to those we see in Van Heemskerck’s drawings: capital and cornice studies, single buildings or parts of buildings in perspective or elevation, and interiors.102 But a number of artists are probably responsible for the drawings in the codex.103 Moreover, it contains only fourteen drawings that we can reasonably call “views,” or vedute of the city. Of Van Heemskerck’s predecessors and contemporaries, a few artists in Rome before and during the period of his stay appear to have pursued the ancient Roman ruin landscape with a vigor and diligence comparable to his: Jan Gossart and Jan van Scorel, Sienese painter/architect Baldassare Peruzzi, Giorgio Vasari, Francesco Salviati, and Van Heemskerck’s fellow Netherlander and travel companion Hermannus Posthumus. Peruzzi left behind a large, impressive corpus of drawings inspired by Rome’s ruined antiquities.104 But most of his drawings are like Sangallo’s: plans and reconstructions, drawings that functioned architecturally rather than pictorially. A tantalizing few show Peruzzi in an inventive mode, reconstituting or reconfiguring Rome for the purposes of designing stage backdrops [e.g., fig. 3.6].105 Such works appear to have been important for Van Heemskerck’s own composition of invented backdrops in his prints. In his Vite, Vasari makes boisterous claims of his drawing explorations of Rome with Francesco Salviati. However, we have no topographical drawings of Rome by Vasari. Given Vasari’s claims and Salviati’s well-earned reputation as a voracious copyist, it is surprising that we also lack extant examples of the Roman landscape by his hand.106 Although Van Heemskerck was not the first Netherlandish artist to go to Rome and draw its antiquities, he solidified the ruin’s status as a crucial object of Netherlandish artistic pursuit. Jan Gossart’s keen interest in the Colosseum’s crags and vegetal onset – on display in his famed drawing of the Colosseum [fig. 1.4] – finds little followthrough in his post-Roman oeuvre.107 This is also true of the relation

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between Van Scorel’s exquisite pen and ink drawing of ruins in Bethlehem [fig. 2.6] and his own post-Roman oeuvre; as we shall see in chapter 2, where ruins do appear in paintings by Van Scorel and his followers, they often appear as generically formulated [e.g., fig. 2.8]. Ruins do not appear to have been an object of his pictorial fixation. This lack of emphasis on ruins in the work Van Heemskerck’s Netherlandish predecessors to Rome belies the emergence in 1520 of Roman ruins from the sea off the shore of Brittenburg. Given the recently identified imperative – especially for Gossart – to cultivate an antiquarian manner according to local concerns, one would expect more ruin imagery than we see in either painter’s work. Among Italians and Netherlanders alike, only the drawings of Roman topography attributed to ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus compare favorably with Van Heemskerck’s in quantity and quality.108 Thanks to Nicole Dacos’s pioneering dedication to the study of Netherlandish artists in Rome, we know that Posthumus was in the Eternal City with Van Heemskerck, even accompanying him and the young Amsterdam painter, Lambert Sustris (c. 1515– 1584), to the Domus Aurea.109 However, if current attributions are correct, Posthumus’s interest in decorative motifs eclipsed his interest in ruins. Moreover, his drawings of Rome’s ruins do not evince the same level of deliberation that Van Heemskerck exercised; in his medium-range panoramic views [e.g., fig. 4.2] Posthumus did not always choose carefully the vantage point he portrayed. In places, the buildings he has drawn obscure one another. Remarkably, this is an exceedingly rare pictorial problem in Van Heemskerck’s drawings, even though he only rarely took license with the topography before him. Nor did Posthumus push the limitations of his media to communicate the diverse visual language on display in Rome’s topography. Unlike Van Heemskerck, who at the very least dabbled in – and often fully engaged with – a notable medial variety in his Roman drawings, Posthumus drew Rome’s ruins almost exclusively with the same pen and ink wash technique.110 Finally, we have no prolific output of finished ruin imagery by him, only his stunning Tempus Edax Rerum painting of 1536 [fig. 3.7].111 The years following Van Heemskerck’s time in Rome witnessed an increasingly steady flow of important artists there. In addition to predecessors Gossart and Van Scorel, and companions Posthumus and Sustris, others who made their way to Rome during 1530s, 40s, and 50s include Mechelen painter Michiel Coxcie (1499–1592), Brussels painter and weaver Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502–50), Liège’s

Introduction

Lambert Lombard (1505–66), and Antwerp’s Frans Floris (1517–70), Hieronymus Cock (1518–70), and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–69). It would not be until the young Rembrandt notoriously proclaimed the Italian journey inessential that any major painter from the Low Countries questioned the importance of study there. It should come as no surprise, then, that the late 1540s and early 1550s witnessed a flurry of activity signaling a coalescence of Netherlandish antiquarianism. Several events of varying degrees of proximity to Van Heemskerck played their part. In 1549, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) staged a triumphal entry into the Netherlands to introduce Philip II, his son and heir, to his future Netherlandish subjects. Hieronymus Cock’s publication of prints of Roman ruins in 1551 was a rousing success. And in 1552, Abraham Ortelius published a map and plan of the Caligulan castle at Brittenburg, which had once again emerged from the sea. While all of Van Heemskerck’s predecessors and contemporaries returned from Rome with heightened ability to engage local antiquarian concerns, he and Hieronymus Cock were the most emphatically interested in the production of ruin imagery, in collaboration and separately. We cannot overlook the significance of Cock’s journey to Rome. There is some question about its timing, but it is likeliest to have occurred in the late 1540s.112 In Rome, Cock may have made contact with the works of Italian and French artists and publishers who were instrumental in developing the ruin vedute. Antonio Salamanca (1479–1562) had established himself as a publisher in Rome as early as the 1520s, but did not begin publishing prints until the mid-1540s. Salamanca’s prints of Roman vedute were often reproductions of works by French engravers, Nicolas Beatrizet (1507–1565) and Antoine Lafréry (1512–1577), both of whom had established himself in Rome by the mid-1540s. Cock’s awareness of a percolating interest in views of Rome’s ruins doubtless fueled his own publishing pursuits upon his return to the Netherlands. By 1550, he had begun publishing prints of Roman ruins, likely with Van Heemskerck’s assistance in the form of some of his Roman ruin drawings [e.g., figs. 0.1, 7.13–7.15]. Meanwhile, artists of the Fontainebleau school, especially Antwerpian import Leonard Thiry (1490–1550), were also instrumental in developing the ruin’s pictorial potential through the publication of ruin fantasie. Thiry’s imaginative ruinscape compositions formed the basis for a small “book” of imagined ruin prints. Etched by Leon Davent or Virgil Solis, these appeared posthumously on Jacques

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Androuet du Cerceau’s imprint in 1550.113 Unlike Van Heemskerck’s prints, Thiry’s compositions do not present the ruin as a signifying object in relation to a narrative. However, Thiry portrays the ruin as a product of the imagination, an object of fixation for artists, who always draw intently before the ruins [e.g., fig. 7.8]. As we shall see in chapter 7, Thiry’s repeated use of this motif is relatable to Van Heemskerck’s own pointed use of it in his self-portraiture. Within this veritable torrent of mid-century ruin imagery, Van Heemskerck’s is notable for its seminal status, inventiveness, pictorial intelligence, and rhetorical potency.



Part 1 Imagining the Eternal: Maarten van Heemskerck Before Rome

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Introduction Maarten van Heemskerck’s artistic development before Rome is crucial for understanding his artistic pursuits while in Rome and for interpreting the Roman journey as the pivotal event in his artistic life. However, the pre-Roman Van Heemskerck is elusive. Few paintings by him dating to before his Roman journey have come down to us. Nor do we have pre-Roman drawings from his hand. We also have insufficient numbers of Roman drawings by Van Heemskerck’s Netherlandish predecessors to Rome, Jan Gossart and Van Heemskerck’s last and most renowned workshop master, Jan Van Scorel. Thus, the relation between Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman milieu and his approach to drawing the Eternal City’s antiquities has remained murky. As we have seen, scholars have accepted uncritically biographer Karel Van Mander’s attribution of Van Heemskerck’s Roman phase to the example of Jan van Scorel. Before clarifying the nature of Van Heemskerck’s debt to Van Scorel, it behooves us to situate his pre-Roman phase within the broader context of Netherlandish antiquarianism in the early sixteenth century. Doing so establishes our understanding of Van Heemskerck’s pictorial intelligence before Rome and the impact of his early artistic training on his pursuits in Rome. Such an approach also reveals the critical nature of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawing program and his enrichment of the Netherlandish pictorial vocabulary with a vast array of motifs after the antique based on his exhaustive study of Rome’s ruins.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_003

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The Possibility of a pre-Roman Maarten van Heemskerck

Collection, Invention, and Netherlandish Antiquity c. 1510–25

Though we know little about the young Maarten van Heemskerck’s early training, we know he was ready to take up the brush by the mid-1510s. The burgeoning Netherlandish antiquarianism he inherited during these formative years of his artistry was paleographic, archaeological, and acquisitive to greatly varied effects. In the intellectual life of the Low Countries, the Adages by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) stands as a literary exemplum of these pursuits.1 From a range of sources, the Rotterdam humanist brought together and annotated a collection of ancient Greek and Latin proverbs – literary antiquities, as it were. First published in 1500, the Adages accrued more sayings over several subsequent editions, many of which appeared during the first three decades of the sixteenth century, as Van Heemskerck matured, likely while attending Latin school.2 Erasmus crafted many of his annotations to appeal to his Netherlandish audience by relating the ancient sayings to phrases familiar in the parlance of the Low Countries. The Netherlandish antiquarian art of the same period was not so different. It resulted from a resourceful blending of familiar northern motifs with those traceable to a variety of sources from antiquity and contemporary Italian art and architecture after the antique. For example, many Netherlandish paintings after the antique presented their enriched pictorial vocabularies within a veneer of Eyckian realism that facilitated their synthetic nature and announced their Netherlandish appeal.3 This means of inventing new antiquities had taken hold as Van Heemskerck began the pursuit of his painting career. Jan Gossart was the first artist from the Low Countries to translate the visual language in Rome’s sculptural and architectural antiquities into the pictorial realm for an audience of Netherlandish viewers. Gossart went to Rome with his eventual patron Philip II of Burgundy, Bishop of Utrecht, as part of Margaret of Austria’s diplomatic retinue to Julius II della Rovere (1443–1513). His Roman drawings, post-Roman oeuvre, and written accounts of his art from

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_004

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early modern to the present combine to suggest the formidable impact of Rome’s sculptural antiquities on the figures he subsequently painted.4 By the same token, some aspects of Gossart’s post-Roman oeuvre elucidate his development of an authoritative Netherlandish antique manner out of sources extending beyond his exploration of Rome’s sculptural and architectural riches. Gossart also looked to the antiquarian art of his contemporaries, antique literary sources, and even numismatics to broaden and deepen the capacity of his pictures to generate meaning via references to the deep past. His ingenious approach to making art exemplifies the antiquarianism that flourished during Van Heemskerck’s artistic nascence. The prime painted example of this emergent Netherlandish antiquarianism is Gossart’s richly appointed Neptune and Amphitrite [fig. 1.1]. He conceived the painting as part of the decorative program for Philip’s new palace in the city of Souburg (modern Middleburg) in the northern province of Zeeland. As the only surviving painting from Philip’s palace project, Neptune and Amphitrite has necessarily functioned for scholars as a metonym of the palace’s entire decorative program.5 Marisa Bass has argued convincingly for its status as a new antiquity promoting Philip’s antiquarian agenda for a local audience.6 For example, in addition to the painting’s portrayal of sea deities, which aligns it with Zeeland’s watery topography, the conch shell covering Amphitrite’s genitals could have reminded thoughtful viewers of local ancient Roman lore; Suetonius tells us that Caligula commanded his army to collect shells from Brittenburg’s shore as “spoils of the sea” for his aborted conquest of Britannia, which the crazed emperor disingenuously deemed “victorious.”7 Our main concerns here are Neptune and Amphitrite’s status as the product of Gossart’s visit to Rome and its referential nature. The painting demonstrates Gossart’s engagement with Rome’s thriving antiquarian collecting culture. Gossart’s approach to Rome’s collections illuminates Van Heemskerck’s later choice to pursue them. Indeed, his role as the artist in Margaret of Austria’s diplomatic delegation to Julius II gave him virtually unlimited access to earlier versions of some of the collections that Van Heemskerck would draw in the 1530s. We know, for example, that Gossart visited the Capitoline collection, where he made his famous drawing of the Spinario.8 He did not produce drawings of collections portraying their manner of display as Van Heemskerck later did [cat. nos. 61–68]. However, while his extant Roman drawings are few in number, their careful finish reveals his long hours spent in Rome’s collection environments, recording and absorbing the new forms before him. Gossart

The Possibility of a pre-Roman Maarten van Heemskerck

gave diligent attention to the rendering of each part, in a manner akin to the technique on view in his drawing of the Colosseum [fig. 1.4]. Moreover, Gossart and Philip visited the Vatican while Julius was acquiring sculptures for the Belvedere. Philip’s chief court humanist, Gerardus Geldenhouwer (1482–1542) alleges that Julius offered Philip five antiquities to take home with him to Zeeland, but that Philip only took two. One was of Caesar and the other of Hadrian.9 We have never been able to verify Geldenhouwer’s claim because the material remains of the transaction he describes are unknown. However, whether true or not, that Geldenhouwer felt compelled to put such a claim on the record provides compelling evidence of the Netherlandish thirst for antiquity’s roots in visits to Rome’s sculpture collections and the sanction of its most prestigious and powerful collector. Thus, by the second decade of the sixteenth century when the young Van Heemskerck was beginning to paint, the Roman collection’s role in fostering the Netherlandish interest in antiquity was well established as a central aspect of Netherlandish visual culture. Drawing in Rome’s sculpture collections and navigating the city’s energetic collecting culture endowed Gossart with a command of antique sculpture that enabled him to imbue Neptune and Amphitrite [fig. 1.1] with a multivalent appeal to viewing memory. In the context of a palatial decorative program, the sculptural qualities of the figures brought artist’s and patron’s perpetuation of the knowledge of antiquity to the fore. Posed after the antique in contrapposto, bearing larger-than-life proportions and carefully modeled flesh with a luminescent, reflective sheen, Gossart’s sea-deities are the most evocative of antique sculpture in his entire oeuvre. Yet, the artist was careful to include details endowing the figures with animated warmth. Amphitrite’s tresses of lustrous hair fall spontaneously onto her shoulders; the gentle clasp of the figures’ left hands in an unusual position over Amphitrite’s left shoulder reads as a temporarily held entanglement. The figures thus embody a paragone for painting over sculpture; fashioned from the hand of the consummate Netherlandish painter who has mastered the Eyckian mode and antiquity, Neptune and Amphitrite’s painted figures embody their medium’s ability to subsume sculpture into a combinative mimesis via their maker’s ingegno. Further, the painting’s composition bears comparison to earlier images by Albrecht Dürer and Jacopo de’Barbari, the latter of whom Philip also called to work on his palace’s decorative program; for the composition of the painting’s figures, Gossart was likely eager to revise the figuration in earlier prints of Adam and Eve by Albrecht

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figure 1.1 Jan Gossart, Neptune and Amphitrite, 1516, Inventory Number 648, oil on oak, 188 × 124 cm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

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figure 1.2 Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, Object Number RP-P0OB-1155, ink on paper, 251 × 192 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Dürer [fig. 1.2] and Mars and Venus by Jacopo [fig. 1.3] according to his own vision.10 The trio of images evinces how Dürer’s famous print of Adam and Eve – the debt of its figures to the Apollo Belvedere and the Medici Venus apparent – functioned seminally for northern artists by bodying forth a template for translating antique sculptures into other pictorial contexts. The legs of the figures in all three images stand in nearly identical contrapposto, suggesting Gossart’s close study of both earlier figural compositions. Like Dürer’s figure of Adam, who reaches back with his right arm to grasp at a branch, Gossart’s Neptune hold his triton in the same pose. Likewise, Jacopo’s Mars carries a spear cocked at the same angle as the triton that Gossart’s Neptune holds. In both the Gossart painting and the de’ Barbari print, the

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figure 1.3 Jacopo de’ Barbari, Mars and Venus, 1509–10, Object Number RP-P-OB-1859, ink on paper, 292 × 178 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

attribute provides a compositional complement to the figure’s contrapposto. Further, like Jacopo, Gossart has put his couple in a close, intimate relationship. The male figure reaches around the back of the female in a half embrace. As Gossart’s figures clasp hands, Jacopo’s nuzzle faces. Clearly, while Gossart’s painting is in conversation with these sources, he was not entirely dependent upon either. The painting’s illusionistic niche suggests Gossart’s and Philip’s interest in Rome’s architecture, Vitruvian architectural theory, and their engagement with the city’s antiquarian collecting culture. Comprised of a frieze and fluted columns, the fictive space the deities occupy reinvents the niches and loggias of the collection spaces that Gossart and Philip saw in Rome. In the minds of some viewers, the painting’s suggestion of a sculptural niche would doubtless

The Possibility of a pre-Roman Maarten van Heemskerck

reinforce its overall suggestion that Gossart painted his new antiquities after carefully observing real antique sculpture. Moreover, the architectural details of Gossart’s niche are not merely generic motifs after the antique. Ariane Mensger has shown that for the egg-anddart capitals of the painting’s columns and the triglyphs and bull’shead metopes of the niche’s frieze, Gossart combined images from the copy of Fra Giocondo’s illustrated edition of Vitruvius that Philip acquired while in Rome.11 Thus, the painted setting of Neptune and Amphitrite is more than an embodiment of authenticity all’antica. Philip owned a copy of a rare illustrated edition of Vitruvius. Given Neptune and Amphitrite’s status as a decorative element for Philip’s castle, perhaps in a room housing his collection, its combination of the visual language of sculptural display and ancient Roman architecture also conveys Philip’s collecting prowess and erudition, his possession and perpetuation – his mastery – of the memory of antiquity. The painting’s inventive combination of antiquarian elements produces an original effect that also makes Gossart’s antiquarian ingegno clear to knowledgeable viewers. The multivalent mode of antiquarianism in Neptune and Amphitrite is prescient of the way images by Van Heemskerck generated meaning. However, this painting’s combination of sources is relatively limited compared to the broader range of materials Gossart and his contemporaries used. For example, the invented pilasters in Gossart’s Vienna St. Luke contain grotteschi revealing his study of the decorations in Nero’s domus aurea, Filippino Lippi’s paintings in the Carafa Chapel of Rome’s Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, or both.12 The pilasters also contain profile portrait busts suggesting Gossart’s observation of ancient Roman coins. Thanks in large part to Gossart’s and Philip’s prodigious example, a richly varied figural, architectural, and decorative vocabulary after the antique gained traction in the Low Countries. Moreover, by the late 1510s and early 20s, the importation of contemporary Italian works of art to the Netherlands had also contributed to the growth of the Netherlandish vocabulary of motifs after the antique. Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna was probably in the Low Countries by as early as 1506.13 Italian tapestry designers, none more renowned than Raphael, were sending their cartoons to Brussels for weaving.14 Italian prints also circulated north. Thus, artists who had not been to Rome such as Dirck Vellert (1480–1547), Bernard Van Orley (1487/91– 1541), and Lucas van Leyden (1494–1533) received examples of recent developments in Italian art. Despite not having sojourned to Italy, these artists were instrumental in furthering Netherlandish

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antiquarianism’s visual aspect during the 1510s and 20s. They may have, moreover, comprised as important an example for the young Van Heemskerck as those who had been to Rome; their works resulted from impressive creativity with the motifs after the antique that did find their way north into Netherlandish workshops. At the height of his powers from the 1510s through 30s, the era of Van Heemskerck’s earliest career pursuits, Bernard Van Orley stands as perhaps the most important example of an antiquarian artist from the Low Countries who did not go to Rome. It seems, rather, that Roman art of the highest order came to him. As one of the leading weavers working in Brussels, first under Pieter Coecke Van Aelst and then independently, Van Orley was privy to Italian tapestry designs that came to the Brabantine capital for execution. He filled his paintings with inventive architectural motifs indebted in part to antiquity for their columns, capitals, volutes, and pediments. He was especially adept at devising ornate baldachins all’antica for his devotional paintings of saints, the Virgin and child, and the Holy Family. Van Orley’s monumental Thomas and Matthias Altarpiece of 1515 and his Bruges Madonna and Child of the same year are two excellent examples among many of his use of exquisitely painted architecture inspired by antiquity. However, Van Orley’s classicizing vocabulary notwithstanding, he combined these fundamental elements with motifs more closely associated with the prevailing northern European decorative vocabulary: the filigrees, ogees, and quatrefoils of Gothic architecture, much of which he burnished in gold to signify the divine.15 There is no question that Gossart’s Roman journey, his visits to Roman collections, and his subsequent antiquarian inventions held importance for Van Heemskerck’s generation of artists. The inventive response to the influx into the Netherlands of Italian art from artists such as Van Orley also provided an important native example. Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre – enriched with variety as it is – suggests that the variety and invention in their art encouraged the encyclopedic consciousness that he would soon cultivate in Rome. The mid-1520s witnessed Jan van Scorel’s return from Rome, where he had served as Keeper of Antiquities under Dutch Pope Adrian VI. With the emergence of Van Scorel’s post-Roman art in Haarlem, Rome gained even greater primacy in the fashioning of art appealing to Netherlandish antiquarian audiences. It also provided a more immediate example for Van Heemskerck. Like Gossart, Van Scorel was able to visit Rome’s collections. Through his Vatican post, he had unlimited access to perhaps the finest collection of antiquities anywhere in

figure 1.4 Jan Gossart, Colosseum, 1508–09, Inventory number 12.918, ink and black chalk on paper, 202 × 268 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

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Europe. However, by the 1520s, the collections he visited were further developed than they had been during Gossart’s visit. Likewise, Van Scorel had been in Rome after Michelangelo completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Raphael finished his Vatican masterpieces.16 Accordingly, Van Scorel’s post-Roman paintings reflect the High Renaissance approach he had observed in those paintings. They are less emphatically decorative than the art of his compatriot antiquarian predecessors. However, none of the artists in the Netherlandish antiquarian milieu of the 1510s and 20s produced work suggesting their cultivation of a nuanced conceptual space for the ruin, not even Van Scorel, despite Van Mander’s claim that Van Scorel “copied after all antique things, as much after statues and ruins as the art-full paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo.”17 An examination of the ruin’s standing during the years of Van Heemskerck’s training provides a higher resolution view of his pre-Roman milieu.

The Status of the Ruin in Netherlandish Visual Culture c. 1510–25

Jan Gossart’s sumptuous drawing of the Colosseum’s ruined side [fig. 1.4] embodies perfectly the introduction of ancient Roman ruin imagery to the Netherlands during the years of Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman phase. In response to seeing Rome’s most famous ruin during his Roman journey (1508–09) Gossart executed a painstakingly worked description of the colossal amphitheater. While his tour de force rendering presents the amphitheater and its ornamental vocabulary as objects of reverence and intensive fixation, its presentation of the building’s emphatically ruined aspect did not carry substantially into his post-Roman paintings or prints. The drawing is distinctly Netherlandish in the meticulousness of its rendering, analogous to Jan van Eyck’s seminal detailing of surface textures, which was by then a hallmark of Netherlandish painting.18 Capitals, dentils, moldings, and rhythmic layers of arches appear with deliberate clarity, conveying Gossart’s earnestness in cataloging the building’s parts more than the whole amphitheater’s massive carriage. However, even as a record of Gossart’s response to the building, it also visualized a compelling memory for Netherlandish viewers who had visited the Eternal City, especially Philip, Geldenhouwer, and the elites he accompanied there in Margaret of Austria’s entourage.19 By the same token, the drawing must have provided an image of marvel for those in Philip’s broader circle of Netherlandish cultural elite and

The Possibility of a pre-Roman Maarten van Heemskerck

those who had never been to Rome. Sadly, while we have a precious few drawings of Rome’s antiquities from Gossart’s hand, we have no other drawings of ruins by him. In fact, Gossart’s drawing of the Colosseum is the sole extant drawing of a Roman ruin by a Netherlander before Van Heemskerck. The paucity of extant ruin drawings by Van Heemskerck’s most important forebears may be due in part to the attrition of their Roman wanderjahr sketchbooks. We must grant the possibility that these corpuses of drawings were initially as abundant with ruinscapes as Van Heemskerck’s later would be. However, with no way of proving this, we cannot assume it. We must also grant the possibility that we have so few drawings of ruins by Gossart and Van Scorel because they did not draw in Rome extensively enough to form a bulwark against the losses that inevitably accrue over time. Topographical elements all’antica in paintings and prints by Gossart, Van Scorel, and their associates suggest that their attention to Roman ruins in landscape settings was not intensive, varied, or inventive enough to verify that they produced oeuvres of ruin drawings as expansive as Van Heemskerck’s. It is thus likely that Van Heemskerck had very little nearby that could have served as sources for emulation.20 By the 1520s, the wave of antiquarianism that Gossart spearheaded had indelibly altered the look of Netherlandish art. However, the prints and paintings of Netherlandish antiquarian artists did not include frequent appearances of ruins. This may seem somewhat surprising, especially after 1520, when the remains of an ancient Roman military encampment commissioned by Caligula – the so-called ruins of Brittenburg – emerged off the north shore within walking distance of Leiden. Brittenburg’s appearance fed the Netherlandish desire for a direct connection to Roman antiquity. The appearance of a bona fide Roman antiquity on Netherlandish soil validated the local rejuvenation and re-formulation of a collectively held memory of a Batavian past, a continuity of native Netherlandish and Roman antiquity. Aged 22 at the time when the ruin appeared, Van Heemskerck was doubtless aware of its discovery. It was a well-known event that occurred only 35 miles south of the town of Heemskerck, where Maarten spent his youth, 20 miles north of Delft, where he may have been working in 1520, and 30 miles south of Haarlem, where he would eventually live and work before and after Rome. Leiden nobleman and friend to Philip, Jan II of Wassenaer (1483– 1523), sponsored an archeological exploration of the site. Alas, the substructures bore no evidence of a previously magnificent edifice. No fallen capitals, broken cornices, or fragmented arcades adorned

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the modest encampment. That no drawings of Brittenburg’s ruins survive, that we have no ekphrastic visualizations or descriptions of it, attests not only to its humble affect, but also to the primarily figural and ornamental nature of the Netherlandish interest in antiquity’s visual aspect during the 1510s and 20s. Reform-inflected hostilities between northern Europe and the Vatican should also have provided an invitation for Netherlandish artists to depict ruins for audiences eager to imagine the decline of the Rome of their present day. As Lucas Cranach’s Destruction of Babylon makes clear, Rome’s crumbling edifices could stand as signifiers of the Vatican’s inherent moral impurities and the prospect of its downfall.21 Geldenhouwer’s well-known vivid account of antagonistic, juvenile behavior towards Philip’s entourage by members the Italian cardinalate gives such hostilities a more personal dimension. While the veracity of Geldenhouwer’s description has received doubt, its truth-value as an anecdote that the humanist chose to craft and include in his description of Philip’s Roman voyage nonetheless indicates a desire to create a record of such behavior for posterity and thus the tensions that gave rise to such a desire.22 Nonetheless, these apparent antagonisms, institutional and individual, did not result in a profusion of images by Netherlanders showing Rome in a state of decay. While plenty of Gossart’s paintings and prints after his compositions contain scenery featuring motifs all’antica, his oeuvre does not bear substantial follow-through on the intensive study of architectural ruination evident in his drawing of the Colosseum. Where ruins do appear in Gossart’s post-Roman oeuvre, they suggest a nascent impetus to develop a sophisticated pictorial language of the ruin. Among Gossart’s paintings, the only significant ruination appears in his famous London Adoration (1510–15).23 However, portraying the adoration of the Christ child amidst ruins was a common means for suggesting the savior’s birth as the advent of the new world rising out of the old, even in periods when an artistic fascination with imaging ruins did not prevail.24 Nor are the ruins in Gossart’s Adoration especially Rome-inspired, rigorously after the antique, or a compelling blend of antiquarian and northern motifs, even though it is traditionally supposed that he composed and executed the painting after visiting the Eternal City. Generic ruins appear in a few other notable images emanating from the Gossart circle and in the art of his contemporaries. For example, the ruined arched brick edifice forming the backdrop in the print after Gossart’s Mocking of Christ carries the same massive

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density as the exposed surfaces of the Colosseum.25 However, the arch is pointed, putting it at one stylistic remove from Roman antiquity. Suggesting a similarly slight awareness of the ruin’s pictorial potential is Lucas van Leyden’s drawing of Jael and Sisera [fig. 1.5] of 1517.26 An imposing post-and-lintel edifice frames the Old Testament heroine’s killing of her oppressor. Cracked and rough-hewn, Lucas’s ruin resembles in its overall gesture the decay on view in the peripheries of Gossart’s Colosseum drawing. Save a faintly drawn vegetal ornament on the structure’s lintel and a lonely base bearing no column, Lucas’s edifice contains no signifiers that would suggest his rigorous debt to Roman antiquity. We have no evidence that the drawing found circulation in print during the late 1510s or early 1520s, which further suggests the hesitancy with which exponents of visual culture in the Netherlands approached ruin imagery at the time.27 More broadly speaking, the lack of a sophisticated ruin vocabulary in the visual culture that nurtured Van Heemskerck is symptomatic of the early stages of Netherlandish antiquarianism’s visual aspect. As Van Heemskerck matured in the 1520s, the conscious Netherlandish acquisition, assimilation, and development of antique motifs and pictorial categories, which would take centuries, had only just begun. At the time when Van Heemskerck went to Rome, amassing a rich repository of ruin imagery had not become a sustained practice among artists from the Low Countries.

The Roman Journey’s Status in the Netherlands and Van Heemskerck’s Road to the Eternal City

Considering Gossart’s Roman journey as the catalyst in the development of Netherlandish antiquarianism enables us to better characterize the relationship between his impact after his return from Rome and Van Heemskerck’s entry into artistic situations during the years before his pursuit of a role in Van Scorel’s workshop.28 The most important factors prompting Van Heemskerck’s pursuit of Van Scorel in the late 1520s, and then of Rome in the spring of 1532, were Gossart’s development of an authentic antique manner and the prestige it won him.29 Both undoubtedly suggested to Van Heemskerck the importance of going to Rome, but also of studying Gossart’s art, if not of training directly under him. Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck were both in the fledgling stages of their careers as Gossart’s fame among artists grew during the 1510s. They belonged to the first generation of Netherlandish artists whose pre-Roman training

Figure 1.5 Lucas van Leyden, Jael and Sisera, 1517, Object number RP-T-1912-25, ink on paper, 269 × 200 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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commenced during Netherlandish antiquarianism’s first flowering. The value of antiquarian imagery for a powerful and well-known bishop of Philip’s ilk put a new premium on the development of a new antique manner appealing to multivalent patronal desires, personal and local concerns.30 Such circumstances suggest Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman movements towards Van Scorel’s workshop as more than indicators of the authority of Van Scorel’s example. In this context, Van Heemskerck’s activities before and even in Rome appear as his critical response to the rise of the Netherlandish antiquarianism that Gossart initiated. The fame and prestige Gossart’s Roman journey won him established a set of aspirations for the next generation of artists.31 From the time he joined Margaret of Austria’s delegation, Gossart navigated the highest patronal circles in Rome and at home.32 Such favorable circumstances lent his development of an antiquarian mode higher credibility among Netherlandish contemporaries and young aspiring artists. As an artist who could make paintings based on the direct observation of Roman antiquities, Gossart could cater to a relatively broader range of tastes than northern painters who could not do so, including the tastes of the most sophisticated patrons.33 Gossart’s so-called Middelburg Altarpiece (now destroyed), a commission that resulted from his status as Philip’s court painter, even attracted Albrecht Dürer’s curiosity and perhaps his admiration.34 Such achievements would have appealed to any aspiring artist. Van Heemskerck may have found Gossart’s accomplishments especially appealing, coming as he did from a humble background.35 The impact of Gossart’s art on Van Scorel’s pre-Roman manner is murky to us because we have no examples. However, Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman paintings suggest Gossart’s importance to him. They also reveal Van Heemskerck’s early, well-developed ability to imitate and assimilate the work of others. Some examples may provide a glimpse of Van Heemskerck’s manner of painting before he entered Van Scorel’s workshop, because they contain tendencies not found in Van Scorel’s work. Rainhald Grosshans has argued convincingly for the presence of Gossart’s figural mode in Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman work.36 Grosshans’ most compelling example is the figure of Christ in Van Heemskerck’s Ghent Man of Sorrows.37 Made shortly before Van Heemskerck left for Rome, the painting’s figure of Christ possesses a corporeality that is a hallmark of Gossart’s painted figures, but unlike Van Scorel’s more lithe bodies. Grosshans also notes that Van Heemskerck’s portraits of Anna Codde and Pieter Bicker reveal his use of foreshortenings like

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figure 1.6 Jan Gossart, Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?), 1520–25, Museum number, 1951.6, oil on oak panel, 43.18 × 31.12 cm., Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH

those in Gossart’s portraits, also not present in Van Scorel’s work. The sitters’ hands appear to encroach the picture plane.38 Jefferson Harrison has identified an array of quotations and re-fashionings of motifs by Van Heemskerck that do not appear to have come from Van Scorel either, which may thus be relatable to Van Heemskerck’s training before Van Scorel.39 We can add to these observations Van Heemskerck’s Portrait of a Woman with a Spinning Wheel in Castagnola. Its deftly foreshortened hands resemble those in several of Gossart’s portraits, including the painting thought to be his self-portrait [fig. 1.6].40 Van Heemskerck

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has furthered the illusionistic capacities of the foreground, including a generous array of stunning visual effects. At left, the spinning wheel’s finely crafted wood shines through the painting’s muted, amber toned half-light; in a remarkably handled complex passage of spatial illusionism, we see the sitter’s foreshortened fingers through a web of decoratively carved wood; at right, the foreshortened thumb and forefingers of sitter’s left hand grasp the fine fibers of the wool skein, one of which crosses the frame, catching light at various points along the way. If the use of the foreground for the painting’s haptic appeal is a hallmark of Gossart’s work, then the Castagnola portrait seems a conspicuous attestation to Van Heemskerck’s conveyance of his own understanding of the device, be it innate, or received via his observation of Gossart’s post-Roman manner. Adjunct to facilitating the nascent development of a vocabulary of motifs all’antica, Gossart’s fame and success also initiated a gradual reorienting of the Netherlandish artist’s journeyman phase towards Italy. Roman sojourns like Van Heemskerck’s – directly to Rome without patronal support and for the primary purpose of enriching one’s artistry – would not become the norm until after Van Heemskerck went to Rome. Van Scorel’s road to Rome was much less direct than either Gossart’s or Van Heemskerck’s, although it does betray his awareness of Gossart’s example. Van Mander’s report that Gossart’s renown induced Van Scorel to work under him for a short time refers to the period immediately prior to Van Scorel’s embarkation. His lengthy itinerant phase took him through Germany, to Venice, Malta, and the Holy Land before concluding in Rome.41 On the surface, Van Scorel’s departure for these extensive travels after having spent time in Gossart’s employ suggests that the fruit of Gossart’s travels – the flourishing career that resulted from his Italianism – impressed Van Scorel to make Italy a destination. However, that Van Scorel began his more distant travels immediately after working under Gossart strongly suggests he had already planned the subsequent phases of his journey before entering Gossart’s studio. In this more expansive Rome-inflected conception of the journeyman phase, Van Scorel’s time with Gossart was the first part of his wanderjahr. Comments by Van Mander further suggest that prior to visiting Gossart, Van Scorel was trained in an environment that impressed upon him the benefits of contact with Gossart and the importance of travel to Italy. Van Mander mentions other Italianate artists besides Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck, including “Willem Cornelisz,” Van Scorel’s first master, whom scholars have identified as Cornelis

The Possibility of a pre-Roman Maarten van Heemskerck

Willemszoon.42 Van Mander also names Willemszoon as Van Heemskerck’s first master.43 In Van Heemskerck’s biography, we learn that Willemszoon was the father of two artists, “both fairly good painters too, having visited Italy, Rome and other places.”44 Willemszoon’s sons, apparently of the same generation as Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck, are obscure to us. We do not know when they ventured south. However, if Van Scorel also trained under Willemszoon, as scholars have deduced, then we can trace four Roman sojourns back to this semi-obscure elder master, which suggests a Gossart-influenced, Rome oriented tendency in his training. Reinforcing this notion are the similar paths chosen by Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck during the earliest parts of their journeyman years; after training under Willemszoon, but before traveling further afield, both pursued situations under masters who had already been to Rome. For Van Scorel, working with an artist of Gossart’s stature before entering foreign environments could provide him with an exceptional credential, and perhaps contacts; that Van Scorel may have visited with Dürer, which occurred after Dürer’s visit to view Gossart’s Middleburg altarpiece, suggests as much. And of course, Gossart could give Van Scorel invaluable practice in the Italianate manner under its leading Netherlandish practitioner. We should also see Van Heemskerck’s movement towards Rome through Van Scorel’s workshop in the larger context of this nascent antiquarianism. Perhaps Rainhald Grosshans over-determines Van Heemskerck’s adoption of motifs from Gossart’s art by suggesting that Van Heemskerck actually visited with Gossart before he worked under Van Scorel.45 Regardless of the veracity of Grosshan’s hypothesis, Van Heemskerck’s relative maturity by the time he arrived in Haarlem to work with Van Scorel in 1527 enabled his development of an unusually sophisticated consciousness of art for a workshop underling.46 Accordingly, it is now generally agreed that Van Heemskerck functioned as an assistant to Van Scorel, not as a pupil.47 That Van Heemskerck entered into a situation with Van Scorel in possession of a broad practical vocabulary of techniques and motifs, perhaps broader than the young Van Scorel possessed prior to his own wanderjahr, is somewhat evident in Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman paintings.48 Such early adoptions and combinings by Van Heemskerck are of a piece with the more famous seamless assimilations of Van Scorel’s manner that he would soon execute as Van Scorel’s exponent. However, while Van Heemskerck’s training before Van Scorel fostered his assimilative capacities, it also afforded him limited

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opportunities to accrue genuine pictorial knowledge of art all’antica and Italian artistic practices. Before Van Scorel, Van Heemskerck learned enough to make himself aware of the benefits of a situation with him. Thus, for an artist like Van Heemskerck, maturing in the 1520s and planning to learn in “the academy” of Rome – “which he had long very much wanted to do,” in Van Mander’s words – the best road did go through Van Scorel’s workshop.49 As the only artist besides Raphael to hold the keys to the Vatican collection, Van Scorel’s reputation was surely quite high among his compatriots. He was the unquestioned local authority on the art of antiquity and the most revered Italian artists. Along with Van Mander’s comment that Van Scorel’s fame drew Van Heemskerck into his orbit, Van Scorel’s employment of other artists who would go on to Rome and his high productivity during the 1520s indicate that the taste for the Italianate manner among Netherlandish artists and patrons was growing.50 It must have been clear to Van Heemskerck that under Van Scorel, he would learn the most authentic Italianate process available to him from its most authoritative local source in preparation for his own eventual voyage to the Eternal City.51

Chapter 2

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel’s Workshop

Prototype, Imitation, Emulation, Invention

We know very little about Maarten van Heemskerck’s tenure in Jan van Scorel’s workshop (1527–30). We have Karel Van Mander’s biographies of both artists, which, as we have seen, are of mixed reliability while serving to give Van Scorel a somewhat false primacy over Van Heemskerck. We know of no Roman or post-Roman drawings attributable to Van Scorel, and no pre-Roman drawings by Van Heemskerck, let alone drawings by him from his time in Van Scorel’s workshop.1 Moreover, only a few paintings from their period together have come down to us. Van Scorel’s post-Roman oeuvre contains several examples attributed to his circle rather than to him. Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman painted oeuvre is small and contested.2 While the body of material evidence between Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck is slight, looking closely at what remains hints at a more complex scenario lurking beneath the simplistic traditional view of Van Heemskerck’s indebtedness to Van Scorel. Examining these sources allows us to move past the historiographic biases Van Mander established to reveal Van Heemskerck’s critical revision of his artistic inheritance from Van Scorel’s workshop. Jan van Scorel first appears in Van Heemskerck’s biography as the younger artist’s beacon. Van Mander tells us that after Van Scorel returned from Rome, the Utrecht painter was very famous and had brought with him from Italy an unusual and much more beautiful, novel manner of working which appealed to everyone, and especially to Marten, [who] managed to get to this master in Haarlem.3 Van Mander goes on to note that while in Van Scorel’s Haarlem workshop, Van Heemskerck assimilated the master’s manner thoroughly. He further claims that, “one could barely distinguish their works from each other,” with Van Heemskerck having “made [Van Scorel’s] manner his own.”4 Therefore, Van Mander next tells us, Van Scorel banished Van Heemskerck from his workshop “out of envy.”5

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_005

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It is tempting to interpret this episode solely as a signal that Van Heemskerck transcended Van Scorel. However, this is but one implication we can take from the story. It may simply be an expulsion topos signaling the beginning of the independent stage of Van Heemskerck’s career, when he began laboring for himself rather than a workshop master. Van Mander’s description of Van Scorel’s jealousy of Van Heemskerck’s ability to paint like him is ultimately unverifiable. Thus, also unsupportable is his claim that this alleged envy subsequently prompted Van Scorel to expel Van Heemskerck from his workshop. Moreover, Van Mander’s telling of these events implies that Van Heemskerck’s success was not autonomous; at the core of the episode is the younger artist’s achievement of artistic mastery of a manner other than his own. That Van Heemskerck used his exceptional powers of imitation to assimilate the manner of his predecessor, not his own manner of painting, precipitates the entire episode. At first glance, similarities between Van Scorel’s Mary Magdalen [fig. 2.1] and Van Heemskerck’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt [fig. 2.2] confirm that at the very least, Van Mander’s claim of Van Heemskerck’s thorough assimilation of Van Scorel’s manner is based on an empirical truth.6 Perhaps these are the paintings that prompted Van figure 2.1 Jan van Scorel, Mary Magdalen, 1530, Object number SK-A-372, oil on panel, 66.3 × 76 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 2.2 Maarten van Heemskerck, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1530, Inventory number 1961.9.36, oil on panel, 57.7 × 74.7 cm., Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Mander to craft his episode of Van Heemskerck’s expulsion from Van Scorel’s workshop. With Van Scorel’s Mary Magdalene as its point of departure, Van Heemskerck’s Rest on the Flight indeed does demonstrate his mastery of the approach that was current in Van Scorel’s workshop. However, a close comparison of the two paintings suggests more than the veracity of Van Mander’s claim. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt indexes aspects of Van Heemskerck’s developing artistry before Rome that are crucial to our understanding of his stay there. A richly referential work, it stands as an example by the preRoman Van Heemskerck of the multivalent pictorial erudition that we explored in the previous chapter’s description of Jan Gossart’s Neptune and Amphitrite [fig. 1.1]. Van Heemskerck’s painting also signals the direction his art took after Rome. Further, it embodies Van Heemskerck’s readiness to assume agency in creating his own works. The painting thus provides a point of entry for examining the complex triangulation between the Netherlandish antiquarianism of the 1520s, Van Scorel’s importance for Van Heemskerck, and Van Heemskerck’s own artistic growth. Van Scorel’s Mary Magdalen comprises a powerful portrayal of its subject and a concise series of resonances for its likely audience. The artist has positioned Mary Magdalen near the picture plane in threequarters view. A gnarled tree sits behind and to her right. The tree’s half-dead, half-lush condition emblematizes the Magdalen’s previously sinful life and her redemption in Christ and penitence. A green middle ground gives way to a craggy, mountainous landscape to the Magdalen’s left. She confronts her audience with an enigmatic intensity rivaling that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, suggesting a complex mental interior befitting the penitent sinner. Van Scorel has made her piercing black eyes all the more so by their contrast with her alabaster complexion. She penetrates the viewer’s gaze. Her bowed upper lip curls into an exceedingly slight smile that is easy to miss unless we dare to search her lip; surely this particular aspect of the painting tempts the viewer, encouraging an invasive mode of looking that was too intimate for some conscientious sixteenth-century Christian viewers to feel comfortable with sustaining. The painting’s Alpine-inspired backdrop bears a famous rock formation known as the Sainte-Baume, located in Provence, which Van Scorel drew during his wanderjahr [fig. 2.3]. According to Jacob de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, the hermitage of the Magdalen’s last 30 years took place in a cave there.7 The Magdalen thus includes small figures, barely visible before the famous outcropping, portraying the Magdalen’s ecstasy. Van Scorel has thus used his wanderjahr experience – his first-hand

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel ’ s Workshop

observation of the Sainte-Baume – to imbue his sacred painting’s landscape with a powerful authenticity. The painting’s allusive landscape must have been especially resonant for its intended viewer; its early provenance suggests that Van Scorel conceived it for a member of Haarlem’s order of the Knights of St. John, with whom he traveled to Jerusalem and for whom the Magdalen was the patron saint.8 Naturally, their pilgrimage route to the Holy Land took them through Provence to see the Sainte-Baume. Having not yet traveled as Van Scorel had, Van Heemskerck was not yet able to infuse his paintings with this brand of experiential gravitas. However, close examination of his Rest on the Flight reveals its status as the product of his thoughtful study of Van Scorel’s Magdalen, not just for its composition and figural disposition, but for its handling of content. Via its figures’ directional glances, inconspicuous symbols, and allusive landscape, The Rest on the Flight epitomizes sacred vision’s elusive nature, its reliance on memory, and sustained, mindful viewing.9 Christ gazes at his mother as if for guidance. Viewed from a distance, the Virgin Mary might appear to confront us with a direct gaze. However, viewing the painting at close range reveals that she does not return our gaze. Rather, she looks past us, into the distance. Her gaze thus suggests that we view the holy family’s world unabated. As Christ suggests that we look to Mary, her glance to our right directs us to the landscape behind her, which reveals the painting’s narrative; Joseph and the ass that have carried the Virgin and child on their flight appear prominently enough in the right middle ground for us to recognize them; beyond the holy family, a landscape of invented Egyptian monuments appears, including an approximation of an obelisk like the ones Van Heemskerck would later draw in Rome. Among them, we find a freestanding column bearing a statue, an allusion to the idols that fell upon the holy family’s entry into Egypt. The simultaneous acknowledgement and denial of viewing presence in the Virgin’s gaze is but one aspect of the painting recommending it as an early example of what Victor Stoichita has called “self-aware” imagery.10 Reflexive, cerebral, The Rest on the Flight posits the formulation of sacred vision in an unfettered viewing meditatio, an extended visual exegesis. In addition to our identification of the landscape’s allusive idol, citing a few of the painting’s half-hidden symbols suffices to substantiate the notion that vision is metaphorically embedded in the painting’s signifying mechanisms, its capacity to reward sustained viewing and the erudition that only memory can support. At first glance, Christ’s right foot appears as

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figure 2.3 Jan van Scorel, Mountain Landscape with a Bridge Spanning a Ravine (the Sainte Baume), c. 1519, Registration number 1909.0109.07, ink on paper, 205 × 153 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

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if in mid stride, about to rest on the Virgin’s cloak. However, a closer look reveals that it rests behind a transparent orb in the Virgin’s lap, on a sparkling golden scepter. The orb is a traditional symbol of universal, eternal dominion, and the scepter surely emblematizes Christ’s status as King of Christendom, as its cross-like shape recalls his crucifixion. That Christ appears to step over the cross suggests the resurrection, his triumph over his earthly persecution, mortality, and death. The spherically shaped pearl at the cross’s center echoes the shape of the orb, thus positing the seed of Christ’s universality in his sacrifice on the cross. The cross-shaped scepter points to a lush tree behind and to the left of the Virgin and child, suggesting the cross’s traditionally symbolic status as the tree of life. The Rest on the Flight also artfully revises the iconicity of the image of the Virgin and child, placing it in Hans Belting’s “age of art.”11 In Belting’s seminal view, the conception, execution, and reception of sacred imagery in the late 15th and early 16th centuries continued to body forth the sacred, but also began increasingly to turn on artistic concerns among artists, patrons, and connoisseurially inclined audiences. Van Heemskerck has deployed several devices that heighten the Rest on the Flight’s tension between icon and art. Although, as we have seen, he has portrayed the Virgin and Child in the midst of a narrative moment, his choices of content and composition downplay the painting’s presentation of narrative linearity. Contemporary portrayals of the Holy Family’s pause during their flight, for example, those by Gerard David and Joachim Patinir, customarily emphasized the narrative by portraying Joseph performing an action such as the gathering of food, while Christ and Mary appear with objects of travel: a bindlestiff, baskets for carrying food, or water jugs.12 Van Heemskerck has downplayed the narrative aspect in his rendition of the episode by minimizing Joseph’s presence and purging the scene of any indications of travel. By muting its presentation of the narrative’s temporal aspects, he has moved the painting into closer contact with the icon’s timelessness. Moreover, upon recognizing the painting’s reference to the falling idols upon Christ’s entry into Egypt, well-read viewers would have compared them to the portrayal of the episode in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis [fig. 2.4], thus situating the painting before them within a more broadly discursive exegetical complex. In the Speculum, the image of the falling idols appears alongside its typological anti-type: a portrayal of the Egyptians supplicant before an image of the Virgin and Child that they have fashioned. Thus, for viewers familiar with the Speculum’s typological juxtaposition, the Van Heemskerck’s

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel ’ s Workshop

inclusion of the falling idol in the Rest on the Flight would further invoke notions of iconicity. Heightening the Rest on the Flight’s tension between icon and art is Van Heemskerck’s deft negotiation of verisimilitude, animation, and facture. The Virgin and child are fully formed, not flat. Mary behaves with human reflex. Her sideward glance is not the kind that lasts. By the same token, like Van Scorel’s Magdalene, Van Heemskerck’s Virgin wears an enigmatic “Mona Lisa smile.” Moreover, Van Heemskerck has gone to some lengths to imbue her garment with a haptic appeal via a convincingly portrayed array of folds. However, his pervasive use of gold enhances the painting’s illusionism even as it renders the painting reminiscent of the icon. In a tour de force of Eyckian realism, Van Heemskerck has rendered Christ’s and Mary’s hair with glimmering gold pigment that reads convincingly as the highlighting of wavy, braided blond hair. Yet, the choice of gold for their hair evokes the icon’s extensive display of gold leaf for the portrayal of the halo. Likewise, close examination reveals Van Heemskerck’s use of pervasive gold-flecks to highlight the figures’ garments and flesh. Rest on the Flight’s revised iconicity even extends beyond downplaying narrative and emphasizing gold. The artfulness of Van Heemskerck’s portrayal of Christ and the Virgin derives in large part from its variations of Van Scorel’s painting. That the earlier work by Van Scorel served as the figural and compositional source for Van Heemskerck’s Rest on the Flight suggests more than Van Heemskerck’s critical response to Van Scorel’s style and working method. It also figures the icon’s changing status in the “age of art”; Van Heemskerck’s

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figure 2.4 Omnia ydola corruerunt intrante ihesu in egiptum and Egiptii fecerunt ymaginem virginis cum puero, Woodcut Illustration from Dat speghel der menscheliker behoudenisse (n. p. 1470/71), chapter XI. By permission of the Huntington Library (RB 104685)

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figure 2.5 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Portraying the Virgin, 1532, Object number os I-134, oil on panel, 168 × 235 cm., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, photo by Margareta Svensson

Chapter 2

use of a contemporary, non-iconic painting and his portrayal of a biblical narrative for the presentation of an enlivened iconicity announces his critical revision of the entire notion of the prototype. Such explorations of sacred art’s compulsions for artist and viewer are appropriate for the late 1520s, when the Reformation and its adjunct image debate had taken root. Even without viewing knowledge of its status as a revision of a work by Van Scorel, Van Heemskerck’s painting deftly issues a broad appeal to audiences seeking opportunities for discourse on sacred art – not just worshippers, but artists, patrons, clerics, and others concerned sacred art’s making. The Rest on the Flight’s date of 1530 suggests that Van Heemskerck painted it near the end of his time with Van Scorel. We do not know precisely when Van Heemskerck left Van Scorel’s workshop. But he likely left some time in 1530. After Van Heemskerck’s time with Van Scorel, he worked in Haarlem for around two years before leaving for Rome in the spring of 1532. On the eve of his departure for the Eternal City, as he was on his way to establishing his own mastery, he painted his first St. Luke Painting the Virgin [fig. 2.5]. Van Mander’s assessment of the painting continues the theme of Van Scorel’s supremacy over Van Heemskerck, even as it garners higher praise from Van Mander than any of Van Heemskerck’s other paintings. Despite characterizing the St. Luke as a triumph, Van Mander describes the painting’s technique as indebted to Van Scorel’s. Like Van Scorel’s figures, Van Heemskerck’s are “too sharply defined where

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel ’ s Workshop

the light falls.”13 Thus, in Van Mander’s view, even the flaws in Van Heemskerck’s style bear Van Scorel’s patrimony. Van Mander portrays Van Heemskerck’s assimilation as lacking judgement. As we shall see, the pairing of the Magdalen and the Rest on the Flight invites us to further differentiate Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck by formulating judicious thoughts on their respective approaches to Rome’s ruins.

Van Scorel, Van Heemskerck, and the Ruin

We seek aspects of Van Scorel’s example that are crucial for understanding Van Heemskerck’s Roman ruin drawings while avoiding the simplistic notion that he emulated his master. Ilja Veldman’s description of Van Heemskerck as “a painter who followed the example of … Scorel … traveled to Rome … [and occupied] himself in sketching the monuments and interesting details he found in the city” is a concise summation of the long held thinking on the subject; Van Heemskerck’s journey to Rome and the hundreds of drawings he made there are the “natural” outcome of his pre-Roman tenure under Van Scorel.14 For several reasons, the idea that Van Heemskerck drew Rome in imitation of Van Scorel has always made perfect sense. As we have seen, Van Scorel’s pre-Roman perambulations resemble Van Heemskerck’s in that both sought out opportunities to work under older artists who had been to Rome. Further, as Gossart achieved prestige after Rome, so did Van Scorel’s status as Keeper of Vatican Antiquities set a precedent worthy of the imitation we have traditionally envisioned by Van Heemskerck. Although the degree to which Van Scorel interacted with those antiquities appears to have been minimal, he had been furnished with the ultimate opportunity to take in the rarified air of ancient and modern Roman artistic glory and incorporate its impress into his own art. He returned to the Netherlands as no less than the successor to the great Raphael in title.15 And in Van Mander’s telling, Van Scorel’s Roman tenure and its artistic results are precisely the reasons that Van Heemskerck pursued a situation in Van Scorel’s Haarlem workshop.16 Thus, given Van Scorel’s apparent authority over Netherlandish antiquarian painting at the time when Van Heemskerck entered his workshop, it would appear that we have no need to question the idea that Van Heemskerck’s movements before and during his Roman stay were imitations of Van Scorel’s exalted example. For that matter, in light

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of Van Scorel’s earlier study under Gossart, why should we not see Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman tenure with Van Scorel as anything other than a part of a continuum, one result of the increasing importance of the Roman journey among Netherlandish artists? While a confluence of cultural circumstances indeed must have helped to propel Van Heemskerck through Van Scorel’s workshop and on to Rome, such an emphatically contextualized approach to the pre-Roman Van Heemskerck risks imagining him as a conduit for the growing Netherlandish interest in Roman antiquity, furnished to carry out its desires by the happenstances of time and place of birth, innate skill, and culture-bound proclivities. By the same token, this approach to Van Heemskerck’s road to Rome suggests that his corpus of Roman drawings is a product of Netherlandish antiquarianism rather than his own discernment. The Roman drawings become important to us not for his agency in making them, or their status as his response to his training, the Eternal City, and his own developing artistic vision, but because they are extant in much greater numbers than Gossart’s or Van Scorel’s Roman drawings. The scarcity of comparanda between Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck dating from their time together complicates efforts to cleanly substantiate or refute the traditional notion that Van Heemskerck replicated Van Scorel’s example by drawing ruins in Rome. Our way of dealing with these conditions has been to transfer from Van Heemskerck to Van Scorel the accomplishment embodied in Van Heemskerck’s corpus of Roman drawings, since the latter was the former’s predecessor and master. We find the roots of this tendency in Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck. Since Van Mander says that Van Scorel used his wanderjahr landscape drawings in some of his post-Roman compositions, it is reasonable to expect his post-Roman paintings to reveal his study of Roman ruins.17 And indeed, relative to Gossart’s example, paintings by Van Scorel and his followers contain a more advanced approach to devising ruin scenery, enough ruination to suggest that Van Heemskerck’s tenure as an assistant in Van Scorel’s Haarlem workshop could have sparked in him at least a glimmering awareness of the ruin’s pictorial potential, if not a more fully developed consciousness of it. Most important for our study of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of ruins, Van Scorel’s exquisite rendering of Bethlehem’s ruins [fig. 2.6] indicates that the older master possessed at least some interest in making images of ruinous decay.18 The artist could have only achieved the detailed effects on view in that drawing through close

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel ’ s Workshop

figure 2.6 Jan Van Scorel, View of Bethlehem, c. 1520, Registration number 1928,0310.100, ink on paper, 173 × 298 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

looking and careful manual deliberation. However, despite the intensive interest in ruination so evident in the Bethlehem drawing, Van Scorel did not translate its full implications into his paintings.19 The decaying substructures that appear foreshortened in the backdrop of his Adoration composition [fig. 2.7] are truly ruins.20 Painted to appear stripped of its marble facing, this edifice suggests Van Scorel’s study of the ruins on the Palatine. But painted ruins such as these are anomalous among the painted edifices in works by Van Scorel and his followers. Much more common in Van Scorel’s postRoman work are the tidy looking edifices occupying the same painting’s distant left background, those appearing behind the sitter in his Portrait of a Man [fig. 7.5], and the neat row of columns receding from the picture plane in the backdrop of the Good Samaritan panel by one of his followers [fig. 2.8].21 Despite their apparent status as only parts of once intact buildings, these painted antiquities show no signs of decay, no vegetal onset, no ruination. Neither Van Scorel, nor his followers, have bothered with detailing these structures. Thus, the dearth of Roman ruin drawings attributable Van Scorel combined with the relatively unsophisticated ruin vocabulary in his post-Roman paintings suggests that while in Rome, he did not

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figure 2.7 Jan van Scorel Workshop, Adoration of the Three Kings, 1530–35, Inventory Number 23542, oil on panel, 114.2 × 86.5 cm., Centraal Museum, Utrecht

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devote much attention to Rome’s ruins, at least not as much as Van Heemskerck did. Jefferson Harrison’s observation that neither Van Scorel’s post-Roman paintings, nor Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman paintings, nor their contested panels, contain direct references to ancient Roman sculpture provides further insight into how Van Scorel’s workshop practices may have inflected Van Heemskerck’s approach to antiquities. Harrison suggests that while Van Heemskerck assisted Van Scorel, “he may well have found Van Scorel’s lack of interest in the antique frustrating,” which thus prompted him to make a profusion of drawings of Rome’s sculptural antiquities.22 Likewise, Van Scorel’s slight use of ruins in his post-Roman work may have

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel ’ s Workshop

contributed to Van Heemskerck’s consciousness of a need for more attention to the ruin either while still in Haarlem or upon arriving in Rome. He may have developed the initial impetus to draw ruins before ever leaving Haarlem, especially upon realizing the advantages of working from a more copious and varied set of ruin drawings than Van Scorel made for himself while in Rome. However, while such a hypothesis is plausible, it bypasses too many shared and divergent artistic tendencies between the two artists that we can judiciously bring to bear on our understanding of Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman consciousness.

Leaving Van Scorel’s Workshop: Landscape and the Wanderjahr Drawing

Before commencing with our exploration of Van Heemskerck’s time in Rome, we add a crucial framing element to his Roman journey; we consider the utility of wanderjahr drawings and the currency of landscape’s signifying capacity in the culture of Van Scorel’s post-Roman workshop. Although Van Scorel’s oeuvre does not confirm that he drew Rome’s ruins in the same amount as Van Heemskerck later did, it does suggest that while in Rome, he learned of the high esteem

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figure 2.8 Master of the Good Samaritan (follow of Jan van Scorel), The Good Samaritan, c. 1537, Object number SK-A-3468, oil on panel, 74.7 × 86 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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his Italians contemporaries gave to drawings. In Haarlem, Van Scorel used the drawings he brought back with him from his travels to create paintings that catered to growing Netherlandish interests in antiquity, Italian art, and landscape.23 Moreover, Van Scorel’s oeuvre suggests that he gave Van Heemskerck an example for translating not just the motifs from his wanderjahr drawings into his paintings, but their implications as well.24 Thus, even though Van Scorel did not develop a ruin vocabulary as sophisticated as Van Heemskerck’s, his wanderjahr drawings and his post-Roman paintings presage Van Heemskerck’s intensive focus on drawing Rome’s ruins in situ. Van Scorel likely impressed upon Van Heemskerck the nearly metaphysical gravitas the Italians gave to drawings. Before Van Scorel worked in Rome, his encounter with Dürer in Carinthia may have brought him into contact with the exquisite figural drawing Raphael had gifted to the German master in 1515.25 During Van Scorel’s Roman stay, as he navigated artistic and patronal circles linked to the Vatican, countless situations would have made the Italian veneration of drawings vivid. No single event could have suggested the importance of drawings for Italian artists and patrons more plainly than the commission of the Sala di Costantino. Giulio Romano and the remaining principals of Raphael’s workshop received the commission because they possessed their recently deceased master’s drawings for the Sala. Such a decision by Leo signaled that possessing Raphael’s disegni was tantamount to possessing his thoughts articulated in the visual lingua franca among his workshop principals.26 For Van Scorel, if Raphael’s drawings were rich enough repositories of the master’s pictorial knowledge to ensure the Sala’s successful completion without him, then drawing from paintings by Italian masters was tantamount to absorbing that knowledge. Motifs in many of the paintings by Van Scorel and those in his post-Roman circle suggest his observation of the frescoes in the Sala di Costantino by the remaining artists of the prematurely deceased Raphael’s workshop. For example, Van Scorel’s Tower of Babel [fig. 2.10] indicates his observation of the Sala’s Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Likewise, his “Stoning of St. Stephen,” panel of the Marchiennes Polyptych bears several motival variations on the Sala’s Vision of the Cross.27 It is thus fitting that Van Mander begins his biography of Van Scorel with a meditation on Rome as the place where Italian painters perfected the figure and then praises Van Scorel for correcting the Netherlandish tendency to paint only from life.28 Van Scorel’s post-Roman paintings everywhere reveal that more than anything else he saw in Italy – including antiquities – the compositional

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figure 2.9 Jan van Scorel, Entry into Jerusalem (central Panel of the Lokhorst Triptych), c. 1526–, Inventory number 6078a, oil on panel, 79 × 147 cm., Centraal Museum, Utrecht

motifs and the figures in paintings by his Italian contemporaries sparked his pictorial imagination.29 Van Scorel’s embrace of Italian disegno surfaces in the post-Roman products of his atelier. He and his assistants could not have devised some paintings without referring to drawings that Van Scorel executed of Vatican paintings by Michelangelo and the Raphael circle. The most obvious example is Van Scorel’s use of Michelangelo’s design of the Sistine Chapel’s Deluge for his influential Entry into Jerusalem [fig. 2.9], the central panel of the so-called Lokhorst triptych. Van Scorel took his compositional scheme from Michelangelo’s painting. The main action takes place in the lower left foreground, on a diagonally inclined piece of terrain. The Holy City beckons in the extreme background. The general composition of Michelangelo’s prototype survives in Van Scorel’s design. However, differences in the groups of figures walking up the hill towards the foreground in each design are revealing. Many of Michelangelo’s figures are quotations and reinventions of sculptures nearby in the Vatican collection. Van Scorel’s figures, on the other hand, appear instead as variations on Michelangelo’s figures. Evidently, despite having access to the antiquities that were Michelangelo’s source, Van Scorel derived the Lokhorst Triptych’s figures from drawings of Michelangelo’s fresco rather than drawings of antiquities. Similar are Adoration paintings by Van Scorel and his circle [e.g., fig. 2.7], whose figure groupings reinvent Michelangelo’s Deluge and the Sala di Costantino’s Battle of the Milvian Bridge. In the work of Van Scorel’s assistants and followers, we also find evidence that Van Scorel collected motifs from Raphael’s Vatican paintings. For example, the most prominent figures in a Fire of Troy composition by a follower are obvious, if awkward, quotations of figures in Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo.30 Along with this pronounced interest the paintings of Italian masters and a corresponding reliance on his drawings of them, the

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landscape drawings that Van Scorel executed during his travels were also instrumental for composing his post-Roman commissions.31 Van Mander suggests a link between Van Scorel’s landscape drawings of Jerusalem and the design of his paintings. He writes that Van Scorel [drew] landscapes, views … when he was in Jerusalem … he traveled through all the surrounding countryside … and drew with the pen from life the landscape and the lay of the land. And from this drawing he made, when he returned to the Netherlands, a beautiful painting in oils of how Joshua led the children of Israel through there dry-shod.32 Van Mander goes on to state that Van Scorel used a drawing of Jerusalem (now lost) “many times over” for paintings. He cites the drawing as the source for the landscape of a painting portraying “Christ heading towards the city on the back of a mule,” the Lokhorst Triptych’s central panel [fig. 2.9].33 Likewise, Van Scorel’s Baptism of Christ, also from his Haarlem period, contains a panoramic landscape that could be based on a wanderjahr drawing that is now lost.34 It is also clear that Van Scorel sometimes approached topographical motifs as he did figures; painted sources were just as useful as genuine antiquities. In describing Van Scorel’s use of Roman sources for the development of the ruin landscape, Nicole Dacos only raises the possibility that Van Scorel was influenced by the paintings of Polidoro da Caravaggio in San Silvestro al Quirinale and ancient examples in the Domus Aurea.35 But as we have seen, Van Scorel’s Tower of Babel [fig. 2.10] resembles the tower in the backdrop of the Sala di Costantino’s Battle of the Milvian Bridge.36 Moreover, the topography surrounding both towers attests to Van Scorel’s close attention to the details of the paintings in the Sala. As with his use of his drawing of the St. Baume for his Mary Magdalene, Van Scorel’s consultation of drawings he had made after the paintings of Italian masters and those he executed of the Holy Land enabled him to imbue his work with an authenticity that his less-traveled compatriots could not achieve. Paintings made in the manner of the Lokhorst Triptych, for example, present the Holy Land as none of his contemporaries yet could: through a first-hand knowledge of the work of Italian masters and a landscape showing Jerusalem, which he retained by having drawn both first hand. He was able to breathe into his own works the pictorial thoughts of Italian masters on the most elevated subjects in history. As a pilgrim

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel ’ s Workshop

to the Holy Land, Van Scorel had observed the “lay of the land” and had absorbed its visual aspect in much the same way. Van Heemskerck’s exposure to these practices in Van Scorel’s workshop environment provided him with the practical inclination to draw the architectural vestiges of the ancient Roman past, even though there was little in his pre-Roman training that could have fully prepared him for the profound splendor he would soon see in Rome’s disabitato. His rearing in an artistic culture that was increasingly enamored of the benefits of visiting Rome, hungry for pictorial knowledge of antiquity and the art of its modern Italian exponents, and increasingly interested in landscape, rendered him uniquely prepared to draw Rome’s ruinscapes. Van Scorel’s lack of an expansive ruin vocabulary may explain the cursory ruins in Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman paintings – especially the Rest on the Flight [fig. 2.2] and his pre-Roman Madonna and Child.37 However, as an enterprising artist who was apparently eager to move through workshops and absorb what they had to offer him on his way to the Eternal City, Van Heemskerck could not have missed the theoretical or practical importance of wanderjahr drawings for the success of Van Scorel’s atelier. Nor could the central place these drawings occupied in observing, absorbing, and reinventing motifs have escaped Van Heemskerck’s notice. Moreover, his pre-Roman assimilation of the manners and devices in paintings by Van Scorel and the artists in

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figure 2.10 Jan van Scorel, Tower of Babel, 1530, Inventory number G.A. d 132, oil on wood, 58 × 75 cm., Ca’ d’Oro, Galleria Franchetti, Venice

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his circle foreshadows his eventual development of an authoritative Italianate manner. Van Heemskerck’s direct path to Rome betrays the focused nature of his Roman stay; just as Rome was the specific reason for his travels, it would also become the object of a drawing program that was unprecedented in its focus on pictorializing antiquity. We are better able to imagine a pre-Roman Maarten Van Heemskerck, a young, gifted artist who grew conscious of the paradoxical nature of the Netherlandish artistic milieu that nurtured him; he matured in an environment where the hunger for imagery after the antique was strong, but the resources for producing it with the encyclopedic authenticity for which he would later strive in his own oeuvre were lacking. At the same time that the young Van Heemskerck developed considerable powers of assimilation, absorbing, imitating, and revising the manners of the artists who preceded him to the Eternal City, his Roman drawings strongly suggest that by the time he left for Rome, he had developed a critical consciousness that the Netherlandish pictorial vocabulary after the antique needed augmenting.

Part 2 Drawing the Eternal: Van Heemskerck in Rome

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Introduction When Maarten van Heemskerck arrived in Rome, he found a city still shaken by the horrifying events of May 1527. The infamous Sack of Rome had made the ruination of modern Rome a palpable threat. Thus, consciousness of the signifying power in the city’s ancient ruins was exceptionally acute. Post-Sack conditions inflected the antiquarian artistic culture that Van Heemskerck navigated, which had become more invested than ever in knowing all aspects of the Eternal City, ancient and modern. Following Raphael’s antiquarian ambitions, left largely unfulfilled at the time of his death, many of the artists in Rome during the 1530s were especially interested in translating Rome’s antiquities into the pictorial realm. Artists including Van Heemskerck, his travel companion Hermannus Posthumus, and Italian artists and architects Baldassare Peruzzi, Giorgio Vasari, and Francesco Salviati understood the importance of drawing ancient Rome’s ruins; doing so preserved the vast range of knowledge and the rich cultural memories they contained. Each approached the task in different ways. Van Heemskerck’s nearly encyclopedic corpus of drawings of antiquities documents his particular interpretation of how to cultivate pictorial knowledge of the ancient Roman past. Each time he composed a vedute, he performed something akin to an archeological act. With exacting choices of vantage points, it is as if he unearthed the views that his drawings present, as if they had been lying dormant for centuries, awaiting discovery by his transformative pictorial gaze. At the same time, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings provide a record of his assimilation of compositional motifs in the Netherlandish and Italian contemporary art he studied. The media and techniques he chose enabled him to articulate his pictorial insights in a polyphony of voices while also indicating his mastery of Netherlandish and Italian representational modes. As a compendium of antiquities, motifs, media, and methods, Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome could have functioned the same way any collection of antiquities did: as demonstrations of artistry for the perpetuation of the past, and as prompts for the discussion of both.

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Drawing Ruins in Post-Sack Rome

Rome’s Post-Sack Milieu

By the time Van Heemskerck arrived in Rome in the early 1530s, the city’s antiquities had become charged with a greater immediacy than any of his Netherlandish predecessors to Rome could have ever imagined, let alone conveyed to him. Jan Gossart and Jan van Scorel had visited Rome in comparatively stable periods. By the time Gossart had arrived in Rome in 1509, the collecting and display of antiquities was an established practice. It had become more sophisticated by the time Van Scorel succeeded Raphael as Keeper of Vatican Antiquities in 1520. However, neither Gossart nor Van Scorel experienced the urgent preservation-oriented rhetoric that surrounded antiquities after the Sack of Rome on May 6th, 1527. It was then that the Eternal City had given way to an impressive assemblage of hostile factions, including Holy Roman Imperial Troops commanded by Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, cavalry from France, Spain, and Italy, League of Cognac deserters, and assorted bandits.1 A significant pillaging that depleted Rome’s population by nearly half, the Sack’s effects lingered well into the 1530s.2 Van Heemskerck first set foot in Rome a mere five years after the devastating events of the Sack. In Rome from the spring of 1532 until at least the spring of 1536 if not longer, he witnessed the major events of the Sack’s denouement.3 In the Sack’s immediate aftermath, surviving Romans were painfully conscious of their city’s fragility. But the early 1530s mark an exceptionally tumultuous period of anxiety and instability for Rome. While the Sack did not cause total destruction, losses were significant enough to vivify the specter of even greater ruination. Over a millennium’s worth of cultural memory, ingrained in Rome’s urban fabric, suddenly seemed vulnerable. Thus, in the post-Sack climate, Rome’s ruins and collections of antiquities took on an intensified air of currency. Displaced and fragmented, the city’s ancient remains had become harbingers from the deep past signaling the horrifying possibility that ruination could happen again. While Van Heemskerck was in Rome, the Vatican and its coterie of humanists and artists had begun the delicate task of formulating responses out of the memory of the Sack’s pillaging and destruction. The post-Sack era’s sharpened consciousness of a

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historically fragile Rome sparked proclamations of a need to renew antiquarian archeological energies: to collect, preserve and above all, to know Roman antiquity, to regenerate a perpetually vital Rome, a truly Eternal City. Scholars will continue to debate myriad aspects of the Sack, its historical and art historical after effects in particular, but its deeply disruptive nature is beyond question. Among the Sack’s immediate effects was Pope Clement VII de’ Medici (r. 1522–1534) eight-month long captivity in Castel Sant’Angelo, his subsequent banishment to Orvieto, and the diaspora of the most talented artists who had been working in the city, especially those who had been working for the Vatican previously under Raphael. For a few weeks after the initial invasion, while destruction ran rampant in Rome, hostile forces reserved especial attention for the city’s antiquities, churches, and Palazzi belonging to high-ranking cardinals. The image of Cardinal Bartolommeo Cesi locked in Castel Sant Angelo with Pope Clement, helpless and anxious over the fate of his precious sculpture collection, part of which Van Heemskerck later drew [cat. no. 65], is a particularly instructive episode. It indicates the wealth in Cesi’s collection, but it also suggests that he saw in it his material and intellectual connectedness with the ancient Roman past, his personal gravitas.4 figure 3.1 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Death of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, and the Capture of Rome,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, Registration number 1868,0208.59, ink on paper, 155 × 228 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

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figure 3.2 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Pope Clement VII Besieged in the Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, Registration number 1868,0208.60, ink on paper, 155 × 230 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman art suggests that the Sack made a deep impression on him, even though he arrived in Rome after its occurrence.5 Consider, for example, the prints he devised some twenty years after his Roman stay, commemorating the triumphant moments in Charles V’s reign – The Victories of Charles V (1555).6 The series contains two prints showing vivid Sack imagery: Bourbon’s death and Clement’s captivity in Castel Sant’Angelo [figs. 3.1 and 3.2].7 The mere existence of these two prints indicates that as late as the 1550s, the major events of the Sack remained current in Charles’s broadcast of his imperial ambit and vivid in Van Heemskerck’s historical imagination. The series’ Sack imagery suggests just how intense the Sack had been for the Romans Van Heemskerck met during his visit. They must have recounted brutal stories for him. The series’ first print, “The Death of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, and the Capture of Rome” [fig. 3.1], is particularly graphic. In the foreground, Bourbon tumbles lifelessly from a Roman rampart, about to hit the ground, already slain. His outstretched right arm suggests Van Heemskerck’s study of the Vatican collection’s masterpiece of tragic expression, the Laocoön group. Plumes of smoke obscure nearly all of the sky in the left background. The inscription, appearing in Latin, Spanish, and French, describes Rome as a “miserable city.”8 The second print

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[fig. 3.2], which shows Clement’s captivity, is striking for its conveyance of papal impotence. The incapacitated pontiff peers out of Castel Sant’Angelo as if its loggia’s columns are prison bars. Helpless, Clement confronts cannons aimed directly at him. He is distant from the picture plane and therefore miniscule, a visual analogue for the Vatican’s weakness. Reinforcing this suggestion is the appearance of Bramante’s St. Peter’s, which stands in the background of both prints unfinished and abandoned. Like Clement himself, the building is tiny in relation to the rest of the figures, reinforcing the suggestion of the Vatican’s powerlessness. But Van Heemskerck has rendered it in enough detail for its incomplete vaulting to remind us of how he portrayed the building on several sheets now in Berlin [e.g., cat. nos. 42 and 43]. In those examples, the colossal church appears in such an unmistakable state of stasis that it prompted Christoph Thoenes to suggest that Van Heemskerck drew the building “as a ruin.”9 In both Victories prints, Van Heemskerck’s inclusion of an incomplete St. Peter’s would have resonated with his northern European viewers, especially the Reform-minded among them. Dating back to the earliest years of the Reformation, it had been popular to liken the colossal unfinished structure to the tower of Babel because of the Vatican’s use of indulgences to offset the new church’s egregious construction costs and its inability to finish the structure in a timely fashion. During the Sack, hostile soldiers who had invaded Agostino Chigi’s Villa on the Via della Lungara (now known as the Villa Farnesina) even inscribed the word “Babel” over the image of St. Peter’s in Baldassare Peruzzi’s panoramic fresco of Rome in the Sala delle Prospettive.10 Thus, Van Heemskerck’s design of a backdrop featuring the church’s stark, unfinished vaults was a pointed inclusion, one of many that indicates his nuanced familiarity with the Sack’s concerns and calamities, which he had garnered during his stay. To say that Roman morale was low during Van Heemskerck’s visit would be an understatement. Despite having returned to the Vatican in 1528, Clement VII had less political leverage than at any other time during his reign. Although Charles V publicly proclaimed his embarrassment at the Sack and the heinous actions of some of his soldiers during its most frenzied beginnings, the pontiff remained diplomatically hamstrung, loath to issue any policy that might provoke the emperor. Perhaps most significantly, threats of a second Sack consumed much of Clement’s post-Sack reign. Ottoman forces were reportedly on the advance towards the Italian peninsula. Exacerbating matters was a seemingly constant string of skirmishes on

Drawing Ruins in Post-Sack Rome

the Papal States’ borders with corsairs from the Barbary Coast.11 In October of 1530, Romans must have even felt that the Sack had cast a die of inevitable doom over their city; a major flood drowned 3,000 Romans. Surely, such a catastrophe reinforced the Sack’s revelation of Rome’s vulnerability and encouraged thoughts among more fatalistic Romans that their city would be ruined as the result of divine disapproval.12 The inscription on the commemorative flood marker in Piazza del Popolo describes “falling houses” devoured by the Tiber, an explicit description of ruin in keeping with the post-Sack mindset.13 Thus, as a powerful reminder of ancient Rome’s fall from its lofty status as the city at the center of all things, the pinnacle of civilization, the Sack cast substantial doubt on the idea of Rome as the Eternal City. A dramatic sequence of events occurring during the years of Van Heemskerck’s stay promoted associations between the city’s ancient fall and the Sack of 1527 and the possibility of renovatio out of the knowledge of both of those pasts. By the spring of 1534, the beleaguered Clement’s health had begun a slow and steady decline. He was even rumored to have died at the beginning of July of that year. In August, his condition seemed so hopelessly irreversible that he received extreme unction. Though that incident proved to be a false alarm, his health never improved. By September 25, 1534, what had seemed inevitable to Romans for months finally happened; Clement had died.14 The Medici pope whose reputation for opulence made him a symbol of papal decadence in the years leading up to the Sack had become an anachronism in the years after it.15 From a historical vantage point, Clement’s death therefore appears as the final unraveling of a plangent drama describing the end of Renaissance Rome’s halcyon days. For anxious Romans, the timing of Clement’s death could not have been worse. Reports of Ottoman progress towards the Italian peninsula had become grimmer; they were in northern Africa, closer to Italy than ever.16 With no pontiff in place, ongoing fears that Rome would be sacked rose towards a crescendo.17 Assuaging anxieties somewhat was the quick election on 13 October of native Roman and longtime papal hopeful, Alessandro Farnese (Paul III, r. 1534–1549).18 The College of Cardinals had no doubt expedited their decision due to the increased vulnerability accompanying the sede vacante (the interim between Popes). The Sack’s humiliation of Clement VII meant that the responsibility for revitalizing the idea of Rome, and thus Rome itself, fell to Paul III. While Clement’s humanists had already taken great care to illustrate continuity between ancient Rome and Renaissance Rome, the

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calamity they had endured in 1527 made them hesitant to continue arguing for such an association.19 For Rome’s artists, humanists, and collectors – all gatherers of related forms of information about the city’s deep past – the violence of the Sack exposed the delicate nature of their enterprise. Within weeks of his election, Paul III took actions aimed at creating the appearance of regeneration in Rome. The rhetoric dating to the earliest days of his reign is particularly noteworthy for its eloquent arguments on behalf of Rome’s antiquities and urban fabric.20 Thus, when we imagine Van Heemskerck in post-Sack Rome, we cannot help but think of the sculptures, fragments, sculpture collections, and architectural ruins as a determining backdrop for him during his stay, an inevitable set of pictorial fixations. It should come as no wonder that his response to the post-Sack milieu was to conduct a rigorous drawing exploration of the city’s ruins; in post-Sack Rome, he found himself at the confluence of these social, political, and artistic circumstances, which combined to form a potent impetus to draw as many of the city’s ancient remains as possible with the pictorial curiosity and knack for invention we see on display everywhere in the drawings this volume presents. Moreover, it must have been clear to him that the status of Rome’s ruins as rich reminders of humanity’s greatest achievements and failures, and the Eternal City’s tenuous present, could provide a foundation for making powerful imagery that would resonate with a wide audience that included overlapping circles of humanists, potential patrons, collectors, and fellow artists. Only the most incessant probing of the Roman ambient would be sufficient to master such powerful imagery.

Drawing, Collecting, and the ‘Chaos of Memory’

The increased air of urgency surrounding collecting in the postSack milieu provides perhaps the most important subtext for Van Heemskerck’s approach to Rome’s antiquities. Perhaps no place in history is more aptly described by Walter Benjamin’s frequently quoted pronouncement that the collector’s passion “borders on the chaos of memory” than post-Sack Rome.21 True, the collecting of antiquities had advanced considerably before the Sack. But among Paul III’s earliest acts as pope was to emphasize the more current importance of preserving Roman antiquities for their status as bearers of Roman cultural memory, so fragile in light of recent events. Paul bestowed upon longtime papal prelate, humanist, and

Drawing Ruins in Post-Sack Rome

collector, Latino Giovenale Manetti, the vaunted title previously belonging to Raphael and Van Scorel, Keeper of Vatican Antiquities. Such a gesture suggested restoration while underscoring the gravity of Rome’s collections.22 Re-cast according to the new pope, the very same sculpture gardens and cortili that had endured plundering and defacement during the Sack became indispensable in the bid to preserve Rome’s heritage. Bastions of ancient Roman memory, collections repelled the peril that a vulnerable, decaying Rome could eventually be forgotten. Van Heemskerck’s Roman connections and his art confirm his participation in Rome’s renewed collecting culture. For the first two years of his sojourn, he probably stayed with Utrecht’s Cardinal, Willem van Enckevoirt (1464–1534), an avid antiquarian and patron of the arts who had served as datary to Pope Adrian VI (r. 1522–23). If Van Heemskerck did not stay with Van Enckevoirt, he certainly would have been able to meet with the Netherlandish cardinal, which in turn would have been useful to him as he pursued Rome’s antiquities; Van Enckevoirt been a close associate of Van Scorel’s during the reign of Adrian VI.23 Even though Van Enckevoirt died two years into Van Heemskerck’s stay, his impressive pedigree and his continuing high rank could have served Van Heemskerck’s efforts to establish himself in Rome’s highest circles of artists, patrons, and collectors. For example, Van Enckevoirt was Baldassare Peruzzi’s patron. At the end of Adrian’s reign, he commissioned the Sienese painter, architect, and senior member of Raphael’s team to design Adrian’s tomb. Even if Van Enckevoirt did not introduce Van Heemskerck to Peruzzi (and there is no reason to believe that he did not), it is clear that Van Heemskerck was attentive to Peruzzi’s art; several of Van Heemskerck’s paintings and prints show a debt to Peruzzi’s work, particularly his frescoes in Agostino Chigi’s Sala delle Prospettive and his formulae for theatrical and pictorial backdrops [e.g., fig. 3.5]. Paintings that Van Heemskerck executed while still in Rome also suggest his immersion in Rome’s collecting culture. Whoever commissioned Van Heemskerck to paint the monumental Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1] must have done so to place the painting in a collection environment.24 Likewise, his Vulcan’s Forge [fig. 3.3] and perhaps his Triumph of Bacchus [fig. 3.4], which also date from the Roman period, would also function well amidst the kinds of objects found in Roman collections.25 All three paintings present imagined antique realms via invented ruins, buildings, figuration, and topography, allusions to the Roman landscape and its antiquities. The

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figure 3.3 Maarten van Heemskerck, Vulcan’s Forge, c. 1535–36, Inventory number DO 4290, oil on canvas, 166.5 × 207 cm., National Gallery, Prague

figure 3.4 Maarten van Heemskerck, Triumph of Bacchus, c. 1536–37, Inventory number 990, oil on panel, 56 × 106.6 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

paintings comprise a wellspring of references to the holdings of the collections that his drawings confirm he visited. Consider, for example, the Triumph of Bacchus, which is especially instructive [fig. 3.4]. A circular temple appearing in the backdrop may depend in part on Van Heemskerck’s observation of the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli [cat. no. 54]; the painting’s circular temple perhaps also benefits from his having seen Bramante’s Il Tempietto. The edifice behind and to its right resembles Van Heemskerck’s observation of the Colosseum from a distance in his famous heavily foreshortened drawing of the Arch of Constantine from a worm’s eye

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view [cat. no. 22]. Van Heemskerck invented the ruined piers bearing atlantae out of his drawing of the cortile of the old Palazzo delle Valle [cat. no. 66], but has added coffering like that in his drawings of the unfinished St. Peter’s [e.g., cat. no. 42]. He must have based the foot in the painting’s foreground on his drawn study of a colossal foot [cat. no. 33]. The female figure in the painting’s central middle ground derives from Van Heemskerck’s study of Raphael’s Galatea. The male figure in the right foreground derives from a sculpture of Apollo in the Casa Sassi collection, which Van Heemskerck also drew [see fig. 6.19 and cat. no. 68]. However, it is Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings themselves that reveal the depth of his pursuit and understanding of the city’s collections.26 While we can interpret his decision to draw antiquities in copious amounts and varieties as an attempt to compensate for a lack of motifs all’antica in his pre-Roman Netherlandish milieu – as suggested in chapters 1 and 2 – that impetus is not exclusive of the desire to emulate Roman collecting habits by drawing to amass a collection of pictorial motifs. Van Heemskerck’s execution of so many images of ruins, landscapes, sculptures, and sculpture collections suggests his Roman drawings as the record of an acquisitive, even preservative act, akin to collecting as Romans conceived of it in the post-Sack milieu. With each pen and ink drawing of a ruin landscape, each masterfully crafted chalk drawing of a sculpture or sculptural fragment, with each carefully composed rendering of a sculpture garden or cortile, Van Heemskerck amassed a drawn collection of antiquities. Moreover, like the collections he drew, his corpus of Roman drawings de facto constituted a rich accrual of Roman cultural memory because it contained antiquity’s remains, whose status as storied, valuable, and vulnerable objects had increased in light of the Sack. Thus, we find one of the many possible functions of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings in their collective status as insurance against the erasure of antiquities and the loss of the memory they contain. Based on the number and content of the extant sheets from his Roman sojourn, Van Heemskerck gained access to at least thirteen places earmarked either for the storage or programmatic display of sculptural antiquities. These included the Vatican, Capitoline, and the sculpture cortili and gardens of Roman palazzi owned by antiquarians from powerful Roman families, curia who had lived and worked in Clementine Rome, had managed to survive the Sack, and continued amassing antiquities: the Medici [cat. nos. 62–64], Cesi [cat. no. 65], della Valle [cat. nos. 66 and 67], and Sassi [cat. no. 68].27

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On his visits to these collections, Van Heemskerck went beyond merely drawing the sculptures he saw. Arguably among the richest of his Roman drawings are those in which the collection environment commands as much pictorial focus as the sculptures themselves. With this choice to portray collection environments, Van Heemskerck may have invented a new category of image. No material evidence confirms that his drawings of collections were a continuance of any tradition that he received from any of his Netherlandish predecessors to Rome.28 The only known drawing earlier than Van Heemskerck’s that shows a collection environment is an anonymously authored specimen from the Fossombrone Sketchbook showing the female sculpture in the cortile of the Palazzo Riario (now Palazzo della Cancelleria).29 With their compelling portrayals of collection spaces and the way visitors to those spaces inhabited them, Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings not only portray sculptures and their environs; they show Rome’s antiquarian culture as it had evolved into the 1530s. Moreover, their mere existence reflects the heightened focus on the collecting of antiquities in the post-Sack milieu, the renewed impetus to preserve the memory of antiquity. It is memory’s generative power – its function as a repository of source material for infinite imaginings and creations – that is so palpable in these drawings of collections, and also his post-Roman compositions evoking collection environments. The collected display of the fragmented, partly legible remains of antiquity – which his Italian artist contemporaries saw as an invitation to invent – comprised most of the sculptural material that he had at his disposal in Rome.30 As the Roman desire to maintain and revitalize the memory of antiquity played a major role in shaping the collections he visited, so does Van Heemskerck’s collection imagery reflect the re-collective and inventive aspects of Roman collection environments. We consider Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings as he himself surely did: they were ricordi of his experiences with Rome’s collecting culture, among the most important aspects of his Roman stay. Their most innovative and striking feature is his choice to allow the collection spaces to function as the major determinant in the composition. As such, they illuminate the spaces they portray as loci in a triangulation of memory, drawing, and invention.31 Consider, for example, Van Heemskerck’s carefully observed drawings of the magnificent collection of antiquities in the cortile of the Palazzo Medici [cat. nos. 62 and 63], or his heavily foreshortened, asymmetrically composed renderings of the sculpture gardens of the Villa Madama and the Palazzo Cesi [cat. nos. 64 and 65, respectively]. To execute

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the smaller of his two Palazzo Madama drawings [cat. no. 62], he stood beneath the cortile’s loggia at its easternmost point and used its arcing rhythm as a pictorial framework. Though the larger drawing of the same space [cat. no. 63] is less finished, it no less emphatically conveys Van Heemskerck’s vision of the cortile as an antiquarian environment. Here, he presents the collection from outside the loggia rather than from within it. Nearly parallel to the picture plane and at considerable distance from it, the loggia again determines the drawing’s composition. Within this framework, sculptures cluster around the columns and near the walls in a variety of poses that suggest them as a group of living figures despite a nearly total loss of heads and arms. Perhaps our imaginations will allow that they are in conversation or acting out a narrative. Rendered in the same calligraphy of hatchings as the loggia, they form such a cohesive group, so integrated with each other and their spaces, we might fail to notice the human figure sitting among the sculptures in the right background. He appears to be studying a fragmented torso propped up in the loggia’s corner, just as Van Heemskerck had done on so many occasions. Perhaps this figure is a self-portrait of sorts – not unlike Van Heemskerck’s later renditions of himself in the act of drawing antiquities in his Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1] and his frontispiece to the Clades Judaeae Gentis series of prints [fig. 8.4].32 Or perhaps it portrays another artist visiting the collection – maybe Hermannus Posthumus or Lambert Sustris, one of the Netherlandish artists with Van Heemskerck in Rome.33 Summarily rendered human figures also appear atop the loggia. Their presence reminds us of the commonplace of gaining high vantage points to take in views of Rome, a practice of supreme importance for Van Heemskerck, as we can see in his broad-view panoramas.34 Given prevailing circumstances during the time of Van Heemskerck’s Roman visit, we suspect that his exceptional pictorial sensitivity to Rome’s collection spaces was more than a formal concern. The new gravity that Post-Sack conditions lent to collecting crystallized whatever motives for drawing collections he brought to Rome from the Netherlands. As the desire to reestablish order in the present meant exerting control over the remains of the past, it also meant identifying their significance to the cultural productions of the present. Scholarship on Renaissance Roman collections reveals their function as venues for the promotion of historical and cultural memory, spaces designed to ensure a continuing conversation about antiquity.35 We find an explicit articulation of such intentions in

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Andrea Della Valle’s hanging sculpture garden (perhaps drawn by Van Heemskerck, reproduced in a print by his collaborator, Haarlem humanist/engraver Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert [cat. no. 67 and fig. 3.5, respectively].36 “MAIORUM MEMORIAE NEPOTUMQUE IMITATIONI (To the memory of ancestors and for emulation by descendants),” declares one inscription. Another relates the garden’s timelessness to artistic production, describing it as a “vivarium of ancient things and an aid to poets and painters.”37 Collections like Della Valle’s thus suggest the crucial nature of artistic production for cultural memory’s cultivation – imitation, recollection, and invention. Collections were meeting places for what was known and unknown about the art of antiquity, made and unmade. Just as imagination brings memory with it wherever it wanders, pictorial hypothesis and invention could begin where the sculptural fragment left off. Although we find we find no images of collection environments in the Italian art that Van Heemskerck could have seen, the work of important Italians in his orbit during his stay – notably Baldassare Peruzzi and Giorgio Vasari – expresses the same concerns we read on the walls of Della Valle’s collection and in Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings. For example, as in his views of the Palazzo Madama collection, Van Heemskerck composed his drawings of the gardens in the Villa Madama [cat. no. 64] and the Palazzo Cesi [cat. no. 65] with an overarching responsiveness to the collection environment’s spatial and pictorial qualities. He left the central area of both compositions open, a pictorial device inviting viewers to enter the image. Small figures wandering through the background of the Villa Madama drawing reinforce this suggestion. The emphatically scenic aspect of these views is comparable to Peruzzi’s developments in scenography [fig. 3.6].38 Like Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings, Peruzzi’s theatrical backdrops use perspective to suggest inhabitable spaces. Their architecture also consists of re-assembled antiquities, which must have impressed Van Heemskerck, many of whose postRoman prints also feature topographical fantasie after the antique. Moreover, the theatrical productions Peruzzi had in mind when devising his stage sets frequently took place in garden settings like the ones in Heemskerk’s drawings.39 Also useful for giving Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings a Roman context are Vasari’s thoughts on Baccio Bandinelli’s contemporary Massacre of the Innocents – that it contained “many nudes […] of diverse attitudes [and] made known his buon disegno […] and understanding [of the figure].”40 Leonard Barkan has noted that for Vasari, the point of Bandinelli’s drawing is not its presentation of

figure 3.5 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Statue Court of the Palazzo della Valle-Capranica, 1553, Registration number 1947,0319.26.141, ink on paper, 290 × 420 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

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figure 3.6 Baldassare Peruzzi, Theatrical Perspective with the Symbolic Monuments of Rome, c. 1530, Inventory number 291 A, pen and ink wash on paper, 56.8 × 71.5 cm., Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence

a narrative, but its utility as an instructive demonstration of buon disegno, a source for further inventions all’antica.41 Seen in this light, Bandinelli’s drawing suggests how Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings also provide compendia of sculptural figures on display in a variety of poses before scenery all’antica. In turn, such parallels suggest that Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings proclaim his awareness of how collection spaces and drawings functioned within the larger sphere of post-Sack artistic thought and production: for the perpetuation of the knowledge found in the remains of antiquity.

Ruins in Post-Sack Rome

We also view Van Heemskerck’s interest in Rome’s architectural ruins in the context of the events occurring early in Paul III’s administration. In addition to appointing Latino Giovenale Manetti as Keeper of Antiquities, the new pope also appointed him Maestro delle Strade or Keeper of the Streets. The new pope’s brief on the occasion identified the most potent of ongoing threats to ancient Roman sites: looting, neglect, and the ravages of time.42 By citing these particular causes of contemporary ruin at that moment, Paul linked ancient Rome’s destruction to the immediate conditions he inherited upon rising to the purple. And in doing so, he adroitly

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figure 3.7 Hermannus Posthumus, Tempus Edax Rerum (Landscape with Roman Ruins), 1536, Inventory number GE 740, oil on canvas, 96 × 41 cm., Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna / SCALA, Florence

suggested that he was keenly aware of Romans’ concerns while publicizing his restoration efforts. But Romans would not feel secure until the following year, when in July, Charles V, the very emperor whose troops had shaken the city to its foundations only eight years earlier, engaged Ottoman forces at Tunis and halted their advance towards Italy. Paul would soon reward Charles with an impressive triumphal procession through the city. We see a nascent archeological consciousness of ruins in the art of Van Heemskerck and his Roman circle, not only contemporaneous with Paul III’s first actions as pope, but as an artistic analogue to his rhetoric. For example, Ruth Olitsky Rubinstein has cited the monumental Tempus Edax Rerum canvas of 1535 [fig. 3.7] by Van Heemskerck’s compatriot and travel companion, Hermannus Posthumus, as a visual equivalent to the preservationist consciousness that Paul had expressed late the year before.43 Posthumus’s canvas portrays a fictive landscape of ruinous cacophony. Rubenstein has identified the ancient sources for many of the fragmented antiquities Posthumus brought together. Perhaps his most provocative inclusion, at least for contemporary viewers, was the crumbling circular loggia in the painting’s right middle ground. With its row of multi-colored double columns, it is unmistakable in its resemblance to the spoliated columns demarcating the ambulatory of Rome’s Santa Costanza. The real church has always been intact, richly appointed. Thus, its dilapidated condition in Posthumus’s vision makes all the more powerful the painting’s Ovidian motto on display in the foregrounded fragment’s fictive inscription: time devours all things.

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Another notable feature of Posthumus’s canvas is its portrayal of curious torch-bearing explorers who may only emerge after sustained close looking. They crawl amidst the vegetal overgrowth to explore and even measure the ruins. Such an inclusion by Posthumus must have come from his experiences witnessing Romans among the ruins. If we are to believe Nicole Dacos’s assessment that most of drawings found in the Berlin volumes not belonging to Van Heemskerck are Posthumus’s, his own rather impressive corpus of Roman drawings shows the frequent appearance of people amidst the ruins as they appear here.44 Moreover, Posthumus, Van Heemskerck, and Lambert Sustris, three Netherlanders abroad in Rome together, had descended amidst the ruins bearing torches themselves: their signatures appear together on the walls of the Domus Aurea.45 Over the whole corpus of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, we find many similarly vivid expressions of ruins as embodiments of the passage of time and objects of archeological scrutiny. Van Heemskerck frequently accentuated the deteriorating aspect of his ancient Roman surroundings to nearly ekphrastic proportions. For example, rendered according to Van Heemskerck’s vision, the northeast quadrant of the dome of Santa Maria della Febbre [cat. no. 44] sprouts not just a few vines and tendrils, but what appear to be mature woody shrubs. Van Heemskerck also made a conspicuous display of cracks and fissures so big that they would have taken centuries to compromise the rough-hewn wall before the ancient chapel. The same building appears pristinely as drawn in the much tidier, more fastidious hand of another Netherlander in Rome around the same time, Ilja Veldman’s “Anonymous B” (Dacos’s Michiel Gast).46 Vegetal overgrowth like that on display in Van Heemskerck’s version of Santa Maria della Febbre functions like a signature of sorts. It is a motif that recurs so consistently in his corpus of Roman vedute, it seemingly creeps from sheet to sheet as if threatening to consume not just the ruins Van Heemskerck drew, but the drawings themselves. The lush overgrowth of vines, leaves, and branches marks Van Heemskerck’s consciousness of time’s relentlessness, nature’s encompassment of all aspects of his Roman drawing exploration. The abundance of vegetation in Van Heemskerck’s drawing of an overturned capital before the Colosseum [cat. no. 17] even suggests a paragone between nature and art, or nature and antiquity; arabesque vegetal flourishes sprout from the immediate foreground and from the highest, most distant vaults of the Colosseum, mimicking the forms of the capital’s bead and reel volutes and acanthus leaves. Such vivid emphases on the epochal aspect of Rome’s ruins

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seem inseparable from Paul III’s contemporaneous evocation of time’s inevitable consumption of Rome’s antiquities. By embellishing his ruin landscapes with staffage, Van Heemskerck recorded the interest that the city’s ruins were then garnering. A veritable school of archeologists walks through his ruin landscapes, just as he himself walked through Rome’s ruins. His tiny, minimally drawn figures explore the vestiges, as in the generously hatched distant view of the Colosseum from atop the Palatine [cat. no. 9]. The presence of figures marks the scale of the palatial ruins. It also marks them as a point of interest. We even see figures with pickaxes in the left half of Van Heemskerck’s panoramic drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1], hacking at the ground near the Arch of Septimius Severus.47 Nearby, two others appear to lug a heavy block of marble away from the site. Such figures wandering through Van Heemskerck’s ruin landscapes suggest that the city’s architectural ruins had a considerable audience, that it was common to see people exploring them. But it also suggests something more profound: Van Heemskerck’s own consciousness of the worthiness of recording the interest in ruins.

Raphael and Van Heemskerck’s Ruinscapes

Van Heemskerck’s intense interest in the architectural vestiges of ancient Rome had its most authoritative precedent in the unrealized antiquarian ambitions of the late Raphael. It has been popular to characterize Van Heemskerck as an emulator of Michelangelo. Van Heemskerck’s consistent tendency towards hyperbolically brawny figures and his publication of prints showing his study of the Sistine Chapel ceiling’s ignudi does suggest Michelangelo as the major Italian inspiration for his post-Roman figural mode.48 But Raphael’s interest in Rome’s ruins, evinced in the paintings of his late period, and his unfinished archeological, cartographic, and architectural projects, provided a major inspiration for Van Heemskerck’s drawings of ancient Roman ruins. In post-Sack Rome, circumstances were ripe for the taking up of Raphael’s unfulfilled legacy. At the time, the very notion of Raphael was not unlike Rome’s ruins: hailing from an irrevocably lost past, fragmented but venerated, in need of intensive study, and thus, of a piece with the sense of loss then pervading Rome. Unlike Michelangelo, who returned to Rome in 1534 to begin his Last Judgement before going on to evolve his terribilità into the 1560s, Raphael would

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forever belong exclusively to the happier days that the Sack had effectively ended. The majority of Raphael’s most important paintings express the Vatican’s primacy in history, its encompassment of time itself, a notion that seemed antiquated after the Sack.49 Moreover, since the incomplete state of Raphael’s artistic mission left many of his most ambitious projects unfinished, his very legacy was a fragment from a glorious past. For example, the Sack had interrupted the execution of the designs he left for the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo.50 Moreover, Raphael’s inheritance of the construction of St. Peter’s put him at the helm of the much-maligned architectural project for nearly half a decade. During that time, he devised his own plans to give the new church a nave, augmenting his uncle Donato Bramante’s central plan. But he made little progress. He was similarly able to realize only part of his grandiose plan for Leo’s and Clement’s Villa Madama. Just as Thoenes hypothesized that Van Heemskerck’s drawings of a ruinous St. Peter’s [e.g., cat. nos. 42 and 43] suggest the Haarlem artist’s consciousness of the Vatican’s overarching hubris, we may also reasonably imagine that in the Villa Madama [cat. nos. 55 and 64], Van Heemskerck knew he was visiting an opulent monument to antiquarianism lapsed before fulfillment. More broadly, while it is true that Raphael’s death preceded the Sack by seven years and Van Heemskerck’s visit by over a decade, the diaspora of Raphael’s equipe as a result of the Sack was an overwhelmingly sad moment of loss for Roman art and architecture, the decisive aftershock of losing the master himself. Marcantonio Raimondi’s tragic fall into impoverished obscurity and then death, for example, is among the most lamentable of the Sack’s outcomes. For the steadily increasing flow of artists and architects returning to Rome, Paul III’s quickly issued call for a renewed commitment to preserving Rome’s antiquities was tantamount to an evocation of Raphael’s methods. In the interim after Raphael’s death and before the Sack, antiquarianism had been the strength of Raphael’s legacy.51 Charles Stinger has noted that the survivors in the younger generation of Raphael’s followers – including Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, Parmagianino, and Rosso Fiorentino – all developed manners of painting that departed from their master’s style.52 But with Marcia Hall’s convincing identification of a relief-like style, we now see that each strove to infuse his work with an erudite antiquarianism that followed his lost master’s example.53 The paintings of the Sala di Costantino stand as the touchstone. Not only are they conspicuous in their display antiquarian rigor, they also form concrete evidence for the universality of Raphael’s method: his followers were

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able to carry out his unrealized plans to an astonishingly sophisticated degree by studying specific antique monuments and incorporating them into the finished work.54 Some of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman designs make clear that he studied these frescoes closely. For example, he derived some of the figures in his printed variation of Raphael’s Expulsion of Heliodorus [fig. 8.3] from the Donation of Rome rather than the earlier fresco that provided the overall model.55 A drawing by Van Heemskerck in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art portraying the Adoration of the Shepherds also bears figures suggesting his observation of the Donation.56 A post-Sack revival of Raphael’s antiquarian methods was thus an appropriate response to Paul’s preservationist rhetoric, a response that was within the grasp of his successors. It is no coincidence that the notion of the universality of Raphael’s methods would later become the lynchpin of Vasari’s biographical vision of the deceased artist.57 Vasari was in Rome in the 1530s. In the projects of artists in post-Sack Rome, we see not only the survival of Raphael’s approach to Rome’s ruins, but its further development. The intensive study and knowledge of ruins was crucial for one of Raphael’s most important antiquarian ambitions, which he left unfinished at the time of his death. Raphael’s declared intention to Leo X that he would “make a drawing of ancient Rome – at least as far as [could] be understood” from the ruins available to him in his own time is perhaps the most ambitious of Raphael’s projects left unfinished at the time of his death.58 The regret that Venetian emissary Marcantonio Michiel expressed, that Raphael never lived to complete this study of ancient Rome, was doubtless also felt in the antiquarian community that was integral in defining Van Heemskerck’s Roman experience.59 We can interpret Raphael’s brief description of the project a few different ways. He could have meant that he intended to draw either a map, a document of the city’s remains, or a reconstruction of ancient Rome. Whatever he had in mind, it appears also to have entailed something along the lines of what Van Heemskerck produced while he was in the Eternal City: drawings of Rome’s ruins. We know that Raphael had begun; while we have no Roman topographical drawings by him, in the preface to his Antiquitates Vrbis Andrea Fulvio reports that only weeks before Raphael’s death, he was out with the artist as he conducted research on the monuments of antiquity by drawing the ruins.60 One suspects that the archeologically minded antiquarian artists and architects working in the post-Sack milieu, including Van Heemskerck, drew Rome’s antiquities in a variety of ways that,

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collectively, constitute a range of interpretations of Raphael’s forever incomplete agenda, attempts to fulfill his unrealized goal. For example, in 1534, Bartholomeo Marliani issued his own attempt to account for ancient Rome, his Topographia Urbis Romae.61 Baldassare Peruzzi, in Rome during the time of Van Heemskerck’s stay, had also amassed a corpus of drawings of Rome’s antiquities, mostly plans and reconstructions of the city’s ancient buildings. These drawings later formed the basis for Sebastiano Serlio’s landmark illustrated architectural treatise. Van Heemskerck also met Giorgio Vasari and Francesco Salviati, who Vasari himself reports spent significant time out in the disabitato, drawing Rome’s ruins by day and sharing their work in the evenings. This ensured, Vasari explained, that they could each have as much of the Eternal City on paper as possible and thus gain a greater pictorial knowledge of Rome. Van Heemskerck’s encounters with them could have refined his general notion of Rome as a storehouse of motifs – a notion already apparent to Van Heemskerck from his time in Van Scorel’s workshop – into a more specific focus on the city’s ancient buildings and vistas. It is Peruzzi’s approach to antiquity, especially his compositional schemes, that resonates most with Van Heemskerck’s postRoman imagery. Van Heemskerck may have already known about Peruzzi’s work before ever arriving in Rome, as a result of his time in Jan van Scorel’s workshop. In the early 1520s, Van Scorel and Peruzzi had both been in Rome working for Cardinal Willem van Enckevoirt.62 The high-ranking Cardinal could have easily introduced Van Heemskerck to the Sienese painter / architect. Ilja Veldman has already demonstrated Van Heemskerck’s attentiveness to Peruzzi’s art by identifying his assimilation of the figure group from Peruzzi’s fresco of Vulcan’s Forge in the Villa Farnesina’s Sala delle Prospettive [fig. 3.3].63 Van Heemskerck’s print of “Gideon Destroying the Altar of Baal,” from his Story of Gideon series [fig. 3.8] further demonstrates his careful study of Vulcan’s Forge.64 His quotation of Peruzzi’s illusionistic fresco of a loggia in the same room for his print of the eighth commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness,” [fig. 3.9] also indicates his knowledge of Peruzzi’s art.65 However, the impact on Van Heemskerck of Peruzzi’s inventiveness with topography all’antica has escaped attention. As is well known, Peruzzi was at the forefront of efforts to image Rome’s ancient architecture.66 His image-based study of the city’s ruins formed the basis for the most groundbreaking aspect of Serlio’s

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figure 3.8 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Gideon Destroying the Altar of Baal,” The Story of Gideon, 1561, Object number RP-P-1961-433, ink on paper, 203 × 251 mm., Rijksmseum, Amsterdam

figure 3.9 Harmen Janszoon Muller after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Susanna Accused by the Elders),” The Ten Commandments, c. 1566, Registration number 1949, 0709.16, ink on paper, 210 × 247 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

treatise: its status as the first illustrated publication on architecture of early modernity.67 Peruzzi’s panoramic fresco of Rome in the Villa Farnesina’s Sala delle Prospettive shows only antiquities and modern buildings after the antique, as do Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome in a broad-view panoramic format.68 Moreover, Peruzzi’s use of Rome’s topography as a source for new pictorial inventions in the ancient manner, especially in his scenographic backdrops, is the clearest precedent for Van Heemskerck’s own inventions of architectural fantasie all’antica, so prevalent in his post-Roman oeuvre.69 For example, Van Heemskerck’s “People of Ninevah Repenting Upon Hearing Jonah’s Prophecies” [fig. 3.10] presents a backdrop after the antique that is strikingly similar to Peruzzi’s formulations for

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Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “People of Ninevah Repenting Upon Hearing Jonah’s Prophecies,” Story of Jonah, 1548–52, Object number RP-P-BI-6583, ink on paper, 178 × 120 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 3.11 Sebastiano Serlio, “Scena Tragica,” The Five Books of Architecture, II, 1545, Accession number 37.56.2(1–5), f. 25, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of W. Gedney Beatty, 1941

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theatrical backdrops [fig. 3.5] as well as the Scena Tragica they inspired [fig. 3.11], appearing in Sebastiano Serlio’s book on perspective. In the same way that we trace Peruzzi’s interest in Rome’s architectural antiquities from Raphael to his own work, we also identify the Raphael circle as the origin of Vasari’s and Salviati’s program of drawing antiquities. Vasari’s description of the drawing practices of Raphael adherents, Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze, provides a vivid indication of his views on the importance of drawing antiquities for the cultivation of one’s faculties of invention after the antique: They began to study the antiquities of Rome, copying marble antiques in their grisaille, so that there was not a vase, statue, sarcophagus, relief, or any other thing, whether whole or broken, which they did not design or make use of. By this means they both acquired the ancient style.70 In addition to asserting that Polidoro and Maturino absorbed the ancient manner by drawing antiquities, Vasari’s description indicates that ancient fragments were as useful as unbroken works for composing art in the ancient manner. Unfortunately, Vasari does not describe their study of ancient architectural ruins. However, Polidoro’s frescos in San Silvestro al Quirinale [e.g., fig. 3.12] suggest that he approached architecture the same way he and Maturino approached sculpture. Marcia Hall has cited the paintings as innovative for their compositional emphasis on landscape, perhaps in the ancient manner found in the Domus Aurea.71 Richard Turner earlier argued that Polidoro was more directly indebted to a lost landscape fresco in San Silvestro’s garden, a portrayal by Peruzzi of the story of St. Bernard.72 Regardless, the paintings both contain architecture that seems to have resulted from Polidoro’s own explorations of Rome’s ruins. The buildings in the left middle ground of the Noli me Tangere painting of Polidoro’s Story of Mary Magdalen fresco [fig. 3.12] appear as an imaginative reinvention of those in the northwest quadrant of the Forum Romanum. Perhaps Polidoro has extended the famous ruined columns and cornice of the Temple of Castor into a full loggia. A circular roof also peeks over the temple’s cornice, perhaps inspired by the Forum’s nearby church of San Teodoro. Van Heemskerck drew

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Cat. no. 3

figure 3.12 Polidoro da Caravaggio, “Noli me Tangere,” Story of Mary Magdalen, 1525, fresco, Fra Mariano Fetti Chapel, San Silvestro al Quirinale, Rome

the forum from a similar angle [cat. no. 3], from the foot of the Capitoline while facing southeast, showing San Teodoro in a similar relation to the ruins before it. Vasari claims that he and Francesco Salviati (1510–1563) undertook a drawing program like the one he describes by Polidoro and Maturino. He claims that he and his fellow Florentine each drew in a different place in Rome by day. Then, in the evening, they would reconnoiter to trade and copy each other’s drawings so that they could “have drawings of everything” and “learn more thoroughly.”73 Such practices may in turn resemble those of Van Heemskerck and his countrymen. Some sheets in the Berlin albums may be copies by ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus of drawings by Van Heemskerck. Others, in which both artists render the same monument from virtually the same angle, may have also resulted from a trade-and-copy scenario like the one Vasari says he practiced with Salviati.74 This post-Sack urge to record antiquity’s visual aspect for the purpose of inventions all’antica, born of Raphael’s unfulfilled directive, is a crucial framework to keep in mind when looking closely at Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome. The image of the Roman landscape was of dire importance to Roman culture during the period when Van Heemskerck drew it. Like his fellow artists in Rome during his stay, Van Heemskerck was deeply responsive to this postSack milieu.

Drawing Ruins in Post-Sack Rome



Charles V’s Triumphal Procession

Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s triumph through Rome on April 5th, 1536 gave closure to the narrative that the Sack had set in motion. Moreover, it affirmed the post-Sack currency of Rome’s ancient ruins by utilizing them as a powerful backdrop for visualizing the triumph’s proclamation of his imperial power. Van Heemskerck’s observation of and possible participation in preparations for the triumph likely consummated his developing notion of Rome’s ruined antiquities as laden with pictorial possibilities.75 With Charles’s triumph, the symbolic import of Roman ruins reached its post-Sack zenith.76 A gift from Paul III to honor Charles’s victory over the Ottomans at Tunis, the triumph was a delicate triangulation of Charles’s imperial ambit, papal power, and the memory of Rome, all broadcast via the image of Charles processing through city’s architectural antiquities.77 Charles requested a route through the Forum Romanum so that he could “see the marvelous antiquities” therein.78 After entering Rome from the south, through the gate of San Sebastiano, he proceeded north on the Via Appia, towards the forum. Upon navigating the forum, Charles passed through an ephemeral arch located in Piazza San Marco erected especially for the occasion. From there, the route culminated at the Vatican. As a reversal of the customary Papal coronation possesso – which proceeded from the Vatican, through the forum, and on to the Lateran – Charles’s triumphal route contrasted his secular imperial authority with Paul’s spiritual authority. As such, the agreed upon route confirmed Charles’s Roman imperial status and a Roman renovatio via Vatican authority. In the context of Charles’s procession it was not only the decaying aspect of Rome’s ruins that took center stage, but their significance as embodiments of antiquity’s endurance and fragility. Charles procession thus also represented a culminating moment for Rome’s artistic heritage. It announced the far-reaching temporal significance of the Eternal City’s ruins and thus represented an opportunity for the city’s post-Sack artistic culture to reclaim its archeological inheritance from earlier generations. André Chastel has shown that the traditional view that the Sack demoralized Roman patrons and artists beyond significant productions only holds for the short period of its immediate aftermath.79 The preparations for Charles’s procession fulfilled the slow but steady restoration of artistic activity in the Eternal City. Paul ordered extensive renovations for the site. Perhaps most indicative of the post-Sack consciousness that informed the staging

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of Charles’s entry was the demolition of some of the forum’s medieval buildings. These renovations resulted in the straightening of the Forum’s main thoroughfare, the Via Sacra. But more than this, they clarified the site’s ancient aspect for the very purpose of showcasing the man who had both sacked and saved Rome. The Emperor’s request to see Rome’s antiquities coupled with the Roman means for meeting it suggests a collective awareness of the profundity in the very image of Rome’s ruins. For Charles to see the antiquities while being seen processing through them doubtless suggested to viewers that they link him to the Eternal City’s venerable past. Moreover, to process through a new arch made especially in his honor indicated a consummation of this continuity while suggesting Charles’s importance for the regeneration of the Eternal City. The use of Roman architectural scenery for rhetorical purposes could not have been new to Van Heemskerck. He saw paintings by Roman artists that used architectural backdrops for rhetorical ends. One crucial example is Giulio / Raphael production, the Baptism of Constantine, c. 1522, in the Vatican’s Sala di Costantino. The fresco shows the emperor supplicant before the Pope at the altar of Rome’s titular church, San Giovanni in Laterano, the Pope’s seat as “Bishop of Rome.” This relation of figures to their architectural backdrop expresses the Vatican’s domain over the city of Rome, represented here by the Lateran, as well as her imperial past. The use of the Lateran altar as scenery is as significant as the figures themselves for reminding viewers of the Vatican’s encompassment of history. According to Vasari, a crew of Netherlanders under the supervision of “un Martino,” thought by some to be Van Heemskerck, which also likely included Posthumus, helped to decorate the new arch in Piazza San Marco with grisaille battle scenes commemorating Charles’s victory.80 Whether or not Van Heemskerck functioned in this particular role, his drawings of Rome remain a product of the same post-Sack moment as the procession. Reading them in the context of the procession proves fruitful. By the spring of 1536 when Charles arrived in Rome for the triumph, Van Heemskerck had been drawing the city’s antiquities for four years. He had thus cultivated a unique form of familiarity with the monuments on Charles’s route; he must have already drawn many of them. The most famous example of a drawing by Van Heemskerck that may tell us something about Charles’s procession is the famous double-sheet medium-view panorama of the Forum [cat. no. 1]. Both sides of this stunning vedute show the antiquities on the Capitoline and Quirinal hills to the northeast and northwest of the forum,

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respectively. Their execution inevitably afforded Van Heemskerck an exceptionally discerning notion of the significance of an antiquity-filled vista for the procession’s impact, as well as its gravitas and grand scale. For example, in addition to Van Heemskerck’s double sheet view of the forum, drawn from the foot of the Palatine looking north, and his drawing looking towards the Forum through the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16], show the same vistas that Charles would have seen while processing through the space. Reciprocally, Van Heemskerck’s majestic large-scale pen and ink wash view of the Forum looking south from the Capitoline’s Tabularium [cat. no. 2] allows us to imagine the spectator’s intake of the procession’s millennial splendor. Scholars have suggested that the double-sheet drawing may show some of the renovations and demolitions of the site that Paul initiated in order to accommodate Charles.81 However, Van Heemskerck’s drawing contains too many departures from the site as we know it appeared in the 1530s to be a reliable point of chronological or topographical reference. For example, not present in Van Heemskerck’s drawing are non-antique topographical elements such as the encasement on the arch of Septimius Severus, the campanile of Ss. Sergio e Bacco, and San Lorenzo in Miranda. However, these pictorial alterations by Van Heemskerck are in the same spirit as Paul’s renovations and Charles’s request. In their own ways, all three focused on the Forum’s antiquities above all else. Van Heemskerck’s drawing is thus as Charles wished to view the Forum and as Paul tried to remake it: as a display of antiquities. Seeing the Forum Romanum renovated for Charles V’s procession could have only enriched Van Heemskerck’s notion of the site’s visuality. The sheer number of vantage points from which he drew there suggests that he undertook a careful selection process from a range of possibilities. The public nature of the ancient site’s function – where Romans went to see and be seen while observing, contributing to, and consuming public life – ensured that its combination of natural and urban topography was always emphatically oriented around notions of vision. Thus, it seems, the site’s preponderance of antiquities arranged to serve myriad performative functions at the heart of Roman public life drew him to it. The area lent itself well to the vedute and the cultivation of one’s eye required for conceiving ruin vistas within the frame.

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Memory and Maarten van Heemskerck’s Eternal Eye

Discovering the Vestiges of Ancient Rome in the Frame

Like an archeologist of the view, Van Heemskerck used his pictorializing eye to “unearth” compelling images of Rome that had been awaiting discovery for centuries. In so doing, he cultivated several forms of memory from the Eternal City’s topography. Ostensibly, his drawings provide us with a record of Rome’s architectural antiquities and topography as they appeared in the 1530s. However, as we discuss the relation of what Van Heemskerck saw to what he drew, specific aspects of his drawings demand that we qualify such a statement at the outset. While it is possible to use them to catalog which of the city’s ancient ruins were extant at the time, careful scrutiny reveals some examples in which his pictorial or antiquarian interests – or both – prompted him to revise the vistas before him in a variety of ways. It would thus be reductive to describe his corpus of Roman drawings as a document of the “actual appearance” of Rome “as he found it.” However, we would be equally misguided to place Van Heemskerck’s drawings in the same category as those ruin vedute among the more capricious revisions of the Roman landscape produced by Marco Dente, Antoine Lafréry, Antonio Salamanca, Étienne Du Pérac, and later, Van Heemskerck’s collaborator, Hieronymus Cock.1 Compared to those images, most of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings display a startling fidelity to the Roman landscape. Thus, if we are to set about the task of enumerating the forms of memory his drawings contain, it behooves us to begin by describing them as a record of his cultivation of pictorial knowledge of Rome’s topography in the 1530s. As fraught with conditions as this phrasing may sound, it is most suitable; Van Heemskerck’s drawings record his mediation between the city’s topographical realities and the pictorial poetics in his drawn vision of them. As such, they also served as a set of vivid, resonant prompts for memory and knowledge in discussions of artistry, antiquity, history, and their relations to present conditions. As side-by-side comparisons between his drawings and his post-Roman works make clear, and as others have observed,

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the drawings also provided him with a fountainhead of motifs for his post-Roman pictorial inventions after the antique.2 We begin our close analysis with Van Heemskerck’s views of Rome’s ruins by considering their moment of genesis. This is a moment of topographical navigation and pictorial visualization, when he deliberated on how best to translate the antiquities before him onto paper, within the frame.3 Collectively, his drawings of Rome reveal an exacting approach to selecting vantage points from which to begin formulating compositions. He mediated the vista on the one hand, and his body, eye, mind, and abundant vocabulary of compositional schemes, which he learned from the art of his predecessors and contemporaries, on the other. A consideration of the vantage points for these drawings should not only entail a determination of a spot from where Van Heemskerck drew; we should also consider the presumed spot from which the viewer sees the vista as each drawing presents it, or said another way, the spot where the drawing alleges that the viewer stands while looking at the vista. As facile and insignificant as this distinction may seem at first, these two vantage points are not exactly the same. Moreover, their distinction is crucial for considering the relation of viewing to making. We are prudent to bear in mind Leonardo da Vinci’s differentiation between experiential viewing and pictorial viewing. We view objects, the Florentine painter states, from “two points of sight, one in the center of each eye.” Thus, he points out, “the rays from each point of sight … take in … some part of the distance … whereas, in a painted representation … the whole being a flat surface … which is the real extremity of the view, the eyes cannot acquire a sight of anything beyond.”4 While Van Heemskerck composed his drawings out of the vistas before him, he occupied the three-dimensional realm. But the objects in the vistas he created, of course, occupy the two-dimensional realm. Thus, to compose and then execute some drawings, he rotated his body or shifted his placement as he recorded a view. As a result, drawings present their audience with vantage points from multiple points of origin, all in a fluid relation to one another, and crystallized into an apparently singular stasis. An extreme if somewhat simplistic example clarifies most vividly these conditions for composing; for his view of the Arch of Titus framing the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 16], Van Heemskerck employs the arch as a framing device for a view of the monuments in the forum beyond. To make the drawing, he assumed at least two vantage points. One is from outside the Forum, on the south side of the arch, where he rendered its engaged columns, the foreshortened

Memory and Maarten van Heemskerck ’ s Eternal Eye

coffering of its passageway, its frieze, and famous inscription. However, to render the view of the forum that appears framed within the arch, he had to venture through the arch and into the forum. We know this because gazing at the forum through the arch before entering does not allow us to see it as Van Heemskerck’s drawing alleges. And yet, the drawing presents its viewers with a presumed vantage point outside the arch. Other drawings suggest subtler shifts of initial vantage point. For example, to draw his famous doublesheeted view of the Forum [cat. no. 1], Van Heemskerck had to turn his head if not reposition himself entirely; the eye could not focus on the Temple of Castor and Pollux at far left in the same moment as the Divus Romulus at far right. By the same token, even drawings of single buildings or objects require at least the rotation of the head or body to record a building’s details. Thus, in the context of their inception, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings record a seemingly infinite series of mediations – from subtle to extreme – between his eye and body, the vista, and the pictorial reality his drawings proclaim. The Roman drawings also document Van Heemskerck’s negotiation of topography with frame and picture plane. Where Rome invited him with tantalizing vistas overflowing with antiquities, as it does within the Forum, he made discriminating choices. He selected vantage points that allowed for the most harmonious composition and the least amount of revision of the topographical truths in the view before him. He rendered the site at least five times if not more [cat. nos. 1–4 and 16].5 A few examples across his Roman drawings oeuvre contain obvious, even extreme revisions of the topography on view [e.g. cat. no. 27], which we explore in chapter 6 as indications of his nascent inventiveness. He also committed some revisions of the vistas before him of a subtler nature [e.g. the “movement” of the column of Marcus Aurelius further east to a spot where it is viewable in the left half of cat. no. 1]. Where the topography offered him a number of vantage points from which to choose, as from atop or around the Palatine [cat. nos. 9–15], he drew several views in several directions. Conversely, some drawings indicate that where the lay of the land was not so cooperative, he was undaunted in his pursuit of places with views lending themselves to picturing. In some cases, he had to gain access to privileged or semi-privileged areas. He could only have executed his views of private sculpture collections [cat. nos. 61–68] with cooperation from their owners.6 Similarly, while he executed some of his broad-view panoramas from easily accessed vantage points atop Rome’s hills, we also know he climbed church bell towers [cat. nos. 56 and 58] to execute others. To gain the optimal

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vantage point for making still other views, such as his worm’s eye view of an overturned late imperial capital [cat. no. 17] he must have laid on the ground. Thus, we marvel not only at the sheer variety of compositional frameworks among Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, we also marvel at his achievement of such variety. Among Van Heemskerck’s extant views of Rome’s topography, twelve present the exterior of one entire structure occupying most of the frame in perspective [e.g., cat. nos. 24 and 25].7 Most, however, show multiple buildings within a single frame at medium range from the picture plane [e.g., cat. nos. 3 and 4].8 Beholding Rome from a distance, he drew at least four panoramas so wide-angled that they demand classification unto themselves [cat. nos. 56–60].9 Familiarization with the general pictorial values each of these fundamental compositional schemes reveals basic aspects of Van Heemskerck’s process for composing. It moreover, adumbrates his developing encyclopedic memory of the pictorial tendencies in his Netherlandish and Roman milieux. Thus, it also facilitates our analysis of their multivalent mnemonic functions. Although Van Heemskerck’s decision to draw “portraits” of single buildings may at first seem a pedestrian one, we find in these drawings a most subtle revelation of the various forms of awareness that pervade his entire corpus of Roman vedute. Examples suggest his responsiveness to the variety in Rome’s built environment. Monumental buildings dominating their surroundings such as the Colosseum [cat. no 21], and St. Peter’s [cat. no. 43], suggested the single building format to him. Examples make clear that when choosing a vantage point to render a single building, Van Heemskerck always considered carefully the relationships of a building’s parts to one another, the picture plane, and the borders of the page. Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the Septizonium [cat. nos. 24 and 25] afford us the rare opportunity to see two solutions to the pictorial demands that such pictures engender; with its singular focus, this compositional scheme establishes the identity of a building. Moreover, even in this seemingly simple format, Van Heemskerck indulged his interest in the pictorial qualities of his subject to evoke his audience’s consciousness of Roman space; in most examples, he rendered the building on view along with a sense of surrounding topography, unlike the more scientific decontextualizations we find on some sheets in the Codex Escurialensis or in those attributed to ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus.10 The renderings of the Septizonium are notable exceptions. Tending towards higher finishes and greater detail, thus inviting close inspection, Van Heemskerck’s drawings of single buildings

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also suggest a display function. As such, they anticipate the kind of discourse on architecture and antiquity among architects, painters, antiquarians and cognoscenti that inspired Sebastiano Serlio’s illustrated treatises, then only a few short years from publication.11 In many places, however, Rome’s ruins are concentrated in clusters. As such, the topography of many vistas suggests drawing at a medium distance from the picture plane, as Van Heemskerck did on several extant sheets. Perhaps Van Heemskerck’s most deft example of this sort is his double-sheeted drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1] The chosen vantage point in this drawing – and in others falling into this category – is neither exceptionally high nor low, neither distant nor close. Compositions focus our attention on buildings in the middle ground and give less emphasis to depth, the extreme foreground or distant background.12 That objects are not close enough to the picture plane to warrant the portrayal of ornamental details determines other pictorial emphases: negotiating a more difficult choice of vantage point, the proportions and spatial relations between objects – hills, rows of columns, facades – become the overarching priorities of such pictures. The compositional aspect of these medium-view panoramas bears such a strong resemblance to Van Scorel’s masterful drawing of Bethlehem [fig. 2.6] that we must consider the possibility that the pictorial clarity in Van Scorel’s example (and perhaps others now lost) made a strong impression on Van Heemskerck.13 As his master did before Bethlehem’s ruins, Van Heemskerck has chosen vantage points for his medium-range panoramas to show all buildings foreshortened, making them appear as if in “high relief” from the scenery behind them. As a result, the groups of buildings in Van Heemskerck’s medium-view panoramas never appear as if they occupy a compressed space as they do in the Codex Escurialensis.14 The drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1] also provides an instructive example of Van Heemskerck’s exceptionally deliberative approach to discovering an optimal vantage point for rendering a group of buildings at medium range. The terrain at the northern foot of the Palatine where he stood to compose this view would have allowed him to draw from many spots. Comparisons with other images of the buildings that appear in Van Heemskerck’s left sheet drawn from slightly different vantage points reveal just how elusive is the legibility that Van Heemskerck achieved in the Forum. Movements of a few feet in either direction have a seismic impact on a drawing’s entire composition. For example, the ruins of the Temples of Saturn and Vespasian, easily read from Van Heemskerck’s vantage

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figure 4.1 Anonymous Roman Artist (formerly attributed to Etiénne Du Pérac), “View of the Forum Romanum,” Disegni de le Ruine di Roma e Come Anticamente Erono, 1574, MS number M.1106, ff. 16v–17, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York, photo by Janny Chiu

figure 4.2 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, North End of the Forum Romanum, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 12r, ink on paper, 196 × 147 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

point, struggle to distinguish themselves from the backdrop of the Tabularium in a print by an anonymous Roman artist of the 1570s [fig. 4.1] even though the artist of the latter example drew from a vantage point near Van Heemskerck’s. Nor does Van Heemskerck impose a false order on the Forum’s topography by portraying buildings as if they recede to a single vanishing point, as we see in this example.15 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus also attempted to overcome the pictorial challenges presented by the north end of the Forum.16 From a vantage point only subtly different from Van

Memory and Maarten van Heemskerck ’ s Eternal Eye

Heemskerck’s, the artist was only able to show part of the ruins of the Temple of Castor because Palatine substructures get in its way. In turn, the temple obscures the Arch of Septimius Severus behind it and blocks our view of the buildings on the Capitoline. The chosen vantage point also renders the Temples of Saturn and Vespasian inconspicuous and nearly illegible, tucked away in a clutter at lower left. Meanwhile, the lower right quadrant of the ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus drawing is empty, creating an unsettling compositional imbalance. By contrast, Van Heemskerck’s vantage point required remarkably little tinkering for the sake of a successful composition on the left sheet.17 Of the many early modern artists who attempted drawings and prints of this famous vista, Van Heemskerck is the only one we know was astute enough to arrive at this specific vantage point as the solution for presenting the Forum’s north end optimally.18 The vantage point he chose displays each ruin in its own pictorial space with such apparent ease that we only realize the subtle difficulty with which he achieved such clarity after looking at the attempts of others. Devising drawings broader in scope, approaching the panoramic, demanded a no less compositionally adroit sense of the vista. Even in a city featuring a topography defined by hills, pictorially favorable vantage points are difficult to discover; such drawings require the inclusion of more of the vista within the frame. Each of Van Heemskerck’s broadest view panoramas encompasses a large portion of the Eternal City.19 Only one, drawn from Monte Mario [cat. no. 59], does not portray Rome from an exceptionally high vantage point. Despite its low point of view, however, this drawing shows a sweeping view of Rome’s topography at a great distance, the roughly two-mile span from the foot of the Quirinal at left all the way to the Janiculum at right.20 Van Heemskerck drew his other three broadview panoramas from among Rome’s highest places: the Aventine Hill, Porta San Pancrazio on the Janiculum Hill, and the campanile of Old St. Peter’s.21 His views from the Janiculum Hill and the campanile of Old St. Peter’s [cat. nos. 57 and 58, respectively] are the earliest known drawings of the vistas they portray.22 Van Heemskerck was certainly familiar with the concept of the broad-view panorama before ever seeing Rome. He may have seen the panoramic depiction of Rome in Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Cronicarum, or Lucas Cranach’s appropriation of it for his image of a fallen Babylon in Martin Luther’s September Testament (1522).23 But his tenure in Jan van Scorel’s workshop provided more specific opportunities for considering how to reconcile sweeping panoramic

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vistas in nature with the four borders framing a sheet of drawing paper or painted surface.24 Where Van Mander discusses Van Scorel’s drawing of Jerusalem for use in his monumental Entry into Jerusalem [fig. 2.9], he is surely discussing a broad-view panoramic landscape drawing.25 If the painting is an accurate reflection of the now-lost Jerusalem drawing, then Van Scorel drew the Holy City in a broad-view format, just as Van Heemskerck drew Rome after him: after having chosen a high vantage point where he could take in the entire city in one glance.26 Doubtless, Rome’s inherently panoramic aspect provided encouragement to Van Heemskerck to draw the city in broad-view frameworks. Its topography of numerous hills and high vantage points makes inevitable a broad-view gaze over its interior, overflowing as it is with storied monuments. As such, Rome lends itself to the discovery of breathtaking, sweeping vistas that tempt one to verify the identity of the distant buildings on view via knowledge and recollection: one’s own memory of their appearances, names, and locations in relation to one another. We see just such an activity in a panorama of Rome from the Capitoline, which Hülsen and Egger gave to ‘Anonymous A,’ perhaps by Van Heemskerck’s travel companion Hermannus Posthumus [fig. 4.3]; the artist has labeled the far away buildings. While the low finish of Van Heemskerck’s drawn responses to the Eternal City’s boundless vistas gives them a “dashed off” feel, a closer look reveals that he drew them out of a thorough knowledge of the Roman landscape, which drove a selective vision favoring the antiquities in his sight.27 Comparing any of Van Heemskerck’s panoramas with the example by ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus or Hendrick van Cleve’s later stipple-riddled view of Rome from the Esquiline Hill [fig. 4.4], reveals Van Heemskerck’s selective vision for antiquities (and a concomitant freedom from horror vacui).28 Unlike his compatriots, who tried to draw everything they saw before them, Van Heemskerck tended to portray only the antique portions of urban density within his gaze, eliminating the medieval buildings in view. Likewise, a comparison of Van Heemskerck’s view of the Tiber from the Aventine [cat. no. 56] with drawings of the same area in the Codex Escurialensis and by Hendrik Gijsmans also reveals Van Heemskerck’s comparative lack of concern with the non-antique elements of the vista.29 Long before Van Heemskerck’s visit to Rome, other artists had portrayed the city in a broad-view panoramic format according to similarly selective parameters. For example, as we come upon the

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representation of Rome by Pietro del Massaio, or even the view of the city appearing in the Weltchronik, we know we view Rome via either image’s presentation of the city via its most recognizable and historically important buildings, the ones with which we associate Rome, the ones that define its vistas but also its identity.30 The Italian example most like Van Heemskerck’s broad-view panoramas, however, is Baldassare Peruzzi’s fresco in the villa Farnesina’s Sala delle Prospettive, which we know Van Heemskerck visited.31 Peruzzi covered the Sala’s four walls with a panorama of Rome showing only antiquities and more recent constructions after the antique. As chapter 6 makes clear, drawing Rome in broad-views had an immediate utility for Van Heemskerck; he also painted a monumental broad-view panorama near the end of his Roman stay, the famous Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], which contains invented topography that is highly reminiscent of Rome and topographical configurations that are indebted to Van Heemskerck’s broad-view drawings of Rome from the Aventine Hill [cat. no.56] and the Janiculum Hill [cat. no. 57].32 Sequencing our survey of compositional schemes in Van Heemskerck’s Roman vedute from images of single-buildings to increasingly broad-views suggests the act of drawing Rome over the entirety of his corpus as an ongoing topographical navigation, the creation of a record of his discoveries of Roman spaces. As such, these examples show Van Heemskerck learning how to compose and invent with the visual elements in the vistas before him. There is also no doubt that the paintings he encountered in his pre-Roman training and the Italian paintings he saw in Rome had a significant impact on the general compositional tendencies we see on display in his Roman drawings. Moreover, it is also clear that after Rome, he continued to work as a voracious consumer and reviser of the motifs in the paintings and prints he encountered. However, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings bear no evidence that he borrowed any specific vantage points or compositional schemes from drawings of Roman vistas by others. Instead, Van Heemskerck incorporated the compositional vocabulary he absorbed from the art of others with his perception of the vistas before him in order to tap into a canon of vantage points readymade in the natural and built features of Rome’s topography. We thus see his variety of pictorial devices in his corpus of Roman vedute as a record of his heuristic process of topographical pictorial discovery.

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figure 4.3 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Panorama of Rome from the Capitoline Hill, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 91v and 92r, ink on paper, 198–200 × 787 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin figure 4.4 Hendrick van Cleve, Panorama of Rome from the Esquiline Hill, 1585, Inventory number 6606, ink on paper, 249 × 393 mm., Fondation Custodia / Frits Lugt Collection, Paris



The Compelling Space and the Epochal Time of Van Heemskerck’s Ruinscapes

The majority of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome’s buildings and vistas – an astonishing thirty sheets – bear compositions that present the city’s ruins in ways that aggressively emphasize his developing consciousness of the spatial aspect of the city’s vistas. The compositions of these drawings memorialize his inhabitation of a vista. Reciprocally, they also suggest the viewer’s inhabitation of it. His drawings achieving this affect do so via his masterful deployment

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of a range of emphatically dynamic compositional devices: extreme foreshortenings or foregroundings [e.g., cat. no. 70], worm’s eye views [e.g., cat. nos. 17, 22], asymmetrical compositions with objects portrayed in ways that challenge the picture plane [e.g., cat. no. 18], and fictive juxtapositions of monuments in different parts of the city [e.g., cat. no. 33].33 In these examples, topographical elements challenge the picture plane’s separation of the viewer from the pictorial realm and appear to enter the viewer’s space, and extremely low vantage points. Typical examples offset a foregrounded topographical element at left or right with a distant building or group of buildings in the opposite corner [e.g., cat. nos. 6 and 7], or a group of buildings that recede from left to right or vice versa [e.g., cat. nos. 3 and 4]. In some examples, we peer through an arch or portico to view a vista [e.g., cat. nos. 16 and 20] or an architectural backdrop [cat. no. 36]. In others, circular structures recede dramatically from a point close to the picture plane [e.g., cat. nos. 18 and 42]. In the most extreme examples, Van Heemskerck has rendered some objects so near to the picture plane that they only partially appear within the frame [e.g., cat. no. 22], or he has placed his viewer at an extremely low vantage point [cat. no. 17]. With such forceful suggestions of the viewer’s inhabitation of the spaces portrayed, he has, in turn, made more vivid the notion of memory they contain. A searching for the origins of this particular pictorial tendency turns up little that is conclusive. At the very least, however, Van Heemskerck’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt [fig. 2.2], which features the Virgin and Christ in the

Cat. no. 22

Cat. no. 18

Cat. no. 36

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left extreme foreground while Joseph toils in the distance at right, indicates that a nascent inclination to make such extreme compositions possessed him before he ever set foot in Rome.34 In his postRoman work, it was a compositional device to which he returned repeatedly, in hand-held prints and monumental paintings alike [e.g., figs. 6.12 and 7.1]. Van Heemskerck’s carefully worked portrayal of an overturned capital before the Colosseum [cat. no. 17] is among his most spatially evocative Roman drawings.35 And with this example, we discover the poetics in such a compositional scheme. The drawing stands as one of his most vivid summonings of antiquity’s ephemeral place within nature’s sphere of dominance, his viewer’s place within this epochal spectacle, and his own crucial role in portraying it as such. He forthrightly confronts his audience with a fallen architectural fragment, resplendent with vegetal motifs, which he has placed amidst creeping vegetation. An exquisite complex of contour lines and hatches describing the capital’s bead and reel volutes and acanthus leaves mimics and commingles with the arcs and arabesques that describe the scene’s grass, leaves, and branches. Meanwhile, in the distance, delicate strokes articulating the Colosseum’s cracks, jags, broken arches, and vegetal onset all but define the ancient amphitheater’s entire form. With its commingling of nature and the ruin of Roman antiquity’s colossus, its greatest architectural masterpiece, the drawing directs thoughtful viewers to extend their memories beyond the relatively short spans of their own lives. The drawing’s spatial poetics are equally instrumental in its appeal to memory. Van Heemskerck’s choice to show antiquities in the extreme foreground and background from a worm’s-eye perspective is inescapable. It places the notion of space – and the inhabiting of it – at the forefront in a series of notions his drawing imparts. Moreover, such a pictorial choice impresses upon viewers the idea of contemplating the spatial aspect of the ruins. The capital’s nearest volute, foreshortened and close enough to the picture plane to suggest its entry into our space, is Van Heemskerck’s overt appeal to viewers to partake of the pictorial space he has conceived and executed so masterfully. Many other examples from among his Roman drawings contain variations on this dynamic spatial approach. In what appears to be a pendant of sorts to the overturned capital drawing, we gaze up at the Arch of Constantine [cat. no 22], which zooms out of the left frame, heavily foreshortened. Again, the Colosseum peaks at us from the right distant background, again the embodiment of millennial decay. The verso side of the same sheet [cat. no. 18] confronts us with

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a close foreshortening of the Colosseum. Its famous northwestern break approaches us, exiting out of the right frame close to the picture plane. Its circular shape recedes to the background leading to the mottled remains of the Baths of Trajan, which appear to merge with the nature that envelops them, an almost abstract pastiche of Van Heemskerck’s dashes, hatches, and arcs. An oft overlooked extreme close-up of architectural fragments [cat. no. 70] features the skeletal remains of lintel and capitals of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina emerging atop the horizon line in the distant background. It is clear from the quantity of Van Heemskerck’s emphatically spatial drawings and their mostly consistent fidelity to the Roman landscape as he found it that places among Rome’s ruins encouraged him to experiment with interplay between foreground and background. From countless vantage points, one can gaze at an ancient monument at close range as an antiquity, or an antiquity-laden vista, beckons from further away. We find myriad examples of this particular visual phenomenon as we look from one of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings to the next. His rendering of the forum through the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16] is but one. By the same token, as with Van Heemskerck’s view of the Colosseum from atop the Palatine Hill [cat. no. 9], where a nearby ruined substructure receives far more pictorial attention than the monumentally important amphitheater in the background, we may gaze at a distant monument while another that is much closer obscures our view or appears in the periphery. Of course, these visual effects are particularly common where ruins are concentrated, such as in the Forum Romanum and the areas immediately surrounding it, which Van Heemskerck drew so copiously: the Capitoline and Palatine Hills, the Forum Nervae, and the Forum Boarium. Likewise, nearness to a large building such as the Colosseum, where one can see other distant monuments, also encourages this pictorial arrangement. It is therefore not coincidental that these are the places in Rome that inspired Van Heemskerck to deploy a “foreground / background” scheme in the greatest numbers. Since we find this topographical arrangement readymade in so many places among Rome’s ruins, we are surprised to find its pictorialization so underdeveloped in the drawings of Rome by Van Heemskerck’s contemporaries. Few vedute by Italian artists suggest an interest in Roman space approaching Van Heemskerck’s. In a drawing of the Arch of Septimius Severus and other nearby monuments in the forum [fig. 4.5], the artist of the Codex Escurialensis shows the Temple of Vespasian exiting the frame from the right middle ground. He used a similar device to compose a drawing of the

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figure 4.5 Circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, “View of the Forum Romanum,” Codex Escurialensis, c. 1500, f. 20r, Copyright Patrimonia Naçional, Madrid, Real Biblioteca de El Escorial

figure 4.6 Circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, “View of the Arch of Constantine and Colosseum,” Codex Escurialensis, c. 1500, f. 28v, Copyright Patrimonia Naçional, Madrid, Real Biblioteca de El Escorial

area around the Colosseum [fig. 4.6], where the Arch of Constantine sits majestically, foreshortened in the right middle ground. However, none of the drawings in the Codex suggest a shared space between viewer and foreground objects as we find, for example, in the

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figure 4.7 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Foreshortened View of the Colosseum, c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 59v, ink on paper, 196 × 147 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

aforementioned furiously foreshortened rendering of Constantine’s Arch [cat. no. 22]. Drawings by Van Heemskerck’s Italian contemporary Polidoro da Caravaggio also merit comparison. For example, a genre study in Vienna’s Albertina shows two women in the extreme right foreground while two elderly men converse in the background at upper left.36 The drawing suggests the currency of such experimentations in the Italian milieu Van Heemskerck encountered before his arrival in the spring of 1532. Van Heemskerck’s travel companion in Rome, Hermannus Posthumus, may have also explored the possibilities perspective techniques had to offer for the depiction of Roman space, but not as frequently as Van Heemskerck. Only the Colosseum appears to have inspired him to use a similar device [fig. 4.7].37 If we perceive Van Heemskerck’s most dynamic perspective experiments as ordinary, it is only because our eyes are familiar with such compositional constructions, which attests to their forwardlooking quality. their status as innovations. Aside from ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus’s drawings, an anonymous view of the Baths of Diocletian from the mid-sixteenth century is the closest chronologically to Van Heemskerck’s.38 It is comparable for its fictive portrayal of armor, an antique torso, and late imperial piers in the extreme right foreground before the ruins of the Baths, which appear at some distance from the picture plane. In Van Heemskerck’s choices of low or close vantage points and sharp recessions into deep space, he anticipated Piranesi by roughly two hundred years. We also find framings of distant views with nearby arches, or columns and cornices more frequently in subsequent centuries.39 The composition of Van Heemskerck’s smaller drawing of the Palazzo Madama’s sculpture collection [cat. no. 62], for example is comparable to Charles Joseph

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Natoire’s mid-Settecento ink wash drawing of the portico and cortile of the Palazzo Nuovo. The two appear to be reverse orientations of one another. During the decades before Van Heemskerck’s departure for Rome, northern European artists including Albrecht Dürer and Jan Van Scorel produced art and theory respectively that is relatable to Heemskerk’s experimentation with foreground/background interplay. However, we find no early sixteenth-century northern European drawings that we can describe as precise analogues to this class of drawings by Van Heemskerck. Rainhald Grosshans has suggested that the gestures out of the picture plane by the sitters in Van Heemskerck’s early portraits of the Bicker family are in emulation of similar devices appearing in portraits by Jan Gossart.40 The complementary narratives in the foregrounds and backgrounds of Lucas van Leyden’s prints could have contributed to Van Heemskerck’s notion that framing places in Rome with one heavily foregrounded object and another in the distant background was a useful exercise.41 However, Lucas’s formal devices were primarily rhetorical manipulations of narrative, play with emphases of content. As drawings of vistas with no portrayal of a specific narrative, Van Heemskerck’s manipulations were more purely formal. Thus, the extent to which we consider Lucas’s prints as a precedent for Van Heemskerck’s drawings is limited. In Van Heemskerck’s northern background, Van Scorel provides the closest precedents for Van Heemskerck’s descriptions of Roman space. However, even Van Scorel’s oeuvre does not contain compositional dynamics precisely like what we find in Van Heemskerck’s drawings that describe Roman space. Van Scorel’s Entry into Jerusalem [fig. 2.9], the touchstone comparative example of a foreground / background composition we know of by him, bears comparison to Van Heemskerck’s drawings for its contrast of figural action in the left foreground with a broad-view panorama of Jerusalem in the distant background. Van Heemskerck, in turn, perhaps looked to both Van Scorel and Michelangelo for his similarly composed Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1].42 Scholars have yet to suggest that Van Heemskerck’s probing interest in describing Roman space partakes in early sixteenth-century discourses on perspective. Broadly speaking, northern European perspective theory was still fledgling in the 1530s. Within this context, it is most likely that northern artists and antiquarians would have viewed these most spatially emphatic compositions by Van Heemskerck as novel pictorial provocations, worthy of discussion.

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But in a much more specific sense, one of Van Heemskerck’s drawings may be a response to – or likelier signal a shared awareness with – the pictorial theories Albrecht Dürer published in 1525.43 The curvatures in the highest parts of the Arch of Constantine as it appears in Van Heemskerck’s heavily foreshortened view [cat. no. 22] suggest Van Heemskerck’s interpretation of Dürer’s ideas on how the beholder sees tall objects. While Dürer’s text suggests that the letters on the higher parts of buildings need to be made larger, his diagrams show an imaginary arc between beholder and building that corresponds to the vertical projection of the building’s façade, thus suggesting the perception of curvature in its highest parts.44 Even where Van Heemskerck has not deployed such pictorial histrionics, his vedute are temporally and spatially compelling through subtler means. For example, compared to Jan Gossart’s drawing of the Colosseum of 1509 [fig. 1.4], his compositional choice from a similar vantage point [cat. no. 21] portrays the amphitheater’s overwhelming decay and brawny proportions more tangibly, more successfully conveying the building’s colossal gesture.45 Gossart keeps the Colosseum at a distance from his viewer, thus flattening it, despite his deft handling of the successive foreshortenings of the arches around the circular building. He has also diminished the amphitheater by containing it entirely within his frame. Perhaps most crucially, Gossart’s near obsessive effort to describe each of the Colosseum’s parts forsakes its most salient feature: its enormity. Engaged columns, capitals, and dentils are fully formed multidimensional entities, but each is oversized in proportion to the surface on which it appears. The effect over the whole Colosseum is an almost toyish appearance. Van Heemskerck’s Colosseum composition is more akin to the Italian example in the Codex Escurialensis [fig. 4.8], also notable for its apparent proportion-consciousness, its clear consideration of the building’s magnitude.46 Van Heemskerck’s choice of vantage point brings the viewer closer to the ruined amphitheater than Gossart’s, stretching the Colosseum beyond the frame on either side. With this subtle difference, he has used the frame to suggest pictorially the sensation many receive when sharing space with the building: that the Colosseum is too enormous to take in its entirety in once glance. Piers close to the picture plane tower above us. They almost look as if they will sink under their own weight due to Van Heemskerck’s masterful grasp of their shape, proportion, and their gradual increase in scale as the amphitheater’s circular shape pushes them towards the picture plane, gradually encroaching on our viewing space. On either side, the arches recede,

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figure 4.8 Circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, “View of the Colosseum,” Codex Escurialensis, c. 1500, f. 41v, Copyright Patrimonia Naçional, Madrid, Real Biblioteca de El Escorial

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becoming narrower with an even rhythm. Through its thick arches, Van Heemskerck shows us a passing glance at the Colosseum’s opposite end, describing the building’s colossal space to those who look long enough – and closely enough – to happen upon this subtle detail. A comparison between the exquisitely worked drawing of St. Peter’s from just outside its south transept [cat. no. 42] and his view looking south from somewhere west of the Belvedere’s west wall [cat. no. 43] provides yet another telling example of his sensitivity to the relation between a building’s time and its spatial aspect. In different ways, both drawings offer splendid discourses on the incomplete church’s monumentality, the textures of its demolished and unfinished walls and vaults, and the poetics of the site’s stasis between demolition and lapsed construction. And in both, the poetic implications in Christoph Thoenes’ insight that Van Heemskerck’s drawings of St. Peter’s portray the church “as a ruin,” are decisive in the context of memory.47 The drawing from the church’s north transept is emphatic in its conveyance of a colossally large architectural space of complex design. From this vantage point, Van Heemskerck has forthrightly framed the drawing via the stark contrast between the unfinished transept walls, which aggressively approach the picture plane, Bramante’s coffered crossing vaults, which sit in the distance on the transept’s axis, and Santa Maria della Febbre, at middle ground right. From the chosen vantage point, the construction’s

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interplay between order and disarray blurs old and new: the elegant unfinished transept arms merge with the new but jagged pilasters and cornices behind, which give way to majestic vaulting. In the distance at right, Van Heemskerck provides just a passing glimpse at the nave of the old St. Peter’s, pictorially seamless within the matrix of the complex’s parts. As such, his choice of vantage point also enabled him to emphasize continuities between the remaining parts of the old building and the unfinished parts of the new. Here, everything is continuous and thus ephemeral. The inextricable bond of memory and imagination are clear; the old structure is passing, evoking the present as temporary, and the future structure is still in formation but awaiting its ultimate, inevitable collapse, ever present in the details of its half-finished forms.48 Likewise, for his drawing from north of the unfinished church [cat. no. 43], Van Heemskerck chose a vantage point that allowed him to blur distinctions between old and new. In the foreground, shadowed walls that are parallel to the picture plane receive their echo in the shadows of Bramante’s vaults, which we see from their incomplete side, where expertly applied ink wash describes their rough surfaces in the same manner as the surfaces of the old walls. By drawing a new building as an old one, Van Heemskerck has here too conflated ancient and modern time. He has thus highlighted the relation between past and present, the very essence of memory. Moreover, in settling on an exact viewpoint, Van Heemskerck has taken an exceptionally precise approach to composing with a single building dominating his gaze. In situating himself north of the new church and west of the Belvedere’s west wall, he has made the subtle but crucial choice to give his viewer the slightest peek at the east side of the unfinished surface of the west vault. From a few steps further west, he would not have been able to see this side of the vault in order to draw it. This seemingly slight choice is not merely the addition of another pictorial element that increases his audience’s understanding of the unfinished church’s appearance. The vantage point Van Heemskerck selected dictates a design with a difficult foreshortening, which he has executed expertly. This would not only make the drawing more visually memorable in the eyes of his audience, likelier to make an imprint on the minds of his viewers; it would also increase their awareness of the acuteness of his vision and his command of space and proportion. Moreover, the image of the foreshortened vault puts the finest point possible on the question of the exact vantage point from which Van Heemskerck drew, thus necessitating his audience’s consideration of its own spatial experience of the church.

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Artistry and Roman Topography as Memory

In the same way that Van Heemskerck drew Rome’s ruins to record and convey the appearance they imprinted on his own vision, his drawings could imprint themselves in the minds of his viewers. Consciousness of viewing a product of artistry that evokes spatial memories and imaginings suggests to viewers Van Heemskerck’s act of picturing, his negotiations with Rome’s topography in order to determine how best to compose it into a drawing. By appealing to his audience to consider the topographical conditions that inflected their making, his ruin vedute could function as potent prompts for recalling topographical knowledge. A succession of topics unfolds from such considerations in addition to details regarding the spot or spots from where he drew: the visual and historical properties of the antiquities in the loci portrayed – their scale, their proportions, their locations in relation to one another, their states of disrepair, and how they came to these conditions. In other words, Van Heemskerck’s ruin vedute direct viewers to a critical mode of looking, one that requires their topographical memories of walking and seeing in Rome, their shared memories of what is known about the buildings portrayed, and perhaps the wisdom that such historical memories had to offer. It should not seem a coincidence to us that throughout his letter to Leo X, Raphael equates topographical memory of Rome with prudence and the preservation of historical memory. He pleads with Leo to ensure that “what little remains” of ancient Rome, “is not to be completely destroyed and ruined by the wicked and ignorant,” because it preserves “those divine spirits, the remembrance of whom encourages and incites to virtue the intellects among us today.”49 Such associations adhere closely to the ultimate goal of ancient mnemotechnics: the channeling of memory into good judgment. As we have seen, Van Heemskerck’s conspicuous compositions make a forthright appeal to viewers to reflect on his artistic response to Rome’s topography. By putting viewers on the ground next to Van Heemskerck, our overturned capital example [cat. no. 17] makes them especially conscious of its status as the result of a series of choices mediated by his pictorial, topographical, and perhaps historical expertise. Because the image is so emphatically about place, viewers could be compelled to ask what ancient ruin Van Heemskerck was near when he drew the Colosseum at that distance, from that angle. Did an overturned capital ever actually sit in that spot in relation to the Colosseum? If not, did whatever site he was

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on even contain capitals like the one in this drawing? What other Roman buildings had capitals like this one? Or is this view a fantasia that Van Heemskerck composed out of his memory, imagination, or caprice, without empirical topographical reality?50 Even our present-day responses to such questions do not entirely resolve the drawing’s mystery. But the act of generating reasoned responses has always demanded an accrual of artistic and topographical memory. For example, the capital might be a remnant of the Temple of Divus Claudius, which did occupy the area from where Van Heemskerck must have drawn the Colosseum as it appears on this sheet.51 Rodolfo Lanciani reports that Michelangelo used a capital from Claudius’ temple to complete his renovation of the Baths of Diocletian.52 His observation accords neatly with Christian Hülsen’s observation that Van Heemskerck’s overturned capital is “almost exactly like” those in the main hall of the Baths of Diocletian.53 Van Heemskerck’s other drawings and other elements of ancient Roman topography may also come into play while seeking to know precisely what he portrayed in the foreground of this drawing. A less finished sheet portraying capitals at close range [cat. no. 69] suggests the possibility that he studied a single capital from multiple angles and then used it later as a basic point of reference for his overturned capital drawing. Though the capitals in the less finished drawing appear with less detail, Van Heemskerck drew them with enough detail to confirm that they share some of the same decorative elements with the overturned capital.54 In both the finished and unfinished drawings, capitals lay amidst vegetation and the shaft of a colonnette lies nearby. Thus, if the less finished drawing could have provided him with the immediate topography for the overturned capital in the more elaborated masterpiece we analyze here, it would have required some small degree of invention.55 Van Heemskerck could have also just as easily created this fictive juxtaposition of Colosseum and capital by using a capital on the nearby Arch of Septimius Severus, also a close match with the overturned one in this composition. Seeking the source for the overturned capital is but one of innumerable ways that the composition of a single Van Heemskerck vedute sparks thoughts of the Eternal City that extend beyond the drawing’s apparent temporal, spatial, and pictorial limits. While the buildings and vistas within Van Heemskerck’s gaze suggested the extraordinary variety of ways he portrayed Roman space in his vedute – from broad-view panoramas that show the entire city within the frame to close studies of architectural fragments – his sensitivity

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to the vast pictorial potential in the Eternal City’s vistas encouraged his cultivation of a network of topographical correspondences, intertextual topographical memory over the collectivity of his vedute. Because the Septizonium has been destroyed, its appearance in multiple drawings of Van Heemskerck’s offers a poignant example. The obvious response to the singular vertical ruin, which forcefully interrupted a relatively uncluttered horizon, is to draw it alone on a vertically oriented page, which Van Heemskerck did, at least twice [cat. nos. 24 and 25]. The asymmetrical building fragment’s enigmatic nature, which his architecturally inclined contemporaries found so evocative of reconstructive imaginings, suggests study from more than one angle. Its proximity to the ruins on the Palatine also led him to render it in context on a horizontally oriented sheet [cat. no. 13]. Beyond composing drawings that feature the Septizonium, the building’s visibility from many distant locations around the city also prompted its appearance in the backgrounds of views that are more panoramic in scope.56 The enigmatic Severan building appears amidst a clutter of hatches in Van Heemskerck’s vastly under studied but remarkably well-executed drawing now in the Rijksmuseum [cat. no. 10]. In another noteworthy, albeit hastily rendered composition from the interior of the Arch of Constantine [cat. no. 23], Van Heemskerck shows us the Colosseum to the left and the Septizonium to the right. The drawing portrays an optical impossibility. However, that we can easily question its visual truth does not mean that we should dismiss the truth it holds in our topographical memories of sixteenth century Rome. Standing beneath the Arch of Constantine and facing southeast, we certainly would be able to see the Colosseum if we look left; and if we look right, we would be facing the southeastern foot of the Palatine, where the Septizonium once stood. Perhaps the ubiquity of the Septizonium and the Colosseum, as evinced by their appearance in so many drawings by Van Heemskerck from so many different locations in the city, suggested their appearance on either side of a view from beneath the arch. Simply by tracking the now destroyed Septizonium’s appearance through Van Heemskerck’s corpus of topographical drawings, then, viewers are able to remember more about the Eternal City’s outlay.57 And each drawing establishes new memory. For example, Van Heemskerck’s pointed inclusion of the Septizonium to the right of his drawing from beneath the Arch of Constantine functions in a manner that is like his inclusion of San Giovanni e Paolo in the distant background of his horizontal drawing of the Septizonium and the Palatine [cat. no. 13], or his choice to include a summary

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but recognizable rendering of the church of Santa Sabina in the distant background of his drawing of the Temple of Divine Augustus in the forum [cat. no. 4]; from drawing to drawing, these topographical correspondences put the minds of viewers in the Eternal City in a way that a single drawing cannot, so that audiences are able to reconstruct their travels through the city, remembering it in a manner approaching completion. Close looking at multiple drawings orients viewers to the point of mapping the city in their minds. We see Van Heemskerck repeat this archaeological brand of pictorial encyclopedism with much of Rome’s ruin topography. The buildings on the Palatine hill, the Frontespizio di Nerone, the Forum Nervae, and the Pyramid of Cestius also appear in multiple drawings in a variety of compositional schemes. But it is the Colosseum’s repeated appearance in Van Heemskerck’s vedute that provides perhaps the richest example of his awareness and conveyance of Roman topography’s intertextuality. As it appears in the distance of the drawing of the overturned capital, the Colosseum might remind viewers of Martial’s description of it in the Meraviglie, as “the far-seen amphitheater,” which “lifts its mass august.”58 This is just as it appears in several of Van Heemskerck’s spatially compelling vedute: the aforementioned view of the Arch of Constantine and the magisterial panoramas looking southeast from the Palatine [cat. no. 9] and southeast from the Capitoline [cat. no. 5]. Recalling Martial’s poetic description of the Colosseum’s enormity might lead viewers to remember his very next statement as well, that the amphitheater was built on the site of Nero’s artificial lake. The introduction of Nero into a chain of recollections sparked by Van Heemskerck’s images of ancient Rome’s decay could lead to historical discourse on Nero’s status as the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, the one who “fiddled while Rome burned,” and so on. With such concerns, Van Heemskerck’s vedute stir the memory, bringing viewing consciousness to the interstices of artistry, topography, literature, and history. This is the historicizing consciousness one suspects Van Heemskerck brought with him to the act of looking with an eye towards picturing: the inclusion of specific elements, the cropping of others, the bringing of one monument to the foreground while choosing to stand where one could see another from a distance. As we have seen, because of their many indications that Van Heemskerck responded to Rome’s vistas in a variety of ways, his drawings of the city are not easily encapsulated. On the one hand, if we think of the vedute as a view of what the landscape truly contained, some

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of Van Heemskerck’s views do not qualify. But on the other, we have also seen examples that reveal Van Heemskerck’s fidelity to what he saw. In a nuanced description of what Van Heemskerck has done with the views before him, we best describe the drawings he created as ricordi: not records in the sense of documenting what was there, but records of his response to what was there. We must think of the pictorial realm as separate from the “real” topographical realm that inspired the picture. A picture cannot be identical to what the gaze puts before us as we inhabit a vista, but it can stand as a record of a translation of it from the third to the second dimension. Therefore, we should not think of a “vantage point” as an actual place where we could stand to take in a view that approximates a drawing, though we have seen how discriminating Van Heemskerck must have been when choosing a place from which to start drawing. This is to say that the differences between third and second dimension do not allow for a one-to-one correspondence between the artist’s vantage point and the one that a picture suggests. We therefore must not confuse the two.

Chapter 5

The Copious Hand

An Abundant Technique

Looking across the entirety of Van Heemskerck’s extant corpus of Roman drawings reveals that when it was time for him to realize his vision of Rome – to apply ink to paper – his hand was every bit as responsive to the pictorial challenges on the in the Eternal City as was his eye. There can be little doubt that he deliberately undertook an expansive search for the means to convey the variety of forms before him. In so doing, he deployed a concomitantly varied set of techniques. With his already advanced pre-Roman technical proficiency as his point of departure, he continued to develop his versatility, a copious language of line and tone to visualize what he saw before him, what David Rosand in his analysis of Leonardo’s drawings has eloquently described as a “handwriting of the self.”1 The variety of shapes and textures in Rome’s antiquities – cornices, capitals, fluting, filigrees, festoons, and a seemingly endless procession of figures adorning friezes and triumphal arches in varying degrees of relief – would comprise a daunting enough array of challenges to any artist’s technical abilities, even where still whole. But in their various states of decay, the city’s fallen ancient monuments confronted the draftsman with an even greater plentitude of spontaneous surfaces, more pictorial problems demanding of the hand an even greater range of solutions: the exposed masonry of ruined buildings, the deep shadows beneath their substructures, the pristine luminescence of an ancient sculpted figure’s muscular sinews interrupted by the rough crags of breakage, capitals and columns once smooth, now worn, chipped, and cracked, no two fissures alike. Van Heemskerck adapted his technique to embrace these challenges. In their technical variety, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings rival anything we find in the extant drawing oeuvres of his Netherlandish and Italian contemporaries. He drew primarily in pen and ink with hatching to describe transitions from light to dark, a technique he likely developed to an advanced level before ever arriving in Rome, his own version of the hatching technique that Gossart, Van Scorel, and many of his fellow Netherlanders practiced. Van Heemskerck’s drawings in his pen and ink hatching technique bear a range of finishes. The splendorous high finish we find in his drawing of an

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overturned capital before the Colosseum [cat. no. 17] appears on only nine extant sheets.2 However, the majority of his pure pen and ink drawings are not worked to such an exceptional level of polish.3 Van Heemskerck’s rendering of the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16], wherein we see a view of the Forum Romanum through the arch, provides an example of this middling degree of finish. With some summary passages, these drawings distinguish themselves from the sixteen drawings appearing to be “first thought” sketches. Rendered with little to no concern for high finish [e.g., cat. no. 31], or even a display of skill in some examples, this last group of drawings nonetheless reveals Van Heemskerck’s supreme ability to record the overall gesture of the Roman topography before him.4 Other drawings from Van Heemskerck’s hand suggest his developed proficiency with alternatives to pure pen and ink hatching, perhaps absorbing the drawing practices of the Italian artists in his Roman milieu. For example, he also used black and red chalks [e.g., cat. nos. 19 and 71, respectively]. We have a handful of expert drawings by Van Heemskerck in which he eschewed hatching altogether to describe all shadows and surfaces in ink wash within a framework of pen outlines.5 Two of these, his large-scale medium-view panorama of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 2] and his view of Bramante’s vaulting of St. Peter’s from the north [cat. no. 42], are among his finest drawings. On a few sheets, he combined these approaches.6 The collective result is a set of drawings displaying an impressive range. No two drawings display exactly the same handling of materials. Such an encompassment of technical variety and skill would no doubt advertise Van Heemskerck’s artistic prowess to his fellow artists and potential patrons. From the very first mentions of Van Heemskerck’s technique to more recent discussions, it is apparent that his deft hand, his virtuosity, and his command of a variety of effects have long been well known, recognized as hallmarks of his Roman drawings oeuvre. However, although this consciousness of his impressive and varied technique has held, it has not led to a thorough analysis. Broadly speaking, we read mostly of Van Heemskerck’s hatching while finding little mention of his use of washes or chalks. This is not surprising, of course, since the majority of his drawings contain pen and ink hatching. Karel Van Mander’s comments in Het Schilder-Boeck provide a specifically focused point of departure for discussions of the practical effects of Van Heemskerck’s technique. His discussion of Van Heemskerck’s technique is not lengthy.7 Rather, it is succinct. In Van

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Mander’s words, Van Heemskerck’s technique was “very precise in hatching, with a light, free way of handling.”8 Though seemingly selfcontradictory (how freely handled can precise hatching be?) Van Mander’s assessment embeds much that is worth considering. We could read the passage as a deliberately inclusive account of both the precision we find in finer examples from Van Heemskerck such as his drawing of the Villa Madama Sculpture Garden [cat. no. 64] and the looser hand on view in the drawing of the southwestern slope of the Palatine [cat. no. 12]. Indeed, across both drawings, we find commonalities within their ostensible divergences; the refined effect of the former is not without its spontaneities. In fact it receives enhancement from them. But the free handling of the latter is not without its precision. However, while Van Mander may have consciously crafted a single phrase that could cleverly encompass the technical breadth appearing over the whole of Van Heemskerck’s drawing corpus, it is likelier that he saw both the orderliness and the spontaneity in Van Heemskerck’s drawings as products of the same technique, a display of remarkable skill, with no need to distinguish between them. Van Heemskerck’s consistent handling of space and proportion combine with his consistent knack for surface texture to imbue his entire corpus of Roman drawings with a striking unity.9 Indeed, in most examples, he blends his careful hatching with a freer stroke so seamlessly that they appear as harmonious elements. Despite their remarkably different overall affects, both the view of the Villa Madama Sculpture Garden and the view of the Palatine’s southwestern slope contain passages of great precision and loose spontaneity. The encomiastic verse describing Van Heemskerck in Hendrick Hondius’s Pictorum Aliquot Celebrium Praecipuae Germaniae Infe­ rioris Effigies, published five years after Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck, reads as a compendium of the major points in Van Mander’s biography, many of which we have touched upon in previous chapters.10 It is among the most poetic early modern allusions to Van Heemskerck’s technical prowess, albeit in relatively unspecific ways [fig. 5.1].11 The concise inscription provides early evidence that Van Heemskerck’s inventiveness, mastery of ruins, and his outstanding technique provided the major focal points for formulating his artistic identity. It notes the sheer quantity of Van Heemskerck’s productions in the same manner as Van Mander: by stating that Van Heemskerck “filled the world” with his art.12 We then read of Van Heemskerck’s ingegno before honing in on his “wondrous cities, towers, and sad ruins.” The verse’s next line locates the source of Van Heemskerck’s inventions

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figure 5.1 Simon Frisius, “Portrait of Maarten van Heemskerck,” Pictorum Aliquot Celebrium Praecipuae Germaniae Inferioris Effigies, 1610, Object Number RP-P-1907-367, ink on paper, 199 × 124 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

in his hand, likening it to the hand of Daedalus, the mythological figure whose identity was inseparable from notions not only of inventiveness, but of dazzling technical craftsmanship. Daedalus’s fame for fashioning wings so that man could fly, for challenging nature, makes the verse’s analogy to Van Heemskerck all the more poetic. With it, the Pictorum’s inscription suggests the many ways in which Van Heemskerck’s art challenged the strictures of nature via his inventiveness, which was facilitated by a masterful technique.13 Modern scholars have added nuance to Van Mander’s description while neglecting to note the full implications in the poetry of the Pictorum’s inscription. Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger saw the same balance between variety and unity that Van Mander suggested. Speaking generally, they note a “uniformity of style” in Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. Where their analysis focuses on Van Heemskerck’s process, however, they also note his uses of ink wash and chalk.14 In their discussion of the second Berlin album, which contains larger sheets that elicited from Van Heemskerck a greater

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range of strokes, they note his “wide hatching” and its execution “with surprising assuredness.”15 However, this is the extent of their observations on the subject of Van Heemskerck’s technical range. Ilja Veldman is the only scholar to offer further commentary on the topic of Van Heemskerck’s versatility. She mentions his “variety of technical approaches” including “ink wash of various shades … and red and black chalk.”16 However, her comments appear in a context that does not call for subjecting his technique to sustained analysis. We do not lack interpretive models that might help us situate Van Heemskerck’s technical variety within its artistic and intellectual universes. The ancients cherished the philosophical notion of variety, as did sixteenth-century humanists on both sides of the Alps. We traditionally cite Quintillian and Cicero as fountainhead sources for early modern notions of varietas. Florentine polymath Leon Battista Alberti’s advocacy of varietas in De Pictura exemplifies the ancient classical literary notion’s early modern application to the pictorial realm.17 However, Van Heemskerck’s technical response to Rome and his use of the Roman ruin in his post-Roman work are perhaps most effectively analogized with Desiderius Erasmus’s notion of copia or copiousness as the Rotterdam humanist described it in his rhetorical treatise, De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia.18 According to Erasmus, writers should strive for their writing to achieve copia, the abundant display of variety in syntax and rhetorical devices. However, they should never do so for copia’s own sake. Erasmus advocates as strongly for brevity as he does for luxuriousness, stating that brevity is part of a good writer’s abundant arsenal of styles. At the core of Erasmus’s notion of copia is the mastery of variety because it facilitates the writer’s ability to deploy the appropriate style for describing the topic at hand. Erasmus first published De Copia in 1512, when Van Heemskerck was likely nearing the end of his Latin schooling.19 In other words, Van Heemskerck was the “target audience” of Erasmus’s treatise; the Rotterdam humanist wrote it as a style guide for boys and young men at the beginning in their quest for eloquence. Van Heemskerck’s tenure as an assistant in Van Scorel’s workshop, an intellectually charged environment where humanist learning facilitated solutions to pictorial problems, would have inevitably begat repeated mentions of Erasmus and his ideas. Moreover, Erasmus continued to revise De Copia, publishing multiple editions over the course of his career, including in 1534, during Van Heemskerck’s Roman stay.20 While we have no proof that Van Heemskerck read the treatise, it is likely that he did, or that he was more than familiar with its concepts. While it is not as if the mature

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Van Heemskerck had de Copia in mind as he drew in Rome, Erasmus’s notion of copia serves as an appropriate analogue for the abundant technical variety among Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings.

Van Heemskerck’s Pre-Roman Technical Inheritance: Pen and Ink Hatching, Netherlandish Realism

Van Heemskerck’s highly finished drawings in pen and ink hatching are closest to the drawing technique that was prevalent in the Netherlands during the years leading to his departure for Rome. Thus, we must ask: before his arrival in Rome, how practiced was the Haarlem artist in the variety of techniques we see among his extant Roman drawings? With no pre-Roman drawings from his hand, we cannot know precisely. At one pole is the possibility that Van Heemskerck arrived in Rome having already mastered all of the techniques on display in his extant drawings.21 At the other is the notion that he arrived in Rome a somewhat unrefined draftsman and continued to polish his technique to the point of making his finest drawings [e.g., cat. nos. 9 and 17] near the end of his stay. While these simple absolutes are doubtless reductive of what was a much more complex reality, both extremes must contain at least a grain of truth. More importantly, however, they provide a useful framework for discussing the concrete aspects of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawing practice vis-à-vis the Netherlandish origins of his artistry and his Netherlandish milieu. On the one hand, we cannot doubt Van Heemskerck’s overall technical proficiency by the time of his first spring in Rome, in 1532. Having just turned 34, he had already presided over his own workshop for roughly two years. The technical maturity in his highly finished drawings, so emphatically manual, evokes the Pictorum’s famous verses in honor of Jan van Amstel, which state that Netherlandish painters, “have the brain … in the capable hand,” a passage which, as we have seen, receives similar expression in Lampsonius’s verses for Van Heemskerck.22 As Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman Rest on the Flight into Egypt or his Bicker family portraits indicate, before he ever left Haarlem, he was in full command of his materials, capable of imitating and revising the traditional Eyckian painting tradition of replicating surface textures. He was, moreover, well able to deploy the techniques he studied in the art around him in a manner reminiscent of Baldassare Castiglione’s recommendation that the ideal courtier must “observe different kinds of courtiers and, ruled

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by the good judgment that must always be his guide, take various qualities now from one man and now from another.”23 In the same way that Gossart’s painstaking attention to detail in his Colosseum drawing is a drawn analogue to his absorption of Eyckian verisimilitude, Van Heemskerck’s thoroughly finished mode of drawing is akin to his own mastery of the Eyckian mode in his pre-Roman paintings. And although painting and drawing make different demands on the artist’s hand, it is plausible that Van Heemskerck translated to his renderings of Rome what Svetlana Alpers elaborated as a “descriptive mode,” an approach to picturing that pervaded Netherlandish visual culture entailing manual deliberation of the kind we see in his pre-Roman paintings.24 Odds are thus slim that Van Heemskerck executed his Roman drawings of varying degrees of finish in a chronological sequence from low to high, ascending to greater levels of technical proficiency as he continued to draw in Rome. Rather, the majority of his extant pen and ink drawings reveal an artist in full control of his hand regardless of their finish, suggesting a mature technique upon arrival there in 1532. On the other hand, however, the variety on display across his oeuvre of Roman drawings also contains ample suggestions that once in Rome, he continued to refine his technique. After all, we should expect this of an artist who had traveled so far to nourish and cultivate his artistry. His deployment of a looser stroke, a freer hand, ink washes, and especially chalks – techniques his Italian contemporaries favored more readily than his northern compatriots – suggests his willingness to continue seeking and experimenting, expanding beyond his limitations. Before Rome, Van Heemskerck must have possessed an advanced facility in a northern hatching technique that is broadly comparable to Lucas van Leyden’s in his finest drawings. Consider, for example, Lucas’s Archangel Gabriel Announcing the Birth of Christ [fig. 5.2]. Tonal value appears strictly through line. The darker the passage, the thicker the lines it bears, and the likelier we are to find multiple layers of hatches, which appear, as if by some strictly prescribed rule, in neatly spaced rows at disarmingly regular intervals. Lucas’s technique for rendering the fingers of the angel Gabriel’s left hand provides a compelling example of his nearly dogmatic adherence to this formula; because the hand is in shadow, Lucas has drawn as if duty bound to hatch every last part of it. As we will see, we find Van Heemskerck’s thorough absorption of this basic Netherlandish approach to drawing – the reliance on line as the basic unit of expression, even where the objects on view require shading – throughout his Roman corpus. However, Van Heemskerck’s treatment of shadow

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figure 5.2 Lucas van Leyden, The Archangel Gabriel Announcing the Birth of Christ, 1520s, Accession number 2008.253, ink and traces of black chalk on paper, 211 × 165 mm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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shows an actively critical mind less inclined to adhere strictly to specific formulae. Given Van Heemskerck’s artistic lineage as the third in the Gossart – Van Scorel succession, it should not surprise us to find that his approach to creating finished drawings of Rome is more precisely akin to the technical strategies we see in drawings by those two artists. However, with only a few Roman drawings by the former and none by the latter, we must arrive cautiously at conclusions about the relation of their techniques to Van Heemskerck’s. By comparing selected extant drawings by all three, we can identify the technical tendencies prevalent in the Netherlands of the 1510s and 20s that Van Heemskerck must have also mastered by the time he arrived in Rome. As Gossart’s only drawing of a Roman ruin, his view of the Colosseum [fig. 1.4] must serve as our main comparative example by him. Van Scorel’s view of Bethlehem’s ruins [fig. 2.6], which he executed during his long wanderjahr, gives the best approximation of the technique in any of his now lost Roman drawings.25 While this small set of drawings by Van Heemskerck’s main exemplars may at first seem to comprise an insufficient comparandum, it bears a variety of pictorial challenges, thus constituting an amply representative sampling. Both drawings feature monuments that differ greatly in shape, structure, and appearance. They also portray buildings at varying distances from the picture plane. Moreover, since we lack autograph drawings by Van Heemskerck of the Colosseum from the same angle of view as Gossart’s and no drawings of Bethlehem by Van Heemskerck, we must introduce drawings of other buildings to achieve a nuanced view of his pre-Roman technical inheritance.26 As a circular ruin with a preponderance of arches, columns, capitals, moldings, rough-hewn substructures, and vegetal onset, the Colosseum alone presents a cornucopia of manual and technical challenges for the artist who endeavors to draw it. This is perhaps especially true for the northern artist not familiar with seeing such forms let alone moving the hand to render lines in imitation of them. These aspects of the Colosseum recommend comparison between Gossart’s portrayal of the building – at medium range, in high finish – to Van Heemskerck’s carefully worked views of the ruins on the Palatine. Two examples show arches similarly angled to the picture plane [cat. nos. 9 and 10]. Likewise, the ruins that Van Scorel drew in Bethlehem sit at varying angles to the picture plane, thus requiring several solutions to describing the nuanced differences between light and shade; they also present a cacophony of broken surfaces. Van Heemskerck’s quintessential drawing of the Forum Romanum

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figure 1.4 detail.

Cat. no. 9, detail.

Cat. no. 10, detail.

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[cat. no. 1] portrays ruins at a similar distance from the picture plane and thus serves as an appropriate point of comparison. Our selected examples by all three artists, moreover, rely on horizontal hatching to establish a ground. In addition to being thoroughly worked, Gossart’s view of the Colosseum is a carefully planned rendering of its subject. We have already noted Gossart’s focus on the Colosseum’s specific parts at the expense of conveying the building’s immensity.27 This approach to rendering the amphitheater is inseparable from Gossart’s technique, with which he seeks to describe every part with an abundance of deliberately applied lines. The Colosseum’s systematic repetition of arches, engaged columns, and entablatures elicited from him a concomitantly systematic technique that changes gradually, but only slightly, with each bay’s recession from the picture plane and gradually increased foreshortening. From bottom to top, each arch’s interior receives a layer of strictly horizontal hatches. The arched portion at the top, where there is less light, receives a second layer of hatches that curve to mimic the arch’s contour. This is comparable to – but not identical to – Van Heemskerck’s treatment of arches on the Palatine, which he has situated at the same angle to the picture plane [cat. nos. 9 and 10]. The vertically oriented larger drawing confronts us with two arches receding from the viewer. Van Heemskerck has rendered the smaller arch at left as Gossart did at the Colosseum; horizontal hatches establish a medium-toned light in the arch’s interior; another layer of nearly vertical hatches imitating the arch’s curvature emerges in the upper portions of the structure to convey the shadows there. We see this treatment of a similarly angled arch beneath the groin-vaulted structure at lower left in the Rijksmuseum’s sheet. A side-by-side comparison reveals some differences worth considering, however. The value of Gossart’s stroke does not vary greatly. While some lines are certainly thicker than others, a persistent sameness over the entire building results in an overall heaviness that, in this case, is appropriate for its subject: Europe’s most colossal building. Even the drawing’s upper right quadrant lacks contrast, despite Gossart’s deployment of a lighter touch there to render the building’s exposed interior. By comparison, the lower left quadrant of Van Heemskerck’s large Palatine sheet alone contains a greater variety of stroke widths, tones, and angles than the technique displayed over the entirety of Gossart’s Colosseum drawing. This is especially true of the vertically oriented sheet’s larger arch nearer the picture plane where Van Heemskerck has angled his foundational

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layer of hatching in the direction of the surface’s recession from the picture plane; one might say Van Heemskerck has hatched orthogonally. Throughout this passage, his technique entails both a lighter and a heavier touch than Gossart’s. Van Scorel’s view of Bethlehem’s ruins [fig. 2.6] comprises an impressive negotiation of virtuosity, variety, and efficiency that we also find in many of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. Requiring less labor than Gossart’s Colosseum drawing, its technique is notable for its reliance on a single layer of mostly horizontal hatches. Vertical lines only appear to articulate the darker interior spaces of windows and two shadowed passages at drawing’s center. Yet, Van Scorel has managed to achieve a surprisingly polyphonic overall affect. He applied some hatches with quick spontaneity; the tight hooks and curls of the long hatches describing the foreground’s natural topography, for example, betray an expressive, confident hand. However, over most of this sheet, especially in the drawing’s central middle ground where the cluster of ruined buildings appears, Van Scorel approximates the appearance of high finish via the execution of more deliberate, virtually systematized hatching and insistently detailed contours. That he has achieved great contrast over the whole of the drawing is remarkable; even in its darker passages, he has not resorted to a second layer of hatches. He has created the drawing’s tonal variety by making his touch heavier, his line thicker, and by leaving blank the surfaces of buildings facing the light source, at left. This is especially evident in his pen’s detailed descriptions of the ruinous contours of buildings. Their broken edges and abrupt endings have inspired his pen to a carefully jagged poetry of line. Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1] bears a technique that suggests his receipt of some tendencies on display in Van Scorel’s drawing and his autonomous development of others. Van Heemskerck is like Van Scorel in his general reliance on horizontal hatching as a foundational element. Also similar to Van Scorel in technique are the broad, loose strokes in the forum drawing’s foreground, which are comparable to those in the foreground of Van Scorel’s Bethlehem example. Moreover, while we have seen that other drawings by Van Heemskerck bear multiple layers of hatches to achieve contrast, this sheet witnesses his response to the Forum’s ruins in a single layer. Van Heemskerck has even eschewed layering to describe the shadows beneath all three of the Arch of Septimius Severus’s passageways. And like Van Scorel, he has used a single layer of hatches that he has made darker than those describing the remainder of the monument by deploying thicker, longer strokes at

figure 2.6 detail.

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denser intervals. However, we must also note significant differences. Van Heemskerck does depart from his drawing’s prevailing horizontality to deploy the diagonal hatches that describe the shadows of broken cornices. He also does not rely on the absence of hatching or bold strokes delineating contours in order to create contrast. Rather, the lines describing the contours of the buildings on view here bear the same width as the hatches. Perhaps of greatest significance, however, is his use of a drawn version of atmospheric perspective here, too. The background’s Tabularium appears in fainter strokes than the foregrounded Temple of Castor. He has used a less sharply defined, thicker, softer, more freely applied line to describe natural topography throughout the drawing, regardless of its distance from the picture plane, be it foreground, middle ground, or background.

Towards Finish: The Flexibility of Van Heemskerck’s Pen and Ink Process

Van Heemskerck’s extant Roman drawings bear considerable evidence indicating that he undertook an adaptable process facilitating an impressive range of finishes, displaying his many forms of virtuosity.28 Regardless of finish, the conspicuous nature of his facture would have caused any curious sixteenth-century Netherlandish liefhebber, fellow artist, or potential patron to explore each drawing with a crucial question in mind: how does the drawing reveal the artist’s process? From this, further questions arise: how much of the drawing did the artist finish in the presence of the monument or vista portrayed? Did he draw some passages from memory?29 If so, which? And which passages record the artist’s indulgence of the pen line’s intrinsic beauty rather than his determination to record his subject accurately? Of course, viewers would have no easy way of arriving at precise answers to these questions. Nonetheless, once provoked, as it inevitably would be, such a line of inquiry would prove fruitful for parsing technique because it would induce the viewer’s guided, detailed exploration. In Van Heemskerck’s case, the negligible nature of his under drawings confirms that he required little in the way of precise guidance before taking up the quill to manifest the views he envisioned. There appears to be no single answer to the question of how much of each drawing he inked while he still had a given vista within his gaze. Therefore, unless he executed more detailed under drawings than the remaining evidence indicates, most of his drawings – even

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some sheets bearing low finishes – appear as virtuosic performances. Van Heemskerck’s draftsmanship thus calls attention to its own intrinsic qualities. Only a handful of extant sheets still display heavy traces of under drawing.30 Applied with a free hand in imprecise, often unsteady black or red chalk outlines, these scant remains are our only evidence of his initial confrontation with the empty page.31 If these marks are typical of Van Heemskerck’s standard procedure, they suggest his concern at the outset with the most general pictorial information in the vista on view: the contours of the visible parts before him, their spatial relations to one another, the proportions of each, and their placement within the frame and in relation to the picture plane. This is to say, while Van Heemskerck’s choice of a vantage point had a profound impact on his compositions, so did the earliest stages of his application of line to paper. We can see evidence that this was the case in the upper right quadrant of his drawing of the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 26]. Above the remains of the cornice and column construction at drawing’s right, famously known as the colonnacce, the ghost of an abandoned under drawing reveals how little concern Van Heemskerck had for establishing convincing, detailed imitations of the things in his view during the early stages of making a drawing. The faintly rendered structure even appears to teeter.32 However, even though Van Heemskerck could not have used this under drawing as an authoritative guide for inking, it facilitated his initial grasp of the structure’s parts and led him to his final placement and description of the antiquity. We find that a similarly ghost-like structure performed the same function on his rendering of the southeastern corner of the Palatine with the Septizonium in the right middle ground [cat. no. 13]. To work out the now destroyed Severan building’s scale in relation to the substructures before it and the drawing’s frame, Van Heemskerck made faint marks rendering the basic shape of the architecture and natural topography. In the end, these turned out to be too high on the page, as the final inking attests. Some small but recognizable clues suggest that the sequence of Van Heemskerck’s inking procedure was responsive to the particular topographical features on view. Consider, for example, his unfinished drawing of the Villa Madama’s loggia [cat. no. 55]. Here, the linearity and segmentation of the space’s architecture formed Van Heemskerck’s first concern as he commenced recording the view. Accordingly, he began the inking phase with bold, somewhat hastily applied outlines. Generally speaking, this particular sheet must

Cat. no. 26, detail.

Cat. no. 13, detail.

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Cat. no. 55, detail.

Cat. no. 62, detail.

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indicate that in rendering most of his vedute – architecture was the prominent feature of so many of the spaces he portrayed – Van Heemskerck articulated all contours before rendering any shadows, either with hatching or wash. This drawing could have taken on any degree of finish among those we see in his finished drawings. Pentimenti in the articulation of the drawing’s central column suggest that he intended to work it with care and deliberation. His drawings of the Palazzo Medici’s sculpture collection [cat. nos. 62 and 63] provide examples of what such a space could have looked like if Van Heemskerck subjected it to a fuller, more careful inking technique. By the same token, had he decided instead that from the outset of the inking process he wished to make an assured drawing with a quick, confident hand in one layer of ink, the final result would have resembled his impressively rendered single inking of the Palatine’s southwestern slope [cat. no. 12]. Just as easily, however, Van Heemskerck could have given this drawing a high finish in ink wash. Had he done so, it would have resembled his exquisitely subtle reading of the cortile of the Casa Maffei all’ Arco della Ciambella [cat. no. 61]. The smoothed surfaces of the space’s vaulting system, comparable to the vaults of the Palazzo Madama’s loggia, lend themselves to the subtle tonal gradations of ink wash. Likewise, had he chosen to finish the space’s shadows in chalk after beginning with pen and ink, we imagine the finished drawing’s similarity to Berlin album I’s well-known rendering of the break in the Colosseum’s vaulting [cat. no. 19], which Van Heemskerck began in ink, and shaded with black chalk. Articulating strong contours immediately after making an under drawing could not have been Van Heemskerck’s standard sequence in every case, however. His most carefully worked drawings of high finish contain multiple layers of ink in many different kinds of strokes. Close looking at these most highly finished specimens, for example, the small drawing of the Palazzo Madama’s sculpture cortile [cat. no. 62], reveals that after completing his first under drawing, he only applied strong dark outlines after applying faint lines – a second under drawing of sorts – with a lighter touch and a more lightly dipped quill, bearing less ink. Thin lines, somewhat unsteady, pervade all objects, from background to foreground. In the background, these thin strokes are exposed, un-augmented by additional layers of bolder lines, save for the occasional accent. The Torre dei Crescenzi’s appearance beyond the Palazzo Madama’s cortile is comprised almost entirely of such thin strokes, making their convincing nature all the more remarkable.33 In addition to functioning as a first under

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drawing in ink, these thin lines create an effect approximating aerial perspective. Continuing to examine our Palazzo Madama example, we see that the closer objects are to the picture plane, the likelier they are to receive finish with bolder accents from subsequent passes. These layers of darker, more precise outlines and famously neat hatches rely on the first layer of faint lines. Thus, second and third passes achieve a convincing articulation of depth, light, and the shapes and proportions of objects, all while highlighting the artist’s sure hand. For example, in addition to the faint lines of the first pass, the outline of the Palazzo Madama loggia’s furthest vault bears only one additional layer of thicker lines in darker ink. Accordingly, this vault’s column also shows one layer of horizontal hatching. Examining the left contour of the column nearest the picture plane, however, reveals multiple layers. In a free hand that wavers in some places, but is mostly steady, a faint line describes the column’s contour. This thin contour line served as a guide for Van Heemskerck’s articulation of the shaft. Detracting from the drawing’s verisimilitude, it pierces its capital. This lighter line finds support alongside the darker, more assured lines and hatches that Van Heemskerck added later. Horizontal hatches establish shadow; two sets of diagonal hatches communicate the column’s cylindrical shape. Close examination of other drawings of high finish reveal numerous similarly instructive examples of the utility of multiple layers of hatches. Consider the difficult, foreshortened passages describing of the Arch of Constantine’s semicircular molding where it descends from the arch’s keystone [cat. no. 22]. Sketchy, uncertain, faint lines of the first inking cross and engage with one another, hidden behind bolder, more assured strokes. Here, too, we find these layers in the outlines closest to the picture plane. No less energetically applied than the contour lines in the loosest of Van Heemskerck’s drawings, the later pass of bolder lines describing the nearest column’s contours impart sure-handedness that must have resulted from the guide that the faint lines provided. Thus, subsequent passes add nuance. They darken shadowed passages, heighten contrast, and give more precise shape and definition to objects.34 We imagine multiple scenarios for Van Heemskerck’s achievement of the display-level finish of each of these specimens. It could have resulted from multiple visits to a site to continue enhancing the same drawing. It is also entirely possible, however, that Van Heemskerck continued working these drawings off site, after having established enough faint line work to convey the basic pictorial

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Cat. no. 27, detail.

Cat. no. 20, detail.

Cat. no. 34, detail.

Cat. no. 33, detail.

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information about the view. A lack of precision in the rendering of ornamental details, even in his most profusely inked drawings, mounts a strong suggestion that Van Heemskerck was not averse to performing substantial inking off-site. For example, if we continue to gaze upon his foreshortened worm’s eye view of the Arch of Constantine, we cannot help but note his conspicuously summary rendering of the arch’s ornamentation [cat. no. 22]. Such a mode of rendering appears in many of his highly finished examples, including his tour de force drawings of the Septizonium [cat. nos. 24 and 25] and the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 26] In these examples, Van Heemskerck either elected to ink the decorative elements on site but also chose to eschew the rendering of ornamental detail, or he elected to record only the ornamentation’s basic forms on site and finish inking them in bolder summary strokes later. In either case, the result is an ornamentation that is present but vague. We are conscious of it but it does not distract from the structure’s overall impression. Van Heemskerck’s drawings of medium finish reveal further evidence that he finished his drawings off-site. Despite containing fewer fully worked, multilayered passages – and more summary ones like those describing the Arch of Constantine’s ornament – almost all are impressive in their handling of proportion, space, and light.35 They bear mostly single layers of ink. In places, these drawings display the same hastiness that is the signature of his least finished drawings: heavy, imprecisely applied outlines and hatches at wide intervals describe the peripheral objects on view.36 For example, his portrayal of the hills beyond the Frontespizio di Nerone [cat. no. 27] is summary and gives no indication of any on site observation whatsoever. His renderings of the velabrum [cat. no. 34] and the Colosseum’s interior [cat. no. 20] contain rough hatches throughout their foregrounds. The Porticus Octaviae sheet [cat. no. 33] also contains thick, overlapping hatches on the base of the “colossal foot” sculpture and in the area at left between the foot and the Porticus. However, what distinguishes these drawings from their less finished counterparts, and what they share with his drawings of higher finish, are impressively handled passages rendering the main objects on view. Here, Van Heemskerck’s technique more consistently approaches Van Mander’s description of his “neat hatchings,” elaborating more surface textures in greater detail. For example, his renderings of St. Peter’s [cat. no. 42], the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 26], the Arco Argentari [cat. no. 36], the Baths of Diocletian [cat. no. 30], and the Frontespizio di Nerone [cat. no. 27] begin to articulate the subtleties

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in the designs of Rome’s ancient buildings more clearly than any of his drawings of low finish. This is to say that Van Heemskerck’s masterful grasp of proportional and spatial relations conveys effectively the subtleties of these buildings where attention to ornamental detail and a mincingly high finish do not. However, in these and other examples [e.g., cat. nos. 18, 65], we do not need to search carefully for “neat hatchings,” which give a clearer sense of surfaces that face the picture plane. They are manifest. Other examples of medium finish display a deliberately varied stroke-width or a second layer of ink that describes depth more clearly; as in many examples of high finish [e.g. cat. no. 17], Van Heemskerck drew in medium finish with distant background objects bearing thinner lines, or foreground and middle ground objects and objects in shadow in a second pass in bolder, wider, darker strokes comprised of greater amounts of ink [e.g. cat. nos. 3 and 16]. However, where there are lighter, thinner background lines, they are not of the delicate, carefully applied, convincing variety we find in his drawings of high finish. For example, in catalog number 10, thinner background lines are not thin enough to effectively communicate contrast with the topography of the middle ground. The thinner strokes describing the distant Aventine seen from the Forum [cat. no. 3] only describe the outlines of objects, not shadows. Van Heemskerck drew San Giorgio in Velabro with lighter background lines [cat. no. 34], but he has applied them sloppily. We find perhaps the strongest indication of off-site inking among this group, in Van Heemskerck’s distant view of the Capitoline Hill framed by the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16]. Here, the distant Palazzo dei Senatori has two close, parallel, unfinished horizontal lines. The Palazzo appears to have two campanile instead of one. In fact, the towering structure to the right is either the palazzo’s campanile, or, likelier, it is the crenellated northeastern buttress of the Tabularium misaligned with its surrounding buildings. We see the Tabularium’s proper appearance in Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the buildings on the Capitoline as seen from the from Palatine’s northernmost foot [cat. no. 1]. The poorly positioned architectural elements in the present example comprise a remarkably rare example of a Van Heemskerck drawing bearing topographical confusion, a compositional inconsistency that survived into the finishing stage. There can be no doubt that such a mistake would not have occurred had he finished this section of the drawing while standing before the buildings. Off-site inking goes a long way towards explaining such a



Cat. no. 3, detail.

Cat. no. 34, detail.

Cat. no. 16, detail.

Cat. no. 1, detail.

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result. And if it was the norm for Van Heemskerck, its unique status among the extant Roman drawings also attests to his fastidiousness in ensuring that he recorded the vistas before him in pictorially resolved ways. Low-finish examples, with one layer of uniformly thick strokes, could have received most inking on site – never to be subjected to later elaborations. However, their lack of detail may result from the execution of a summary, on-site under drawing and a preponderance of inking off-site, when details were no longer on offer. Thick, loose strokes applied in a single inking phase, inattention to the tonal value that could have been conveyed with a variety of stroke widths, and prominent summary and incomplete passages define this group. However, despite being the products of the least amount of labor, these drawings are not unresolved. They communicate the proportions, spatial relations, and lighting of ancient Roman topography plausibly. Because they achieve a convincing representation of the vista with so little work, they are as impressive, in their way, as Van Heemskerck’s drawings of higher finishes. His rendering of the Trofei di Mario is a tour de force result of such scenarios [e.g., cat no. 31]. The imposing Severan monument appears parallel to – and at medium distance from – the picture plane. With a light source coming into the picture from the right, the monument’s central sculptural niche provided Van Heemskerck with the drawing’s sole opportunity for hatching and cross hatching that delineates smooth contours. Being on-site was not necessary for rendering this passage. Likewise, the base of the monument displays strokes applied with apparent speed; of a generic nature, they articulate the base’s shadowy niches, textured outcroppings, and vegetal onset the same way, as in countless other Van Heemskerck sheets. Thus, it is apparent that once a minimal under drawing was in place, Van Heemskerck engaged a process that could accommodate a variety of media. This makes the relation between Rome’s topography and its life in his drawings less rigid, more fluid; an adaptable process that served an expansive use of media increased the means for Roman topography’s entry into the pictorial realm via Van Heemskerck’s hand. At the same time that his drawings provide a vast body of information about the buildings they portray, the variety of appearances he gives those vistas also conveys information that is purely pictorial. A flexible drawing process resulting in a variety of finishes conveys more forms of knowledge and invites discourse regarding the artist’s process, his drawings as performances.

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Ink Washes, Chalk, Texture: Performance

Van Heemskerck’s departures from pen and ink hatching – his use of ink wash in combination with hatching, pure ink wash, red chalk, and black chalk – appear as attempts to expand his repertoire to better describe the textures before him. His use of chalks suggests his absorption of methods he encountered in Italy among Raphael’s retinue. Some drawings in pen and ink hatching received a thin layer of ink wash [cat. nos. 1, 16, 18, 20, 66, and 69]. Where some of these examples are not obvious, they are effective in complementing hatching and darkening shadows nearest the picture plane. For example, the vegetation in the left foreground of the Forum Romanum double sheet [cat. no. 1] contains two layers of hatching and brown ink wash. Likewise, a minimal wash appears in the darkest shadows of his foreshortened view of the Colosseum’s exterior [cat. no. 18]. Van Heemskerck also used the thinnest of brown washes on the foreground rocks in his drawing of the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16] in order to articulate their situation between the picture plane and the Arch behind them. These conservative but effective uses of ink wash hardly prepare us for the expert drawings in which he eschewed hatching altogether to describe all shadows and surfaces with ink wash within a rubric of pen outlines. His uses of ink wash to describe a variety of shadows and textures, though much fewer in number than his pure pen and ink hatching drawings, are highly performative pieces. In the most carefully crafted among them, Van Heemskerck describes texture and the effects of light on Roman buildings and vistas with precision and detail that surpasses even the most finished of his pure pen and ink drawings. There is even a considerable variety of technical approaches within this small set of drawings. For example, the smooth surfaces of the sculptures, column shafts, walls, and rolling vaults of the Casa Maffei all’arco di Ciambella’s sculpture collection [cat. no. 61] suggested ink wash as the appropriate method of rendering. Van Heemskerck shows the understated transitions of shadows on the cortile’s vaulted ceilings and unfluted columns more carefully than the sculptures sitting in random display on the cortile’s perimeter. The cortile’s heavily inked foregrounded column and arches stand in stark contrast to the particularly subtle passages at background right, where gradually arcing vaults have elicited from Van Heemskerck a remarkably convincing portrayal of transitions from deep shadow to light.

Cat. no. 1, detail.

Cat. no. 16, detail.

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But there is no greater example of Van Heemskerck’s awareness of ink wash’s polyphonic capacities than his large ink wash drawing of the Forum [cat. no. 2]. This drawing’s large format demands more attention to detail than most among his corpus. The ink wash technique enabled him to portray the fluting of the Temple of Vespasian’s columns and the clamor of relief sculpture on the Arch of Septimius Severus with a clarity we cannot find even in his most finished pure pen and ink hatching examples. Likewise, one suspects that the rough texture of the unfinished massive north walls of the New St. Peter’s complex [cat. no. 43] in mid-transformation from old to new inspired Van Heemskerck’s choice of ink wash. No amount of hatching, no line however thin, could describe the wall with the same fidelity as these deftly handled passages. In places on the massive walls, Van Heemskerck has executed hatches with the brush instead of the pen. He has also used the ink wash to reconcile the geometric perfection of the northern and western vault’s interiors with the irregular shadows in the crags of the building’s razed surfaces. Most impressive is his use of two slightly varied tones of wash for the shadows of the vaults furthest from the picture plane. Van Heemskerck also used the ink wash technique effectively for recording the effects of light on smooth contours. These meticulous uses of ink wash by Van Heemskerck, which closely resemble painting, may have descended from the use of the brush to execute under drawings for paintings by artists in the generation before him, including Gossart, Lucas van Leyden, Bernard Van Orley, and Pieter Coecke van Aelst.37 It is also possible that Van Heemskerck and ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, the latter of whom favored ink wash in his drawings, noted and emulated Van Scorel’s use of ink wash for drawing views, as seen in his landscape drawing now in the Getty collection.38 Van Heemskerck also occasionally turned to black and red chalks for a variety of descriptive effects. The virtuosic chalk drawings of the Raphael circle appear to have inspired his masterful renderings in this medium. Francesco Salviati’s drawing of a seated youth [fig. 5.4] provides an example of the kind of Italian chalk drawing Van Heemskerck may have seen during his stay. Breathtaking in its display of subtle chiaroscuro throughout, especially the figure’s left sleeve, arm, and leg, it would have provided an aspiration for the Haarlem artist, eager to assimilate the methods of his Italian contemporaries. In their handling of light and shadow, Van Heemskerck’s renderings of sculptural antiquities [e.g. fig. 5.3] are not quite as fine as our Salviati example. However, they nonetheless reveal his

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figure 5.3 Maarten van Heemskerck, Torso of a Youth from Casa Santa Croce, 1532–c. 37, Inventory Number 79D2 61v, ink on paper, 128 × 204 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

figure 5.4 Francesco Salviati, Seated Youth, c. 1530, Registration number 1946,0713.519 red chalk on paper, 413 × 293mm, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

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interest in the medium and his desire to exploit its capability for deft passages of chiaroscuro and displays of his understanding of artist’s understanding of the forms before him. The darkened interior of the Colosseum’s vaults prompted him to test black chalk’s capacity for describing contrast, while leaving to pen and ink the precision required by the building’s contours. A study of the Colosseum’s ruined side [cat. no. 19] is the lone drawing in which Van Heemskerck attempts to give voice to the dark shadows of the amphitheater’s masonry and barrel vaults with black chalk. Pen lines portray the contours, vegetation, and design elements such as pilasters. Chalk appears to stem from the middle spine of the masonry between the two rows of circumferential vaults. It is not surprising that we only have one example by Van Heemskerck in black chalk. Unlike ink wash, the chalk is less able to provide the contrast that marks Van Heemskerck’s pure pen and ink, and ink wash efforts. As we have seen, he found red chalk especially effective for describing the polished, rounded surfaces of the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures he encountered in Rome, applying the chalk with subtle variations in pressure, to produce nuanced tonal variety [e.g., fig. 5.3]. Likewise, we have only two examples of Van Heemskerck’s use of red chalk to render elements of Roman topography. Perhaps the sculptural qualities of the cornice in the Forum Augusta’s Temple of Mars Ultor [cat. no. 71] and the Palazzo Branconio d’all Acquila’s façade [cat. no. 39] influenced Van Heemskerck to draw them in red chalk as well.39 Even in the latter example, an imprecise unfinished line drawing that does not portray details, Van Heemskerck has used the red chalk to emphasize harmonic fluidity in Raphael’s façade design. The choice of red chalk here is in marked contrast to Van Heemskerck’s other facade drawing in elevation [cat. no. 40], for which he chose pen and ink wash to render much more linear architectural designs. The cornice of the Temple of Mars Ultor prompted Van Heemskerck to use the pointed, blunt, and flat surfaces of his chalk to express the slight curves of the egg and dart pattern and the play of light on the acanthus leaves, volutes, and the negative space between them.

Mimesis, Performance, and Function

The copiously varied techniques Van Heemskerck deployed in response to Rome’s topography were at once mimetic and performative. The tension in these modes of presentation, contained in varying measures in each of his Roman drawings, prompts

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considerations of their functions. His occasional revisions to the Roman landscape notwithstanding, his drawings comprise our best source if we want to know what the city’s ruins and vistas looked like in the early-to-mid 1530s. Of greater importance for our present discussion of his technique, however, is their vivid presentation of Rome’s textural variety. Van Heemskerck’s handling of his drawing materials was so deft that it made his antique subjects palpable. He did not impose his received drawing method on each of the objects in his view with rote sameness, disregarding each one’s uniquely varied visual aspect. Rather, he adapted his technique to the different problems that each monument or vista posed. In turn, however, this mimesis, this virtuosic adaptability, highlights his technical prowess. In the final analysis, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings do not show us Rome as it was, but Rome as his remarkably subtle hand has described it for us. Despite their highly mimetic appearance, it is impossible to forget that his Roman drawings also comprise a series of performances. Even as we recognize the convincing portrayals in the drawings before us, we cannot help but marvel at their facture; crisp, orderly hatching has its own intrinsic beauty, regardless of what it portrays. By the same token, so does the calligraphic poetry of the more spontaneously applied line, the carefully crafted chiaroscuro of a ceiling vault shaded with ink wash, or a cornice drawn in red chalk. Overflowing with effects like these, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings continually remind us of their maker’s hand. Even within the apparent limitations of pen and ink hatching, Van Heemskerck was capable of achieving a remarkable range of mimetic and performative effects. Let us return to the rich comparison we noted at the beginning of this chapter. Consider the multi-layered, finely detailed strokes in his foreshortened drawing of the Villa Madama’s sculpture garden [cat. no. 64] and the near-abstractions of his drawing of the Palatine Hill’s southwestern slope [cat. no. 12]. Both boast their maker’s virtuosic grasp of space and proportion, which we illuminated in this book’s previous chapter. But as their subject matter has dictated, both bear notably different affects. The drawing of the Villa Madama sculpture garden, like Van Heemskerck’s other drawings of similarly high finish, displays his most emphatically performative mode of drawing Rome. Their display of virtuosity is their most conspicuous feature. While Van Heemskerck’s convincing command of proportion, contour, and space makes the objects in these views appear plausible, it is as if they are beneath a patina of hatches that conceal ornamental detail. Sure-handed outlines are closely mimetic of nuanced forms such as the tapering of Jupiter’s thigh. Even a cursory first glance at this

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Cat. no. 64, detail.

Cat. no. 64, detail.

Cat. no. 64, detail.

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drawing reveals multiple layers of ink and strokes of varying widths and intervals, resulting in an overall tonal subtlety that is appropriate for the textures of its many subjects: the smoothed contours of sculptures and their molded bases, walls bearing brick voussoirs, niches, grotteschi reliefs, and vegetation. With convincing imitation, the drawing impresses a variety of details: from the cragginess of the Jupiter sculpture’s broken arm to the orderly, rhythmic sequence of smooth, flat pilasters behind him in the half-light. But this same network of hatching merely suggests other details. Hatching shows us the play of light on more complexly articulated surfaces such as the folds in Jupiter’s drapery. Here, we also find passages where Van Heemskerck has deliberately eased or increased pressure to bring his line from thin to wide or vice versa, thus achieving a close approximation of the transition from shadow to light. For example, the contour hatches articulating the musculature of Jupiter’s torso appear to evaporate into light as they become thinner. They describe the subtle curvature of the marble as it mimics flesh. The overall impression of precision in such polished specimens makes looser, wavering strokes, traces of under drawing, pentimenti, and incomplete passages easy to miss.40 Nonetheless, under careful examination, they appear, albeit as anomalies. For example, Van Heemskerck has articulated the grotesquery on the sculpture garden’s pilasters, which appears in low relief, with relative speed in single lines. Further, only a close examination reveals the slightly inconsistent angles of the orthogonal lines of the pilaster’s bases and the wavering verticality of the pilasters’ contour lines, which indicate that Van Heemskerck has eschewed the use of a straight edge. Further from the picture plane, strokes lighten and contrast lessens to describe distance. This loosened stroke is nonetheless capable of describing a variety of forms – thick vegetation, the pediment and cornice of the garden gate, and Baccio Bandinelli’s giganti – with a plausible spatial and proportional grasp. These are remarkably bold displays of sprezzatura on a sheet that bears careful handling in so many other ways. Other examples bear similar combinations of the deliberate with the spontaneous. For example, Van Heemskerck frequently left minutiae such as architectural ornament and inscriptions unstated. Even his close view of cornice fragments with the Temple of Faustina in the distant backdrop [cat. no. 70] portrays the general appearance of the ornament rather than offering precise descriptions of its individual parts. Nor does Van Heemskerck’s focus on the capitals and the relief sculpture in the foreground of his masterful Forum Nervae sheet [cat. no. 26] reveal detail either, despite his exceptionally exacting execution of

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outlines and hatches. And we can say the same of his rendering of the cornice and capitals atop the Pantheon’s portico [cat. no. 38]. Thus, despite their obvious meticulousness, even these more finished drawings do not articulate the details of objects with mincing exactitude. Only the overturned composite capital [cat. no. 17] – exceptionally close to the picture plane compared to most objects among Van Heemskerck’s pure pen and ink drawings – shows ornamental detail. All others show summary, even inattentive renderings of ornament.41 While this is not surprising in sheets showing buildings at some distance from the picture plane [e.g., cat. nos. 1], even capitals, keystones, and relief sculpture relatively close to the picture plane bear no detail upon careful examination [cat. no. 22]. By contrast, the technique in Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the southwestern slope of the Palatine [cat. no. 12] is a startlingly uncomplicated affair, but one example of his ability to master the appearance of a Roman vista while using only thick strokes. He has chosen to portray the hill’s palatial wreckage at a difficult angle from the picture plane, a display of seemingly effortless command of a variety of foreshortenings; no surface appears in elevation, no contour in profile. However, rather than working up a polyphonic variety of tones via networks of multi-layered hatches, Van Heemskerck has chosen not to elaborate the vista before him. He has used a minimum of quickly applied lines. Both foreground and background appear in thick hatches at wide intervals. Only the deepest shadows of the coffering in the entrance of Palatine’s stadium and foreground substructures appear via a slightly bolder stroke. In only a few of the vista’s darker places do we see a second layer of thicker, bolder hatches. Nonetheless, the drawing effectively conveys the mass and ruination of the vista, the sad grandeur of the towering palatial ruins and the bulk of the hill on which they sit. The drawing is thus an essay on the seamless relation of Van Heemskerck’s eye and hand, a performance of his knowledge of the hill and his facility in drawing it, not his command of a variety of inking effects. We find similar effects throughout Van Heemskerck’s corpus of Roman drawings. For example, the hodgepodge of buildings comprising San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure [cat. no. 32] appears through a network of medium-width strokes offering little or contrast or detail. His views of the Porta del Popolo and the Muro Torto [cat. no. 37] appear via similarly uniform, heavy lines. Likewise, at first glance, the instantly recognizable shape and the darkly shadowed interior of the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica [cat. no. 51] suggest a highly finished drawing. But a closer look reveals an omnipresent thick stroke and the swiftness with which Van Heemskerck has

Cat. no. 32, detail.

Cat. no. 37, detail.

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Cat. no. 51, detail.

Cat. no. 52, detail.

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rendered the ancient Roman temple and the surrounding bridges, ruins, and vegetation. Van Heemskerck has rendered the Porta Maggior and its environs [cat. no. 52] in a similar fashion. The arc of the undisciplined hatches on the gate’s north side betrays his quick application of ink. Many hatches stop midway or overshoot their mark. But his skillful handling of the gate’s foreshortening and the shadowed nooks of the background’s ruins contribute to a convincing vista. Likewise, stepping away from the summarily drawn parts in Van Heemskerck’s Trofei di Mario sheet [cat. no. 31] reveals that he has recorded the monument’s gesture with impressive mimetic fidelity. As a result, the drawing’s presentation of the monument is as convincing as its more carefully rendered appearances in any of the prints of the monument from the same angle.42 Though these drawings are quick studies, Van Heemskerck’s grasp of general appearances is so true that he deceives us into thinking that he has described more detail than is actually present. Van Heemskerck’s technical variety is intrinsically significant, but it must have also had both practical and poetical values for him that were inextricably bound to one another. Their mimetic and performative aspects enabled his Roman drawings to function in a variety of ways that go beyond their obvious function of furnishing Van Heemskerck with an enduring set of motifs after the antique. For example, as we established in chapter 4, his drawings of relatively low finish [e.g., cat. no. 12] are vivid in their evocation of Roman space, suggesting his eye’s virtuosic grasp of the Roman landscape. Combined with their loose but confident strokes, such drawings proclaim his effortless manual mastery of Rome, highlighting his sprezzatura. In turn, such a conspicuous display of manual dexterity with pen in hand would display his skill for the fellow artists with whom he shared his work, whether in Rome or in the Netherlands. It would also make a strong appeal to potential patrons. Similarly, Van Heemskerck’s more thorough technique, whether in pen and ink hatching, ink wash, or chalk, would have enhanced their function as display drawings – conversation pieces – in the workshop, the collection, or more formal settings. Moreover, the precise hatching on view in many of his thoroughly worked pen and ink drawings approximated the standard method during the middle quarters of the sixteenth century for making preparatory sketches for prints in the middle quarters of the sixteenth century; as Veldman remarked, such examples could thus also make a convincing argument to potential print engravers and publishers to contract Van Heemskerck’s services.43

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We have at least one example that confirms this: Van Heemskerck’s carefully worked drawing from the Palatine [cat. no. 9], which eventually did serve as the basis for a print [fig. 7.15]. Thus, by expanding his technical lexicon he could develop new forms of pictorial intelligence that could, in turn, further his career. In the post-Sack cultural and artistic climate of the 1530s, it would have served several specific purposes for Van Heemskerck and his fellow Netherlanders to amass a corpus of images of Rome’s ruins, which were so crucial in post-Sack visual and cultural parlance. The very act of amassing such a collection of motifs was the surest way to gain an important form of pictorial knowledge. Having a set of self-produced images at the ready was the surest way to demonstrate that knowledge to established masters with active workshops as well as potential patrons. For artists not planning to put down roots in Rome, producing such a corpus of drawings served the additional function of ensuring a portable knowledge base for future use. Van Heemskerck’s Roman topographical drawings are records of an eye and hand that had acquired a unique pictorial knowledge of Roman space, unsurpassed in its awareness of then current Netherlandish and Italian pictorial trends. The compositional schemes, media, and techniques in his drawings comprise a vast and varied collection of forms of knowledge that falls within the overlapping rubrics of antiquity and art. Because of Van Heemskerck’s convincing grasp of Roman space, even drawings of low finish strike us as truthful renderings in which he uses his considerable gift for representation to make a little labor go a long way. Drawings of higher finish in various media display more specific information about the shapes and textures of things. Their quantity of a variety of quality strokes also brings Van Heemskerck’s presence to the forefront by indicating his meticulous study, his manual labor, and thus his virtuosity. Beyond these intrinsic qualities, his utterly dynamic array of pictorial frameworks and topographical revisions suggests his mastery of Roman space and even his ability to re-present antiquity in new syntactical configurations. Likewise, the sheer facture of his drawings also conveys to any beholder that he has cultivated his eye and hand to “read and write” fluently in the pictorial language of Rome, to design “new Romes.”

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Part 3 Remembering the Eternal: Van Heemskerck After Rome

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Introduction Upon his return from Rome to Haarlem, Van Heemskerck established a thriving workshop and functioned as one of the most vital artists on the European stage. He remained there until his death in 1574. It is impossible to imagine Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman artistic production without his Roman drawings. His compatriots in the Low Countries had not likely seen such an extensive set of images of Rome’s antiquities. For the duration of this long post-Roman phase, they remained at the center of his artistic practice as he produced an unparalleled body of paintings and prints after the antique. Van Heemskerck himself signaled the importance of the Roman drawings for his own work by using self-portraiture to fashion his identity as a master of Rome’s ruins, an antiquarian of the highest order, and a perpetuator of the cultural memory of antiquity. As a preeminent pictor doctus of the Low Countries, Van Heemskerck pressed his antiquarian mode of image-making into service to comment on the turbulent socio-political environment of the mid-sixteenth century Low Countries. At the center of his imagery was the ruin, which he used as a cautionary, a reminder from the deep past of the fragile nature of civilization.

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Invention, Collecting, Antiquarianism He was a very good designer, yes: a man who, in a manner of speaking, filled the world with his inventions, added to which he was also a good architect as all his works make abundantly clear.1 Karel van Mander

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Reinventing Rome: Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World

Van Heemskerck returned to Haarlem sometime between late 1536 and the spring of 1537 with his corpus of Roman drawings, the seedbed for his cultivation of an ekphrastic vision of the Roman landscape he had just absorbed. For the remainder of his life he worked from his home base in Haarlem, sending paintings and prints across the Low Countries, northern Europe, and beyond. His overlapping circles of artists, publishers, humanists, antiquarians, and clerics encouraged him to refine the modes of invention all’antica that he had begun developing while in Rome.2 Aside from the remembrances that he and his colleagues shared of their experiences in Rome and the antiquities they viewed there, the drawings were all Van Heemskerck had left of the city. With the city no longer just beyond his door, his drawings became essential for his artistic pursuits, functioning broadly as prompts for the recollection of historical knowledge, a repository of pictorial memories of Rome and antiquity. In practice, they could serve him and those in his circle as pieces for informal conversation or formal display. Regardless of environment or audience – whether in the workshop or in a collection environment, with fellow artists, a potential patron, or publisher – viewing and discussing the Roman drawings would have entailed a de facto cultivation of multiple forms of knowledge stemming from the Eternal City. The drawings could evoke artistic, architectural, and historical concerns and more. They could also bring to mind several related, more specific branches of knowledge: the mythological, the theological

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and spiritual, and the political, to name but a few. As such abundant prompts, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings doubtless aided him in gaining commissions for his paintings and collaborators for his prints. Naturally, viewers impressed with his drawings must have desired that the art resulting from working with Van Heemskerck reflect their richly refractive content. Thus, Van Heemskerck’s corpus of drawings provided him with a lexicon of motifs translatable into his art. But drawing in Rome had fortified him with more than a pictorial memory of the city’s ruined antiquities. It imbued his pictorial intelligence with an “imagination after the antique” that enabled him to devise new antiquities. In truth, by the time Van Heemskerck arrived in the Netherlands, his post-Roman phase was already well under way. It had begun before he ever left the Eternal City. There, he used his Roman drawings as a means to gain commissions and, more importantly, as a source for the motifs in the works he made as a result: Vulcan’s Forge [fig. 3.3], Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], and perhaps the Triumph of Bacchus [fig. 3.4]. Although we trace the origins of these paintings to his time in Rome, we should see them as his first post-Roman works. He made them after having been in the city for at least two and a half years. By then, he had likely executed a considerable number of his Roman drawings and had thus developed a refined understanding of the pictorial qualities in Rome’s antiquities. Moreover, although he did not conceive or execute the paintings he made in Rome with the concerns of northern European viewers in mind, these works stand as augurs of the pictorial strategies he would continue to evolve in the paintings and prints of his 37-year Haarlem period. The figure grouping of Vulcan’s Forge [fig. 3.3], for example, is indebted to his study of Baldassare Peruzzi’s painting of the same subject, appearing over the hearth in the Sala delle Prospettive of Agostino Chigi’s Roman villa.3 His later print revising the painting’s design and his print of “Gideon Destroying the Altar of Baal” [fig. 3.8], which reprises and varies the same figural composition, suggests admiration for the Peruzzi painting by Van Heemskerck and those in his circle, as well as his interest in the pictorial challenge of rendering a group of male nudes in active poses at varying angles to the picture plane.4 Likewise, the central female figure of Van Heemskerck’s Triumph of Bacchus [fig. 3.4] revises the pose of Raphael’s Galatea, also in Chigi’s villa. Several other figures in the painting derive from sculptures Van Heemskerck drew during his visits to Rome’s sculpture collections.5 Though we do not have drawings by Van Heemskerck documenting his study of

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all of the sources for the motifs in these works, their presence in the paintings alone is enough to suggest that he did indeed draw them. The majestic, monumentally scaled Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1] comprises Van Heemskerck’s first post-Roman masterwork.6 It stands as an early summa of his development of the ekphrastic use of his pictorial vocabulary after the antique. The painting’s unusual display of two dates (1535–36) suggests that it was long in development and occupied a considerable amount of his time before he left Rome.7 Given its apparently long gestation, it should not seem surprising that the copious variety in the Roman drawings, our focus of the previous two chapters, came to such abundant fruition in the Helen painting. The Helen portrays the event that sparked the Trojan War. Paris has abducted Helen of Troy from the temple of Venus. Van Heemskerck has composed the painting to feature Paris and his retinue on a knoll in the composition’s lower left foreground. They make off with Helen and a golden statue of Venus bearing an apple, an allusion to Paris’s earlier judgment of Venus as the most beautiful of all goddesses. Van Heemskerck’s sweeping panoramic cityscape, teeming with intact and ruined buildings all’antica, occupies the remainder and majority of the 12-foot long canvas. The Helen thus presents a wondrous, abundant display of Van Heemskerck’s fantasie: the never-beforeseen antiquities he conjured out of his drawings and his pictorial imagination after the antique.8 We even construe the Helen’s only identifiable historical buildings as fantasie: Van Heemskerck’s imaginings of three and perhaps four of the seven wonders of the ancient world.9 In the painting’s deep left backdrop we find the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which Van Heemskerck has seemingly modeled on his observation of Rome’s Church of Sant Agostino or Florence’s Santa Maria Novella.10 In the painting’s right central middle ground, a walled hill with lush but manicured greenery before a spiral tower represents his interpretation of the walls and hanging garden of Babylon, or the hanging gardens and the lighthouse at Alexandria.11 At the painting’s far right, a golden statue straddling a canal portrays the Colossus of Rhodes.12 With its abundant visual and literary references to antiquity such as these, the Helen would have functioned most effectively if hung in a mid-Cinquecento studiolo, kunst-und-wunderkammer, or collection environment comprised of all manner of wondrous objects – antiquities, paintings, prints, incunabula, exotica, naturalia, and more – the environments that Samuel Quicchelberg (1529–1567) most famously elaborated in his Inscriptiones vel titule theatri amplissimi, and which Peter Parshall

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figure 6.1 Maarten van Heemskerck Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World, 1535–36, Accession number 37.656, oil on canvas, 147.3 × 383.5 cm., Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD

later described incisively as “theaters of knowledge.”13 By virtue of its enormity alone, the Helen would preside over myriad concretions of knowledge in such environs. With its plenitude of inventions, it would prompt a viewing consciousness of the collection as an environment for the consumption of past cultural productions and the creation of new ones out of that past. Thus, it would also suggest the crucial roles of collecting and memory in the development of artistic vision and intellection writ large. We therefore most appropriately describe the Helen as “collection picture.” Unsurprisingly, much of the literature on the monumentally scaled painting is concerned with the relation between its fantasia backdrop and its narrative.14 Martin Stritt has offered the definitive, most holistic accounting of the painting.15 It nonetheless behooves

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us to explore in detail the relation between the Helen’s scenery and to Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. As scholars have pointed out, aspects of the Helen’s landscape are related to literary precedents. A large cityscape of any sort is unusual in depictions of the narrative.16 E. S. King has noted that Van Heemskerck’s depiction of the abduction from a circular temple of Venus suggests that Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Trojae (1287) – a reworked version of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (1160) – served Van Heemskerck as a crucial source. Both books enjoyed popularity in the sixteenth century. However, noting that Van Heemskerck’s “remarkable metropolis” has no “Cytherean counterpart,” King concluded that it “would be useless to consult the texts in order to find a name for it.”17 Expanding our narrative scope beyond the limited

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literary temporality of the abduction suggests otherwise, however. A recurring theme in Benoît’s history is the far-flung wonders and exoticism of the eastern world.18 Van Heemskerck’s inclusion in the painting’s backdrop of some as opposed to all of the ancient wonders – his visualization of a metonymy of the ancient wonders – was thus a natural choice.19 Their presence allowed him to display his historical knowledge and pictorial imagination for antiquity. For a cultured, antiquarian audience in a collection environment, his visualization of a theme promoting a consciousness that was global in scope in a literary work that was then popular would suggest discursive parameters extending beyond the immediate range of the narrative portrayed. Thus, the use of the wonders is analogous to the painting’s panoramic format. A vista portraying an impossible topographic and temporal range by virtue of its inventions, Van Heemskerck’s copious panorama visualizes a hyperbolic, de facto suggestion of viewing prolepsis; it presents its viewers with everything before they could ever hope to consume it. In order to even approach a consummation of the painting’s proleptic effect – complete contemplation of its vista – one must take the extended time required to explore its plenitude of associations. Thus, viewing time becomes analogous to the portrayal of an apparently endless vista. Surely, the abundant historical content in the Roman landscape itself served as Van Heemskerck’s inspiration for the Helen’s landscape. Moreover, there can be no doubt that the painting’s viewers would have embraced a search for the seemingly infinite refractions in its landscape. Even Van Heemskerck’s general compositional scheme, his choice to situate the narrative on a hill in the lower left foreground, constitutes an appeal to connoisseurial knowledge via a reinvention of a prototypical compositional scheme utilized by both Michelangelo and Jan van Scorel. For this decision, he is ultimately indebted to the compositional scheme in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Deluge. As we have seen, however, Van Heemskerck would have known well the advantages of such a compositional scheme before ever arriving in Rome; Van Scorel’s Entry into Jerusalem – the center panel of the Lokhorst Triptych [fig. 2.9] – is ultimately traceable to the same Sistine motif.20 Other paintings from 1520 and 1521, Van Scorel’s pre-Roman phase, suggest that the Deluge’s compositional scheme would have resonated with his own pictorial proclivities once he saw it in 1522. Like the Deluge, Van Scorel’s Landscape with the Drowning of the Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea of 1520, and his Landscape with Tobias and the Angel of 1521 both utilize the lower left corner as a grounding

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element for a landscape that recedes to upper right. The latter painting contains foregrounded figures on a hill at lower left.21 Thus, his experiments with a compositional scheme similar to the Sistine composition began long before composing the Lokhorst Triptych and even before seeing the Deluge. The Tobias painting is also notable for the variety of inventive architectural forms of its sweeping panoramic landscape. Albeit summarily articulated, these painted buildings are prescient of the Helen’s architectural forms. Thus, the Helen’s compositional scheme indicates not only the strong impression that the Deluge made on Van Heemskerck, but the currency of the scheme in his training and Van Scorel’s claim to realizing its effectiveness on his own terms. In turn, the Helen’s composition would prompt knowledgeable viewers to consider broadly the painting’s place within its artistic universe, as well as that of its maker. While we have no drawing by Van Heemskerck of Michelangelo’s Deluge, his ignudi prints confirm his intensive study of the Sistine ceiling.22 And it is impossible to imagine Van Heemskerck’s receipt of a commission to paint Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World without the many drawings his executed while in Rome, not only of the paintings he studied, but of the city’s ruins. Even if Van Heemskerck began painting the Helen in early in 1535, he had by then been in Rome long enough to have already executed many of the drawings that have now come down to us. As the post-Sack diaspora of Italian artists from the remains of Raphael’s equipe created more opportunities than usual for Netherlandish artists, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings appear to have enjoyed a high reputation among the artists and prestigious patrons who remained or had returned to the Eternal City during his time in Rome.23 His drawings of Rome’s sculpture collections [cat. nos. 61–67] are particularly indicative of his high standing; they provide de facto evidence that Rome’s antiquarian collectors welcomed him into their sculpture gardens, cortile, and loggias, and even suggest his renown among them.24 Van Heemskerck’s growing corpus of drawings, its quantity and scope driven by a seemingly encyclopedic ambition, would have appeared as the result of an acquisitive act to the learned antiquarian collectors who allowed him access to their collections. A record of the same urge to know Rome and antiquity as the collections he visited and drew, they comprise a “meta-collection.”25 Their copious display of his virtuosic pictorial capacities was doubtless a major determinant in the Helen’s final form; the painting marks the first time Van Heemskerck synthesized his experiences of drawing Rome in order to create a fantasy on any scale, let alone a

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monumental one. Moreover, the painting’s display of topographical and architectural motifs relatable to his drawings further validates the notion that they were instrumental in securing the painting’s commission. Speculation on the relation between the Helen’s patronage, subject matter, and ekphrastic reinterpretation of Rome further indicates the importance of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings for the painting’s demonstration of his ingegno.26 The specific identity of the painting’s patron is currently an open question. However, its monumental scale alone provides a clear indication of Van Heemskerck’s receipt of ample financial support for its making; the conception and execution of such a large work on speculation is highly unlikely. The Helen’s earliest known owner is leading Italian humanist and collector, Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi (1500–1564). An itemization of Rodolfo’s estate at the time of his death provides our earliest confirmation of the painting’s whereabouts. However, in no way does the cardinal’s inventory confirm his commission of the painting.27 During most of Van Heemskerck’s Roman stay, Rodolfo was in France serving the court of Francis I. At that time, he had hardly begun commissioning or collecting works of art in earnest.28 Therefore, although Rodolfo would eventually own the painting, we continue to search for other credible sources of patronage.29 On the side of a boat in the painting’s lower right foreground, shields bearing impresa associated with the Habsburg dynasty and the Farnese family provide a crucial point of fixation.30 The shields suggest patronage rooted in circumstances of the mid-1530s, when both of these prominent families shared the European stage. As recounted above in chapter 3, June of 1535 witnessed Charles V’s thwarting of Ottoman troops in Tunis and his subsequent triumphal procession through Rome in April, 1536. Charles arranged the procession in collaboration with the Vatican under Paul III Farnese.31 A commission for the painting by either European power as part of the festivities for the occasion would thus explain the painting’s unusual display of two dates as well as its combination of emblems. Such a commission would also explain the painting’s landscape, so sweeping in scope. Extending across Rome, Charles’s procession was also panoramic in nature. Along with his rising status as “world emperor,” his triumphal procession amidst Rome’s antiquities provides a historical context for Van Heemskerck’s conceptualization of the painting’s panoramic display after the antique, which refers to the world beyond itself via its inclusion of a few, but not all, of the world’s ancient wonders. However, while the painting’s landscape

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accords with the notion of its commission for Charles’s procession, it is only with some difficulty that we explain its foregrounded portrayal of Paris’s abduction of Helen in conjunction with Charles’s defeat of the Ottomans. If we associate Paris’s abduction of Helen with matters among nations, we associate it with the beginning of hostilities between them, not the celebration of a victory after having vanquished a foe. Moreover, in a much more concrete sense, the painting never left Rome, making Charles’s commission of it unlikelier still. The wedding of Margaret of Parma (1522–1586) provides another possible patronal scenario. Margaret could have commissioned Helen to celebrate her marriage to Alessandro de’ Medici (1510–1537) in Florence in 1536.32 She was engaged to Alessandro in 1527, at the tender age of five. Born in the eastern Flemish province of Oudenaarde, Margaret was Charles’s illegitimate daughter, whom he acknowledged. She and those in the chain of command leading to her father may have viewed Van Heemskerck as a most fitting choice among available Netherlanders for the commission of a large-scale painting to commemorate the happy occasion. As an artist of highpedigree Netherlandish training whose drawings revealed his depth of knowledge of the artistic treasures of Italy and Rome’s vistas, Van Heemskerck would have appeared capable of working in a visual language appropriate for a union between a Netherlander and an Italian. Moreover, Alessandro himself was not averse to appropriating art by northerners for his personal visual culture. His own emblem featured a variation on Dürer’s Rhinoceros.33 This marital circumstance would also explain more satisfactorily the painting’s Virgilian subject matter. Portrayals of Paris and Helen were not at all uncommon for weddings. Additionally, the subject would seem an especially appropriate analogue for the specific circumstances of Margaret and Alessandro’s wedding: the princess’s union with an elite, powerful, foreign entourage. It would more specifically call for the portrayal of the mythological union as Van Heemskerck has, after Sappho’s description of the story as an amorous, consensual pursuit rather than a non-consensual abduction.34 Margaret’s commission of the painting might likewise explain Van Heemskerck’s deployment of its oft-noted, decidedly Netherlandish, Patiniresque tri-partite color scheme. The predominantly brown and green earth tones of the canvas’s bottom third give way to a greenish-blue hue for the landscape’s lush middle ground, which in turn yields to the icy blue-greys that describe the painting’s jagged mountains and panoramic sky.35 The combination of this Netherlandish landscape

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color scheme with its motifs all’antica comprises a fundamental formal analogue between the painting and the marital circumstance that might have precipitated its conception. In order to best understand the Helen’s pictorial conceptualization – its inventions in particular – we oscillate from painting to drawing in search of correspondences between them. Doing so reveals degrees of departure from the Roman drawings. The Helen canvas bears motifs that are identifiable as echoes of motifs in the drawings, motifs that do not echo the drawings but allude to topography and buildings appearing in them, and fantasie of a more fully inventive nature. Thus, doing so provides a first glimpse at Van Heemskerck’s inventive process. We begin by considering the Helen’s basic framework of invented natural topography. We trace even this fundamental determinant in the configuration of the painting’s imagined city back to Van Heemskerck’s drawings. For example, in the same way that the Apennine Mountains form a backdrop to the Eternal City from high vantage points on the Janiculum Hill, a craggy mountain range forming the Helen’s deepest background frames Van Heemskerck’s invented city. Also much like Rome, the cityscape Van Heemskerck has configured in the painting’s middle ground comprises several hills. Certainly, if this natural topography reminded the Helen’s audience of the Eternal City it is because they, like the artist himself, possessed some memory of Rome’s appearance from its high vantage points. Beyond the painted vista’s general similarities to Rome, specific passages in Van Heemskerck’s drawings provided source material for the mountains, hills, and bodies of water configuring the Helen’s composition. They are revisions of Rome’s appearance from high vantage points in two of Van Heemskerck’s panoramas, each of which covers two horizontally oriented sheets: his view east from the Janiculum Hill [cat. no. 57] and his view north from the Aventine Hill [cat. no. 56].36 From background to foreground, the panorama Van Heemskerck drew from the Janiculum served as a major determinant of the Helen’s basic compositional, spatial, and topographical framework. Articulating this drawing’s most distant horizon line is the silhouette of the Apennine mountains to Rome’s east. From left to right, a cluster of peaks in the drawing’s left third gives way to lower topography in the center. The horizon then gradually rises to a single peak at right. The Helen’s distant horizon line bears the same fundamental configuration, albeit with a more magnificently jagged, fantastical mountain range. The Janiculum drawing’s right foreground likewise provided a basic motif for the painting’s harbor,

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also in the right foreground. In the drawing, the foregrounded crest of the Janiculum forms a low horizon line that blocks the view of the Tiber, beyond and at lower elevation. Further to the right, this tension resolves where we see Rome’s walls loop from foreground to background, behind Monte Testaccio, east towards the drawing’s central third. Likewise, the Helen canvas’s lower right quarter bears this very same topographical configuration determining the transition from foreground to background. Here, Van Heemskerck has transformed the void in the drawing’s right foreground into the painting’s body of water. Finally, the Janiculum drawing’s portrayal of the Aventine Hill also provides the source for the hill in the Helen’s central middle ground; with its heavy hatching and deep shadows, it resembles the painting’s lush, forest-green passage of trees. Van Heemskerck consulted his double-sheeted drawing of the Tiber from the Aventine [cat. no. 56] for similar purposes. It provided the source for the serpentine river in the painting’s distant middle ground. The drawing’s left sheet shows the Ponte Fabricio and the Ponte Rotto surmount the Tiber as it approaches Rome’s urban clutter. Likewise, arcaded bridges surmount the Helen’s painted river as it recedes from the picture plane. Continued searching for relations between both of these panoramic drawings and the Helen canvas inevitably moves us from considerations of the painting’s composition and natural topography to an exploration of its architecture. For example, the bottom left corner of the Janiculum drawing’s left sheet bears numerous foreshortened lines that culminate in the distant background at upper left. The most prominent among them summarily describes the Janiculum’s Aurelian wall. In the Helen’s lower left third, we find the echo of these informally drawn orthogonal lines, a foreshortened hill that Van Heemskerck embellished with a rhythmic arcade based on the Palatine Hill’s substructures.37 Further into the Janiculum drawing’s background, these lines lead to the Colosseum, which appears as a little circular structure in the distance at upper left. This drawn motif served Van Heemskerck as the source for the Helen’s invented circular ruin, also appearing in the distance at upper left. However, it is the right half of the Janiculum drawing that contains the clearest indication of its importance for the Helen’s inventions. Scanning down and to the right from this sheet’s distant mountain peak, we see Rome’s Pyramid of Cestius. Further down in the same direction sits a small, foreshortened vernacular structure with a pitched roof. Turning to the Helen and scanning down the canvas from its distant mountain peak at far right, we find that Van Heemskerck has revised

Cat. no. 56, detail.

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the drawing’s attenuated depiction of the Pyramid of Cestius to form the splayed legs of the Colossus of Rhodes. For the painting, he has also moved the drawing’s pyramid to where the vernacular structure stood. The architecture in Van Heemskerck’s view of Rome from the Aventine served as an important determinant for the buildings in the Helen’s distant middle ground. For example, in the drawing’s left sheet, the Temple of Portunus appears to the Tiber’s right, on the river’s east bank, near the Ponte Fabricio. Similarly, on the near bank of the Helen’s foreshortened river, Van Heemskerck has re-angled the temple and moved it to a spot slightly closer to the picture plane. The drawing also shows the Pantheon’s dome and the Temple of Hercules Victor prominently, just beyond the Ponte Fabricio. In the Helen, these circular temples have multiplied. Five circular buildings populate various points along either side of the river. Similarly, the drawing’s depiction of the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius has spawned a preponderance of vertical elements in the passages beyond, to the left, and the right of the Helen painting’s bridge. Other fantasie among the Helen’s buildings indicate instead that drawing the Roman ambient had so impressed a pictorial language all’antica into Van Heemskerck’s memory, that he could be freely inventive with it. While these inventions bear less direct reliance on the Roman drawings, they are no less indicative of drawing Rome’s importance for the painting. Consider, for example, the fictive triumphal arches appearing in the Helen’s left foreground and central middle ground. At first glance, both resemble – but certainly are not – the Arch of Titus. Nor does either arch slavishly replicate any other triumphal arch extant in Rome during Van Heemskerck’s sojourn. Their proportions are squat. They bear no inscriptions. A spiral staircase attaches to the side of the arch in the painting’s lower left third. Moreover, gazing through this arch’s opening reveals that Van Heemskerck has invented a four-sided arch, making it even less like the Arch of Titus. In this particular way, Van Heemskerck’s painted arch is not unlike the Arch of Janus, also four-sided. Thus, the Helen’s invented triumphal arches marry Van Heemskerck’s observations in several drawings. The Arch of Titus, for example, appears on three extant sheets. Immured, only partially present during the years of his Roman stay, it provided an exceptional springboard for inventions [e.g. fig. no. 8.11]. In addition to rendering it at close range [cat. no. 16], Van Heemskerck included it in his large ink wash view of the forum [cat. no. 2], where it appears at far right, a considerable distance from the picture plane. The Arch of Titus also appears in

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the distant right middle ground of his view of the Colosseum from the south end of the Capitoline Hill [cat. no. 5]. Two sheets confirm Van Heemskerck’s observation of the Arch of Janus [cat. nos. 34 and 35]. He also drew the Arches of Septimius Severus and Constantine. None of these drawings bear motifs that are reproduced in a manner approaching verbatim status in either of the Helen’s invented triumphal arches. However, we read the painting’s triumphal arches as the collective result of having drawn so many from so many different views. Many fantasie in the Helen of a more generic nature bear a likewise similar indebtedness to the act of drawing Rome. For example, although the obelisks in the painting’s central backdrop resemble the many obelisks Van Heemskerck saw and drew in Rome, and although their distance from the picture plane suggests their close resemblance to the Capitoline obelisk as it appears in the left sheet of his Forum Romanum drawing [cat. no. 1], there is no reason to posit direct dependence on a specific drawing; Van Heemskerck drew obelisks on several sheets and would not have needed to consult a specific one to invent the obelisks populating the Helen.38 And by the same token, assimilating the pictorial language of the cornices and columns of the Forum Romanum’s Temples of Castor and Vespasian [e.g., cat. nos. 1–4 and 16] served as a means for inventing the Helen’s three columns and cornice articulating a ruined temple in the painting’s lower left foreground. Such relations bear out our suggestion that drawing in Rome fortified Van Heemskerck with a flexible memory, primed for invention. Still more buildings in the Helen would remind Van Heemskerck’s viewers of various elements in Rome’s built environment, despite their awareness that the Helen’s buildings do not precisely resemble a single Roman monument. Among the most obvious and inventive examples: Van Heemskerck has combined Rome’s Pyramids of Cestius and the Meta Romuli, the former of which he drew at least twice [cat. nos. 53 and 57] and the latter at least once [cat. no. 58], with his drawing of the Trofei di Mario [cat. no. 31] for a highly unusual monument; appearing on the hill above the painting’s temple of Venus, we find a niche with a small pyramid before it. Likewise, in the painting’s foreground, a handsome semi-circular temple is suggestive of Donato Bramante’s Il Tempietto, as is a fully circular temple dominating the painting’s center. While these fantasie endow the painting with a Roman ambiance, its most conspicuous feature is its pure fantasie, imaginary buildings that are more confounding of our attempts to know their source in Rome’s landscape, or their invention

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out of Van Heemskerck’s drawings. The most obvious example is the spiral tower in the right central backdrop, either the Lighthouse of Alexandria or the Tower of Babel.39 We have identified some drawings that figured directly in the genesis of Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World and still more that aided Van Heemskerck indirectly. However, by mapping the motifs from his drawings onto the painting as we have, we run the risk of describing a process that moves with deceptive seamlessness from the raw motival material among Van Heemskerck’s drawings to the finished painting, a process lacking a synthetic stage. Thankfully, we have what appears to be a fascinating window into Van Heemskerck’s fusion of the Helen’s inventions within its compositional scheme. Sheets in the so-called “De Vos Sketchbook” may copy some of Van Heemskerck’s developing thoughts on the painting. On the recto side of the sketchbook’s ninth folio [cat. no. 74] a passage at lower left resembles the painting’s foregrounded hillock. In the drawing, this motif gives way to a shore line that stretches to the right before receding gradually into the distance, like the natural topography of the Helen’s right half. Moreover, this little landscape contains several motifs resembling what ultimately appeared in the Helen: jagged mountains, an arcaded bridge, and a monumentally scaled statue. A small spiral tower in this little drawing resembles the Helen’s spiral tower. This small landscape drawing also contains two circular temples positioned just as they appear in the painting. The recto side of folio X of the “de Vos Sketchbook” [cat. no. 76] contains a number of circular temples that appear to be fantasie of varying degrees of inventiveness. At top center, we find an imaginatively composed temple with a concave transition from drum to dome. In its circularity, its containment of vertical elements that could be either columns or pilasters, and most importantly, its demonstration of the artist’s willingness to play with the traditional conventions of architectural form, it is reminiscent of the Helen’s inventions. However, a spiral tower half way up the drawing at far right appears to be especially important for the painting; it suggests a link between the Helen’s spiral tower and Jan van Scorel’s Tower of Babel [fig. 2.10]. The latter painting, which dates to Van Heemskerck’s time in Van Scorel’s workshop, bears squat proportions that are strikingly similar to the ones in the “de Vos Sketchbook’s” spiral tower. Finally, the verso side of folio X [cat. no. 77] contains more imaginary landscapes reminiscent of the Helen, where small buildings in the distance are punctuated by vertical elements – spires, obelisks, and free-standing

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columns – resembling their appearance in the Helen’s distant background. If the “de Vos Sketchbook” drawings are indeed copies of drawings that Van Heemskerck made while composing the Helen in Rome – and it is likely given the date of the drawings with which they appear – then they stand as an artifact of a crucial phase of Van Heemskerck’s process. More than just a document of the Helen in mid-genesis, they offer a rare window into the mediation phase of Van Heemskerck’s process, between his drawings and the finished work. They thus comprise a concretion of his pictorial imagination. And in fact, the painting’s narrative juxtaposed with its abundance of inventions that are reminiscent of Rome comprises a strong suggestion that its overarching theme is just such a process: the invention of the future out of the past, the founding of new, revised worlds out of what we have learned of the extant one. The episode of Helen’s abduction eventually resulted in Troy’s destruction and the founding of the Eternal City. Van Heemskerck’s use of his drawings, his memory of Rome, and his imaginings from it, to invent a new city that any viewer familiar with Rome would find uncannily like – and in the same moment unlike – its prototype is thus entirely appropriate. The image of Paris absconding with Helen before an imagined urban vista all’antica invites viewers to analogize Van Heemskerck’s invention of a city with Rome’s founding.40 Such a compelling combination and the painting’s sheer copiousness, its compositional emphasis on its backdrop, and the overwhelming quantity of motifs therein, invite and reward extended looking and thinking. Its fantasie, from somewhere, but portraying nowhere in particular, thwart conventional notions of time and place and give the painting’s moralizing theme a timeless universality. In its display of almost every kind of pictorial knowledge that appears in Van Heemskerck’s drawings, paintings, and prints – re-workings of the paintings of other masters from his massive pictorial vocabulary, recreations of Rome’s natural topography, and architectural fantasie – Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World triggers a broad range of mnemonic responses for its viewers. Thus, its eventual situation in Rodolfo Pio da Carpi’s collection seems most appropriate. Although it appears unlikely that Rodolfo was the Helen’s patron, we can nonetheless glean significances from the painting’s presence in his collection at the time of his death. If the Habsburgs commissioned the painting to occasion Charles’s triumphal procession through Rome and the emperor decided not to take the painting with him, or if the painting was for the wedding of Margaret of Parma and Alessandro de’ Medici, it would have been available

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by 1537. In the latter scenario, Alessandro’s untimely death in 1537 may have resulted in its eventual sale. In either situation, Rodolfo could have eagerly entered the bidding upon his return to Rome from France in 1537. The Helen was, after all, Van Heemskerck’s most ambitious effort from the Roman phase of his career. Rodolfo was likewise an ambitious collector all through the middle decades of the sixteenth century as Van Heemskerck’s stature in Rome, the Netherlands, and beyond was growing. Rodolfo’s acquisition of the Helen – which could have also occurred any time after his return to Rome around mid-century – suggests that Van Heemskerck’s reputation was also strong in Italy at that time. The painting’s eventual placement in the loggia of Rodolfo’s palace, near other paintings featuring antiquities and a painting of the “torre di Babilonia” imbued its scenery with a rich relation to its narrative and a central role in its antiquarian context.41 The Italian cognoscenti who viewed the Helen in Rodolfo’s collection would have found it so abundant with inventions as to defy closure. This ekphrastic richness – likely to prompt ekphrastic responses – accords with the painting’s format as well as its inventions.42 The panorama suggests endless space and, thus, bodies forth the notion that continued looking would reap continued rewards: new discoveries, edifying knowledge. Just as we trace the copiousness of the painting’s inventions to the abundance of antiquities in Rome’s landscape, so do we trace their rich reception to the long and evolving consciousness of the abundance of history in Rome’s landscape. This is to say, without its references to the Eternal City, the painting would hold less interest for viewers. Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World thus manifests Van Heemskerck’s twofold mastery of the Eternal City. In a concrete sense, by drawing Rome he provided himself with a quantity of original motifs for later reference. And in a much more abstract sense, his cultivation of an eye and hand that were practiced in the art of drawing Rome, a pictorial and manual memory of the Eternal City, was tantamount to becoming fluent in the pictorial language of the Eternal City’s buildings and vistas, or, in Gombrich’s words, taking “that decisive step from the pastiche to … free mastery.”43 Both of these results ensured that many of the subsequent compositions for paintings and prints Van Heemskerck made in Haarlem contained an extraordinary variety of buildings and vistas all’antica. In hundreds of compositions, few topographical motifs repeat. Tracing Van Heemskerck’s means for his archeologically inspired invention from its origins in his drawings to its manifest variety in his paintings and prints reveals the Roman ruin’s

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evocative nature in both production and reception. As we shall see, Van Heemskerck’s drawings and the inventions he devised for the Helen would later become his stock-in-trade.

Memory and Invention After Rome: Van Heemskerck’s Drawings in the Netherlands

Away from Rome, the pictorial realm of Van Heemskerck’s drawings triumphed over the spatial authority Rome’s built environment. This was inevitable, the fulfillment of their purpose; by amassing so many views of the Eternal City on paper, Van Heemskerck had created his own highly idiosyncratic pictorial space of antiquity, a simulacrum of Rome that could travel away from its source and function by the rules of its own pictorial authority.44 Thus, integral to understanding the ruinscapes Van Heemskerck made upon his return to Haarlem is a consideration of how his drawings functioned there, for his Netherlandish audience and in his artistic practice. The straightforward commemorative aspect of the drawings – that is, their preservation of the memory of particular buildings, spaces, and vistas, their ability to remind viewers of ancient Roman monuments – does not in any way distinguish them from images of Roman ruins preceding or contemporary to Van Heemskerck’s. Yet it does suggest how, in their post-Roman Netherlandish context, Van Heemskerck’s drawings are relatable to notions prevalent in diverse thoughts on the phenomenon of memory dating back to antiquity. In both Aristotelian and Platonic traditions, memory was thought to be, among many other things, the knowledge of a thing in its absence.45 In De Oratore, Cicero regards architectural imagines not as essential memories of things in and of themselves, but images to be read, the means for accessing the knowledge that, in turn, formed the true stuff of discourse.46 We find a nearly identical affirmation of the image or the sign of the thing where Plato had Socrates opine that written text is only as valuable as the knowledge that readers could remember in relation to it.47 Like any externalized images of objects that are bound up in legend, myth, and history, Van Heemskerck’s drawings of ruins could feed directly into such notions, at the core of the memory tradition; they could prompt and mediate viewers’ access to their own repositories of received knowledge. Upon Van Heemskerck’s return to the Netherlands with his drawings, their mnemonic utility became much richer. Their sheer distance from Rome added a discursive layer, dependent upon visual, topographical, and physical memories. This

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is especially true for Van Heemskerck himself; unmoored from the Roman ambient by distance and the passage of time, his memory of his Roman experience continued to evolve, even as he continued to consult the same drawings he made in the 1530s. Thus, as he repeatedly returned to his drawn simulacra of Rome, the locus of his pictorial and historical knowledge, their function as prompts for imaginative inventions grew. Away from Rome, Van Heemskerck and his likeliest audience – liefhebbers: the antiquarian art lovers concerned with relating their present to the ancient past, without regular access to Rome, but desirous of imagery of Rome’s ruins – had great cause to look to his drawings as externalized imagines. For any among this audience who had never been to Rome, were infrequently there, or like Van Heemskerck, had visited once, the drawings also would spark memories, but they could also function as catalysts for associative and imaginative thinking. In their states of incompletion and loss, ruins are especially ripe for these latter two forms of response. Lest we discount this mode of looking and reception, many thinkers from antiquity to the early modern period regarded association and imagination as modes of thought so closely connected to memory that they are nearly indistinguishable from it.48 Descriptions that the uninitiated observer had only heard or read of Roman monuments, without having experienced them first hand, would come to vividly mind while inspecting Van Heemskerck’s drawings. For the Netherlanders in Van Heemskerck’s audience who did have first-hand familiarity with Rome, his drawings could, of course, spark these same literary and historical associations while further providing nourishment for their first-hand experiences of the Eternal City. Their imagines of Roman topography, the mental images they had received on their perambulations, they later sought to maintain, cultivate, and even augment over time and via discourse. A consideration of the geographical distance from Rome’s ruins that Van Heemskerck and his compatriots shared also aides in understanding his innovative approach to composing ruin vedute. Frances Yates was the first to suggest that the emphasis on loci in the memory tradition might have contributed to the final appearance of works of art in the early modern period.49 She points out that the allegorical figures in Giotto’s portrayal of the Virtues and Vices in the Arena Chapel appear to enter viewing space from a small room. Perhaps, Yates hypothesized, Giotto’s deployment of such vivid spatial devices resulted from his attempt to realize the Rhetorica Ad Herennium’s recommendation that imagines feature strong space

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and lighting. Given their novelty in the context of early Trecento Italian visual culture, their striking appearance would certainly enhance their capacity to imprint themselves in the minds of viewers in the Scrovegni family’s circle as they listened to sermons related to the many concepts encompassed by those personifications of right and wrong. Their vivid appearance would also help concerned viewers remember the images and the associated lessons later when they were away from the chapel. Similarly, since Van Heemskerck and his colleagues would view his ruin drawings while far away from Rome, their emphatically spatial aspect seems an especially pointed appeal to his particular audience that they either imagine or remember being among Rome’s antiquities and thus, associate particular forms of knowledge with each place. No less intriguing in this Netherlandish context is the evidence of Van Heemskerck’s nascent inventive imagination, present in so many of his Roman drawings. As the products of his compositional and manual deliberations, they were already at one remove from their sources, simulacra of their Roman prototypes. Their potential uses for invention were thus inherent, intrinsic to their very nature. In a much more concrete sense, however, many examples among the Roman drawings, the vedute in particular, contain inventive details that reveal Van Heemskerck’s earliest inventive practices: his movement from total immersion in the careful observation of extant antiquities to the manual creation of new ones. Viewed and used in the Netherlands, removed from the verifications of the Roman ambient, the drawings’ distinctions between topographical truth and pictorial invention transform, eventually giving themselves over entirely to the pictorial realm. Where we have elaborated Van Heemskerck’s carefully considered pictorial choices – of content, vantage point, and composition, thus far – we have seen that some of his Roman vedute are compositionally inventive accounts of the Roman spaces they portray. They are portrayals of the landscape that occupy the zone between the choice of a compelling, readymade vantage point and outright revision. For example, we have noted Van Heemskerck’s decision to draw St. Peter’s “as a ruin” as a creative, even poetic pictorial choice that uses documentation as its point of departure towards commentary.50 As such, those drawings suggest a notion we further explore here: Van Heemskerck’s selective pictorial vision, which tended towards portraying the antiquities within his gaze while eliminating nonantique elements. With their emphasis on Rome’s antiquities over and above the medieval buildings before him, Van Heemskerck’s

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broad-view panoramas [cat. nos. 56–60] are an easily understood case in point.51 We find such revisions in drawings that are less panoramic in scope as well. For example, compare his splendid rendering of the nymphaeum known as the Temple of Minerva Medica [cat. no. 51] with a drawing from the 1590s of the same site by Jacob Franckaert the Elder.52 Doing so reveals Van Heemskerck’s revisions of functioning vernacular architecture near the ancient nymphaeum. He has re-drawn some of the common buildings as ruins and has substituted his signature vegetal onset for others; presumably, the ruined structures to the left and the right of the Augustan temple are the architectural products of his manual imaginings. Similarly, in his double-sheet drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1], Van Heemskerck has left out many topographical elements of medieval vintage, including the encasement on the Arch of Septimius Severus. The drawing does not, however, conjecture a reconstruction of what the forum must have looked like during the imperial era. Van Heemskerck’s drawn erasure of the medieval elements before him reinvents the forum as an environment more purely after the antique that is, nonetheless, ruined. It thus approaches detemporalization.53 A species of invention related to these pictorial omissions of nonantiquities is Van Heemskerck’s movement of buildings to new locations for the sake of a more harmonious composition, or for the more practical purpose of making a greater number of buildings visible to the viewer from the drawing’s vantage point. In the same drawing of the Forum, for example, Van Heemskerck relocated the column of Marcus Aurelius east so that it could appear in his view of the forum [cat. no. 1, right sheet] even though it is not visible from the point of view the drawing presents.54 Similarly, his composition portraying the natural and built elements in the low-lying area just south and west of the forum known as the velabrum, the site of the ancient Roman cattle market called the Forum Boarium [cat. no. 34], depicts the Arch of Janus and the church of San Giorgio in Velabro further apart than they actually are. While eliminations of nonantiquities from a vista or the movement of a monument to a new pictorial location are not inventions of the sort we see in the Helen, they show Van Heemskerck taking inventive license with Roman topography for the sake of his picture. Both tendencies are prescient of Van Heemskerck’s paintings containing panoramic views of the city; in Landscape with the Good Samaritan, Landscape with View of Rome, and Landscape with the Dioscorii, Rome appears without vernacular buildings.55

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We see a stronger indication of Van Heemskerck’s approach to the Roman vista as a venue for invention in his drawing from within the Arch of Constantine [cat. no. 23]. In chapter 4, we noted this drawing’s presentation of a view that would have been impossible in one glance.56 One could not see the Colosseum and the Septizonium at the same time from this vantage point. However, we also distinguished this drawing’s visual fiction from its pictorial presentation of a topographical truth; while facing southeast from beneath the arch and looking left, the Colosseum would be visible; the nowdestroyed Septizonium may have also been visible to the right. Thus, this particular drawing’s composition bridged a gap, newly crucial and widening for Van Heemskerck and his audience upon his return to Haarlem. In relation to the actual appearance of the things that the drawing portrays, it is a manipulation; with no Roman monuments nearby for comparison, however, it becomes a stand-alone image suggestive of pictorial possibilities.57 This is to say, in its new context away from the Roman ambient, on view in the Netherlands, any verifiable truths the drawing may or may not have contained in relation to Rome diminished in value compared to the drawing’s pictorial aspect.

figure 6.2 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, Frontespizio di Nerone c. 1535, Inventory Number 79D2a 82r, ink on paper, 188 × 281 mm., Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

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Van Heemskerck came the closest to creating invented settings after the antique on sheets where he drew elements from different parts of the city as if they share the same space. In perhaps his most inventive example bearing this type of fictive juxtaposition [cat. no. 27], Van Heemskerck shows the Frontespizio di Nerone, located on the Quirinal Hill, behind a crater that was on display in the cortile of S. Cecilia in Trastevere during the time of his Roman stay. To date, scholars have not pointed out that Van Heemskerck’s placement of vaulting beneath the Frontespizio is probably an invention as well. Although there is a grotto beneath the monument, which Van Heemskerck drew on the verso of his Düsseldorf view of the Quirinal structure [cat. no. 29], the vaulting he portrayed on the Berlin sheet does not appear in contemporary views of the Frontespizio by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus [Fig. 6.2] or Giovan Antonio Dosio.58 Rather, it closely resembles the substructures of the Palace of Septimius Severus in a separate drawing by Dosio.59 In a less seamless juxtaposition, Van Heemskerck has included a foot resembling the sculptural fragment known as the Pie di Marmo in the foreground of his drawing of the Porticus Octaviae [cat. no. 33] though we know of no sculpture of a colossal foot that ever occupied the area near the Porticus.60 However, the most sophisticated product of Van Heemskerck’s tendency to create fictive juxtapositions must be his drawing of an overturned composite capital before the Colosseum [cat. no. 17]. As chapter 4’s exploration of this drawing from a worm’s eye view revealed, he might have composed it out of disparate elements appearing elsewhere among his Roman drawings. This is particularly the case with the capital itself, which resembles the capitals he studied on another sheet [cat. no. 69]. Van Heemskerck could have easily composed this particular drawing without visiting the site. Moreover, it comprises a seamless juxtaposition of Rome’s topographical elements. And viewed in Haarlem, his audiences could neither confirm nor refute the drawing’s topographical veracity. The verisimilitude of the drawing’s high finish imbues it with a veneer of plausibility; such careful observation suggests that Van Heemskerck drew not just all of the drawing’s elements, but the entire image, from life. With its evocative portrayal of space, which we explored in chapter 4, the drawing comprises a vivid appeal to viewing imagination. Thus, it also represents a decisive movement towards the kinds of invented, Rome-inspired environments Van Heemskerck would go on to create in his Haarlem workshop; by presenting an abundance of apparently persuasive

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pictorial truths, the drawing is ultimately a supreme invention after the antique. Among Van Heemskerck’s drawings that he did not execute in preparation for a print, we have only one of a purely invented ruin. The unidentified structure appearing on a large single sheet in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett [cat. no. 73] – not a sheet belonging to the drawing booklet Van Heemskerck carried with him through Rome, or the Kupferstichkabinett’s two albums – suggests the substance of his dedication to knowing his Roman source material in the most thorough manner possible, while also indicating his indebtedness to his own drawings as a fountainhead for his inventive prowess. Like many of the inventions we explore in subsequent sections of this chapter, Van Heemskerck’s “unidentified ruin” derives from identifiable elements in his other Roman drawings. For example, the drawing takes its overall compositional scheme from his view of the Baths of Caracalla [cat. no. 47] and his drawing of Severan barrel vaults on the Palatine [cat. no. 14], both on the crests of hills, foregrounded at left, and giving way to a distant landscape on lower terrain at extreme right. Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the baths of Diocletian at close range [cat. no. 30] also may have provided a source for this invention’s presentation of a view in which we peer through a large barrel vault at more distant ruins. To varying degrees, these drawings also served as sources for the invented ruin’s main structure. All three main vaults bear broken vertical elements, ruined cornices, and of course, copious amounts of Van Heemskerck’s signature vegetal onset. His invented ruin bears coffering. This could be an expansion on the summary rendering of coffering appearing on the ceiling of the Baths of Diocletian’s vaulting. However, it is also reminiscent of the coffering Van Heemskerck drew on the interior of Donato Bramante’s vaults for the new St. Peter’s [cat. no. 42]. The overall proportion and carriage of Van Heemskerck’s invented arch resembles that of the Arch of Janus as it appears on two sheets among his Roman drawings [cat. nos. 34 and 35]. Though the proportions of Van Heemskerck’s invented ruin are not are not as wide as the ancient Roman four-sided arch, the top portions of both share a similarly craggy affect. Moreover, the foreshortened sidewall of Van Heemskerck’s invention bears a small arch on its exterior resembling those decorating the Arch of Janus. At the left of the invented arch, in the middle ground, we see the ruins of a pedimented church entrance that is reminiscent of Santa Maria del Popolo’s entrance as it appears in Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the Piazza del Popolo [cat. no. 37]. Finally, in the distant right background of Van Heemskerck’s

Cat. no. 73

Cat. no. 47

Cat. no. 14

Cat. no. 35

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figure 6.3 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulchre and Receiving Gifts from the Three Men, 1549, Inventory number 2008.31.1, ink on paper, 286 × 427 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT

fantasia drawing we see what appears to be an arcaded bridge upon which two figures walk. This invented structure, which appears in the Helen canvas and several of Van Heemskerck’s prints with panoramic landscapes [e.g. fig. 6.22], appears to be a combination of the arcade beneath the main vault of his rendering of the Baths of Caracalla and the Ponte Fabricio as it appears in his panorama of the Ripe Grande from the Aventine Hill [cat. no. 56]. Thus, Van Heemskerck’s drawing of an unidentified ruin provides a revealing view onto his method of invention: the reconfiguration of drawn elements out of his observations of the Roman landscape. That the drawing served as part of a process towards the formulation of a print is clear. The drawing’s main structure appears only slightly varied in the backdrop of his print, Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulcher [fig. 6.3].61 For his revision of the invention for the print, Van Heemskerck seems to have remembered its partial origins in his drawings of the Arch of Janus [cat. nos. 34 and 35]; in the translation

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from drawing to print, the ruined arch in the print has become a four-sided arch. One can imagine how, in Van Heemskerck’s Haarlem milieu, the suggestive aspects of his drawings encouraged retrospective and imaginative image-making and discourse. The drawings’ cataloging of Rome’s ruins are so suggestive of once complete buildings that their presentation of changes to Rome’s vistas, not to mention their inventions from it, are rife with suggestions of new antiquities and new Romes. Clearly, however, the liberties Van Heemskerck took with the Rome’s topography and ruins, be they subtle slippages, prudent pictorial revisions, or wholesale creations, would have inevitably returned him and his audience to a memory of – and an imagination for – the Roman landscape. Thus, although we have seen how the pictorial realm provided Van Heemskerck with a venue for seemingly endless invention, we find its limits in Rome itself. Only Van Heemskerck’s experiences with the concrete realities of Rome’s landscape could serve him and his audience as a referent for his departures from it. This is even true of viewing the drawings in Haarlem. Thus, exploring the types of fantasie on display in the prints and paintings he devised reveals more than his departures from Rome’s precedent. It confirms his indebtedness.

Van Heemskerck’s Inventions After the Antique: Means and Modes

After c. 1545 and until the end of his life 30 years later, Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, his ruinscapes in particular, began to figure much more conspicuously in his art.62 He began to produce images containing natural topography and buildings all’antica of varying degrees of departure from the built Roman sources and the motifs in his corpus of drawings in greater quantities and varieties of invention. To date, however, scholars have offered little detail regarding the relationship of the Roman drawings to his paintings and prints from this period. While there is a general consensus that, naturally, drawing in Rome was important for the appearance of his later works, emphasis has traditionally been on the paucity of one-to-one correspondences between whole drawings and his post-Roman work.63 Summarized succinctly by Ilja Veldman, Van Heemskerck’s Roman vedute “are obviously study drawings … not made specifically as preliminary designs for a painting or print.”64

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Of course, as we have already seen, Veldman is correct; none of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings reappears in toto in the Helen, for example. Nor did he reproduce any of his drawings verbatim in any of his other post-Roman paintings or prints.65 In fact, surprisingly few of Van Heemskerck’s works from the Haarlem period are even set in Rome, even as they broadcast his vast archaeological knowledge of the city.66 Further, only in rare examples did he use parts of his Roman views in ways that approach verbatim quotations. And yet, we cannot deny the palpable but elusive presence of the drawings in the works of this period. Most are set in fictive, Rome-inspired realms akin to the Helen’s setting – what Richard Krautheimer would describe as a “never and nowhere land evolved from a free interpretation of antiquity” – despite their literary sources’ suggestions of specific locales.67 As our mapping of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings onto the Helen’s inventions makes clear, it is the disjunction between the drawings and the finished works that is so intriguing in their relation to one another. Therein lies the locus of his ingegno. Here, we expand our search for echoes of the drawings’ motifs in the paintings and prints of Van Heemskerck’s Haarlem period. At the outset, we grant that the precise nature of the relations between the drawings and his invented scenery – ruined and intact, natural and architectural – are difficult to parse, fluid, evolving, and even capricious. Nonetheless, continuing to sort out the variety of correspondences in the triangulation between Rome’s built environment, Van Heemskerck’s drawings, and the motifs in his finished works furthers our understanding of his artistic process. Subsequently, it establishes means for illuminating how audiences may have read and responded to the finished works. In the art of Van Heemskerck’s Haarlem period, we often find direct allusions to particular Roman buildings, not unlike the reminiscence of Rome’s pyramids in the Helen canvas’s pyramids.68 We do not need Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings to spot these motifs. Other topographical motifs in Van Heemskerck’s paintings and prints are more reliant on our knowledge of Van Heemskerck’s drawings for the nearly verbatim quotations of particular motifs they contain. However, where we find these echoes and correspondences with Rome, we must also account for variations. Even though both of these types of fantasie remind us of Rome, they never share a one-to-one correspondence with their built Roman sources or Van Heemskerck’s drawn records of the Roman buildings they mimic. Still more of the compositions from Van Heemskerck’s Haarlem

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period contain scenery that evokes Rome with more obscure relations to specific places there. It is only with great difficulty that one can discover any relation between these pure fantasie and Van Heemskerck’s drawings. In this latter group, Van Heemskerck’s capacity for invention, his artfulness, is most apparent. Surprisingly, we can safely associate only a handful of the buildings we see in Van Heemskerck’s hundreds of compositions with famous Roman monuments. These examples are not exact matches for their specific Roman sources. Rather, they echo their forms. Amphitheaters bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the Colosseum appear in the greatest numbers.69 For example, the setting of Van Heemskerck’s Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater [fig. 7.16] is a ruined amphitheater with a multi-tiered vaulting system that clearly reminds us of the Colosseum. Its broken ends derive from the northwestern break in the Colosseum’s vaults, which Van Heemskerck drew several times [cat. nos. 17, 18, 19, 21]. However, close examination is not required to determine that the amphitheater on display in the painting is not the Colosseum in Rome. The building contains extra vaulting that does not exist in its ancient Roman model. It is completely open on one side, which has never been the case for its built source in Rome, despite the loss of part of its exterior [e.g., cat. no. 21]. The surrounding topography that Van Heemskerck has painted also differs from Rome’s. Moreover, a colossal statue on a circular pedestal appears at the center of the print’s amphitheater.70 Even the design of Van Heemskerck’s “Amphitheatrum” print from the Eight Wonders of the World series [fig. 8.14], illustrating the inclusion of Rome’s Colosseum among the Wonders of the World, contains similar artful alterations of its prototype.71 Van Heemskerck furthered this variation on the Colosseum in a print of Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle [fig. 6.4].72 Elisha inherits Elijah’s authority before a flooded amphitheater like the one that appeared Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater, right down to the statue in the center. Other examples of such unquestionable allusions to specific Roman buildings are more difficult to find. Buildings that obviously derive from the Septizonium appear in the distance among the ruin landscapes of Van Heemskerck’s prints of Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22], the right half of Balaam and the Angel [fig. 6.11], and in the distant background of the print after Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater.73 The Septizonium-like building in Ruth and Boaz faces the picture plane at the same angle as the Septizonium in Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the Palatine from the south [cat. no. 13]. However, Van Heemskerck has given the ruin an extra story and arched openings.

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figure 6.4 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle, 1571, Inventory number S.I 54637, ink on paper, 173. 325 mm., Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, Prentenkabinet, Brussels

In his “Triumph of Pride” a generic triumphal arch with three passages, thus resembling either the Arch of Septimius Severus or the Arch of Constantine awaits the allegorical procession’s passage. As one suspects, when subjected to close examination, even these allusions to specific famous Roman monuments begin to approach the purer forms of invention wherein Van Heemskerck has revised parts of his drawings, or consulted them in order to create entirely new structures. Van Heemskerck’s quotation of his own drawings is a complex affair. Combined with his tendency to create buildings resembling famous Roman monuments for his post-Roman art, his use of anonymous portions of his drawings accounts for much of the authentically Roman – yet wholly original – quality of his scenery after the antique. As we saw in our exploration of the Helen, he tended to quote parts of his drawings, but never slavishly. Rather, he must have explored them for topographical motifs that could serve as points of departure for the ones in his finished works. Where we are sure we see a motif from a drawing, it is because enough of it has survived for us to notice the similarity. For example, his print of “Lot and his Family Leaving Sodom” [fig. 8.11] clearly takes its triumphal arch motif from his drawing of the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16]. By eliminating the arch’s inscription and its encasement, he has derived a generic arch from his drawn source. His technical means for reusing the Roman drawings is not entirely clear. In no examples of reuse are the motifs the same size in both drawing and print. Nor do the drawings show any impressions for transfer. In some examples, he must have simply redrawn parts of drawings when executing preparatory drawings for prints. Their motifs thus appear in reverse when printed, as in our example of his use of his drawing of the Arch of Titus for “Lot and His Family Leaving

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Sodom.” Likewise, Van Heemskerck’s consultation with his drawing of the Villa Madama’s garden terrace [cat. no. 64] appears revised to a semicircular shape in “The Elders Trying to Seduce Susannah” [fig. 6.5] and reversed in “The Three Holy Women at the Sepulchre” [fig. 6.6].74 Variations on the foreshortened exedra from the Palace of Septimius Severus [cat. no. 12] in a print of “Lot Making Love to His Daughters” [fig. 8.12] and “Tempus” from the Triumphs of Petrarch series are also reversed from their source drawings.75 However, Van Heemskerck’s print oeuvre also contains motifs in the same direction as their source drawings, which means he drew them in reverse in his preparatory drawings. The Frontespizio di Nerone appears the same way in Van Heemskerck’s drawing [cat. no. 27] and the print of “Job on the Dunghill with his Wife and Three Friends [fig. 6.7].”76 Likewise, the Septizonium-inspired building in Ruth and Boaz also appears in the same direction in both drawing [cat. no. 13] and print [fig. 6.22].77 Van Heemskerck quoted frequently from his large drawing of the Forum Nervae in Berlin’s Album II [cat. no. 26]. Major elements appear in reconfigured, but recognizable forms in several prints. His print of the Flight into Egypt [fig. 6.8] contains a large bridge with massive, rusticated voussoirs, beneath which we see piers and figures.78 This is only a slight alteration from the drawing’s ruinous stone bridge, through which we see figures and a columned portico. For his print of Satan Smiting Job with Boils [Fig. 6.9], Van Heemskerck has also used the colonnacce motif that appears in the middle ground and to the right of the stone bridge in his Forum Nervae drawing.79 In both the drawing and the print, the colonnacce’s protruding entablatures recede from the picture plane from right to left. But in figure 6.5 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Elders Trying to Seduce Susanna,” The Story of Susanna, 1563, Registration number 1949,0709.141, ink on paper, 206 × 251 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

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figure 6.6 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Three Holy Women at the Sepulchre,” The Fall and Salvation of Mankind Through the Life and Passion of Christ, 1548, Object number RP-P-OB-7340, ink on paper, 197 × 248 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 6.7 Unidentified Engraver after Maarten van Heemskerck Job on the Dunghill with his Wife and Three Friends, 1556, Object number RP-P-1988-297-20, ink on paper, 208 × 299 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Cat. no. 27

the print, we see the entablatures from a lower vantage point than in the drawing.80 Van Heemskerck has also transported the vaulting of the drawing’s Temple of Minerva to the print’s variation on the colonnacce, where it appears above the entablatures, as if springing from them. Moreover, the print shows a freestanding column to the left of the reinvented colonnacce, in the same place as a freestanding column from the Temple of Minerva in the Forum of Nervae drawing. Van Heemskerck also worked a variation on the drawing’s ruins of the Temple of Minerva into his print of Samuel Anointing Saul

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[fig. 6.10] with a subtlety that makes it difficult, but not impossible, to detect.81 The left half of Balaam and the Angel [fig. 6.11] bears yet another rendition of the colonnacce. However, searching Van Heemskerck’s paintings and prints for the motifs that remind us of Roman monuments or mimic parts of his drawings only leads us to a fraction of the scenery all’antica in his oeuvre. In many other works, he composed entirely fictive natural topography, buildings, ruins, and even new cities, which find no match in Rome or his drawings. Yet, everywhere in these paintings and prints, the specter of the Eternal City is strongly felt. Naturally, Van Heemskerck’s inventions of pure fantasie are the most vivid in their revelation that by looking, drawing, and thinking in Rome, he absorbed the essence of Rome’s ruin landscapes and developed a pictorial vocabulary of the Eternal City. He thus provided himself with innumerable opportunities to set his paintings and prints in environs that are uncannily un-Roman at the same time that they appear to be authentically Roman. The more apparent is Van Heemskerck’s inventiveness with antiquity, the more aroused – and in the same moment confounded – is the viewer’s memory of antiquity. Thus, Van Heemskerck’s pictorial knowledge of antiquity and the very authority of antiquity are equally present in his fantasie.

Cat. no. 26, detail.

figure 6.8 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Flight into Egypt, 1547–51, Object number RP-P-OB-7316, ink on paper, 208 × 361 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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figure 6.9 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Satan Smiting Job with Boils, 1548–50, Object number RP-P-1966-384, ink on paper, 384 × 255 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 6.10

Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Samuel Anointing Saul, 1549, Object number RP-P-BI-6494X, ink on paper, 401 × 256 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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figure 6.11

Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Balaam and the Angel (left half), 1554, Object number RP-P-BI-6502X, ink on paper, 276 × 420 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Van Heemskerck’s purest examples of fantasie after the antique push fidelity to antiquity to its limits. In extreme examples, he breaks those limits; he even based some of his fantasie on architectural forms that are entirely foreign to Roman antiquity. For example, in his print from 1566 of “Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd,” [fig. 6.12] Jonah gazes at a distant church bearing an onion-dome.82 However, in most examples, he rooted his inventions in his knowledge of ancient Roman precedents he found in having drawn Rome. Such an approach still left him with immeasurable space for caprice. Model examples include Habakkuk Bringing Food to Daniel in the Lion’s Den [fig. 6.13] and his print of Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan [fig. 7.12], both of which are rife with mish mashes of columns, arches, cornices, and other basic elements of the classical architectural vocabulary.83 Indeed, for these fantasie, Van Heemskerck deployed a basic “vocabulary of ruins” he developed out of his drawings: cracked coffering in broken vaults and arches, freestanding piers, abandoned columns, and fallen cornices in fragments strewn about the ground. And yet, we find among these

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examples, no direct quotations of his drawings like the ones we have enumerated above. Van Heemskerck arrived at such pure fantasie by expanding on his variations of Roman buildings and artful quotations of his drawings. In those examples, he maintained the basic configurations of his sources but departed from them in the details. In his purer examples of fantasie, however, he executed seemingly endless recontextualizations and new syntactical reconfigurations of smaller and smaller parts of the Rome appearing in his drawings and his imagination. For example, observing and absorbing a variety of circular buildings [e.g., cat. nos. 18, 21, 42, 46, 54] contributed to Van Heemskerck’s formulation of circular temple fantasie in many paintings and prints.84 His print of “The Removal and Destruction of the Chariot and the Horses of the Sun” from the King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord series of prints features a temple combining the buttressed exterior of Santa Maria della Febbre with the multitiered design of the Colosseum and the portico of the Pantheon.85 Similarly, for the Temple of Jerusalem appearing in his image of the Chaldeans looting the temple in his the Clades Judaeae Gentis series, he revised the receding arched substructures from his drawing of the Palatine [cat. no. 15].86 He has turned a similar motif into a ruin in-the-making in the backdrop of “The Triumph of Death” from the Triumphs of Petrarch series [fig. 6.14].87 In the same way, figure 6.12 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd,” Story of Jonah, 1566, Object Number RP-P-1988-297-11, ink on paper, 205 × 247 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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figure 6.13

Anonymous Engraver after Maarten van Heemskerck, Habakuk Bringing Food to Daniel in the Lion’s Den, 1556, Registration number 1874,1212.450, ink on paper, 295 × 420 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

figure 6.14 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Triumph of Death, c. 1565, Registration number 1937,0915.271, ink on paper, 190 × 262 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

the foreshortened piers and arches of the Colosseum’s exterior [cat. no. 18] reappear as the interior of a vaulted structure in the print, “Feeding the Hungry” and again as the supports of a bridge in the 1562 print of Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd.88

Cat. no. 15, detail.

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Van Heemskerck committed more frequent recontextualizations of this nature – too many ruin motifs to itemize here – with the more generic, anonymous, or smaller forms he absorbed into his ruin vocabulary. His absorption of the overall effect of a common Roman motif such as heavily rusticated piers [e.g., cat. no. 20] aided in the formulation of the generic, rusticated exteriors of buildings appearing in several prints. Examples include “Giving the Thirsty to Drink” and the “Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.”89 In “The Servant Forcing a Fellow Servant to Pay his Debt” [fig. 6.15] and “The Adoration of an Idol of Isis,” Van Heemskerck’s caprice has spurred him to form “new ruins” by commingling cornices and columns with ruins like the exposed substructures and other ruined construction elements on the Palatine [cat. nos. 9–15].90 Learning the visual language of rows of columns in loggias and porticoes such as those found in cortili, the Pantheon, and even the painted loggia in Peruzzi’s Sala Delle Prospettive [e.g., cat. nos. 38, 62, 63, and 66] enabled his inventions of the similarly foreshortened loggia settings of his prints illustrating the proverb “Blessed are they who do Hunger and Thirst After Righteousness” [fig. 6.16], “St. Peter Healing the Lame at the Beautiful Gate,” and “The Burial of St. Stephen.”91 The loggias in each of these prints find themselves in new syntactical configurations with their surroundings, leading onto fictive cities, or in the “Righteousness” example, an interior reminiscent of the Pantheon. figure 6.15 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Servant Forcing a Fellow Servant to Pay his Debt,” The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, 1554, Registration number 1949,0709.200, ink on paper, 265 × 192 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

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figure 6.16

203

Harmen Jansz Muller after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Blessed are they who do Hunger and Thirst After Righteousness (The Presentation in the Temple),” The Eight Beatitudes, c. 1566, Object number RP-P-1982-15 ink on paper, 210 × 250 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

In the most ostentatiously inventive of Van Heemskerck’s pure fantasie, he designed ruins that draw attention to their status as inventions. Many designs, including the aforementioned prints, Habakkuk Bringing Food to Daniel in the Lion’s Den [fig. 6.12] and Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan [fig. 7.12] include functionally implausible fantasie.92 Neither of the compositions we name here gives us any idea of what type of buildings these ruins might have been when they were intact. Not only are we unable to associate them with built entities, or even particular parts of Van Heemskerck’s drawings, their configurations in relation to one another do not conclusively suggest a building type or even a workable reconstruction. However, with their cacophonous mixes of authentically Roman

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looking piers, columns, and other assorted motifs all’antica, their status as inventions by an artist who had spent long hours drawing intently at the feet of Rome’s ruins is impossible to miss. Thus, it is simplistic to view the structural implausibility of these examples as a lack of architectural knowledge. It is more fruitful to interpret Van Heemskerck’s deliberate, conspicuous display of invention as his broadcast of his own ingegno. Thus, we have deepened our understanding of Van Heemskerck’s creative process, the genesis of his inventions. By doing so, however, we have done more than simply the track the movement of drawn motifs from reappearance to disappearance in Van Heemskerck’s finished works. We have also suggested the translation of the richly refractive content in his Roman drawings onto his inventions, conscious all the while of the ways in which their status as reuses and revisions of Rome’s ruins and vistas broadens their spectrum of visual memories and imaginings of the Eternal City. We are thus prepared to consider Van Heemskerck’s inventions as a means for generating discourse for audiences of varied viewing proclivities.

In Reminiscor: Reading the Ruins

It is the ingeniously conceived and executed “alternate Romes,” so integral to the myriad works we have explored here, that Karel van Mander surely had in mind in the excerpt quoted at the beginning of this chapter stating that Van Heemskerck was an “architect” who “filled the world with his inventions.” From the biographer’s turnof-the-seventeenth-century vantage point, it certainly must have seemed so; that Van Mander would dare to call Van Heemskerck an “architect” without the artist’s having designed any buildings is a wonderfully hyperbolic turn reminding us of the exceptional inventiveness of Van Heemskerck’s pictorial buildings. The frequent appearance of the term “inventor” on Van Heemskerck’s prints to indicate his role as their composer also suggests that Van Mander used the word “invention” (Dutch: “inventien”) as a double-entendre, to also allude to Van Heemskerck’s prints in particular. And in this medium, Van Heemskerck certainly did “fill the world.” In the short span from 1548 to 1550 alone, for example, he and engraver Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert produced a staggering 118 prints, if not more.93 In addition, Ilja Veldman’s supposition that the Haarlemers were the publishers of these prints seems correct.94 And this is but one phase of Van Heemskerck’s print career. To the end of

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his life, at least fourteen different engravers executed his compositions for prints, which number over 500. Van Mander’s praise for Van Heemskerck’s prolific print practice holds with his continued argument in the Schilder-Boeck for print’s prestige alongside the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture.95 But it also may have been a special point of local pride for the Haarlem author and his circle; Van Heemskerck’s humanist collaborator Hadrianus Junius, who was also the author of many of the inscriptions on Van Heemskerck’s prints, published in his Batavia the claim that Haarlem’s own Lourens Janszoon Coster was responsible for the invention of the printing press before Gutenberg.96 Although the story’s veracity has always been questioned, Junius’s claim nonetheless carries with it the truth-value of the print medium’s importance as a source of local pride in Van Heemskerck’s circle. It moreover expresses a desire to record for posterity Haarlem’s centrality to the medium’s growth. As the late 1540s mark a watershed period of growth in Van Heemskerck’s production of inventions and fantasie, they must also mark a period of remarkable growth of the audience for his ruinscapes. What remains, then, is to suggest modes of interpretation, the retrospective summoning of knowledge before these confounding images. What could this preponderance of motifs after the antique have meant to Van Heemskerck’s audiences? And where we discuss his prints – images that circulated widely and fell into the hands of numbers of viewers – did his designs anticipate a range of responses? It does seem so in many examples and this is the present book’s assertion in the remainder of its pages. However, answers to such questions are ultimately elusive; attempts to systematically construct meaning or posit reception require us to grapple with the unsystematic appearance of the pictorial inventions across his oeuvre. Meaning is mutable according to changing appearances and contexts. Reception varies according to a shifting set of culturedriven categories.97 The ubiquity and variety of the scenery in Van Heemskerck’s allegories, portraits, biblical narratives, and mythologies point us in a sprawling number of interpretive directions at once. For example, the appearance of the crumbling Colosseum knockoff in the backdrop of The Dangers of Human Ambition [fig. 6.17] – where figures falling from the precarious heights they have attained embody the pitfalls of hubris – is surely a vanitas commentary of a sort, an expression of the inevitable sad fate of even the grandest human achievements. However, the reconstructed Colosseum-like amphitheater in Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle [fig. 6.4] is not so easily read; both its placement behind an Old Testament story and its

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status as a pictorial reconstruction of a ruin change the finer points of its meaning. By contrast, where it appears in Van Heemskerck’s self-portrait of 1553 [fig. 7.1], the Colosseum surely must take on personal overtones. Accordingly, this book’s next two chapters are specific in their address of the meaning of Van Heemskerck’s inventions after the antique for the two most prevalent themes of his career: his self-fashioning and his response to the image debate. In those chapters, it will behoove us to build our understanding of his inventions on their status as markers of his inventive prowess – his ability to “converse with the ancients” in their pictorial language – and the continued interest in imagery all’antica among the artists, humanists, and prestigious patrons in his circle. There, we posit Van Heemskerck’s continued and varied uses of scenery after the antique as signs of imperial ambition, commentaries on the increasing

figure 6.17

Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Dangers of Human Ambition, 1549, Accession number L 1965/133 (PK), ink on paper, 433 × 507 mm., Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, photo by Studio Buitenhof, The Hague

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religious and political turbulence in the troubled relations between the Low Countries and the Habsburg-Vatican alliance. We conclude this chapter, however, by harvesting what it has already taught us in order to establish an interpretative foundation. The intrinsic significance of Van Heemskerck’s inventions all’antica holds from image to image; regardless of their pictorial context or their status as ruins or reconstructions, they are deliberative mnemonic triggers: visual suggestions of antiquity’s grandeur, human achievement, and its erasure. Like the drawings that begat them, Van Heemskerck’s fantasie are appeals to knowledge or memory. While this alone does not comprise the entire significance of any of Van Heemskerck’s invented ruins, it is never an insignificant part of the meanings they can generate. Over the entirety of his career, Van Heemskerck continued to explore and expand his approach to producing such appeals, art he devised for the associative, analogizing mode of reception that collecting cultures encouraged and humanist audiences engaged.98 His second St. Luke [fig. 6.18], for example, which he painted sometime around 1545, even proffers the importance of collecting and collections for the sacred vision required in the making of sacred art.99 St. Luke has his vision of the Virgin before a collection environment, which Van Heemskerck devised via a near verbatim appropriation and reversal of the Sassi sculpture collection as it appears in the Coornhert engraving of 1553 [fig. 6.19].100 The saint records his vision of the Virgin Mary amidst anatomy books and an astrolabe appearing in the foreground. The background also portrays a sculptor wielding his chisel over a nearly finished work. These portrayals of artistic practice, suggestive of the artist’s studio, elide the iconography of St. Luke with images of artistic practice such as Agostino Veneziano’s print of the “Bandinelli Academy,” which celebrates the Bandinelli workshop’s status as a place of ideation, intellection, and antiquarianism.101 Moreover, the Sassi Apollo’s mediation of Luke’s vision of the Virgin in the midst of an environment invented to conflate the collection and the studio expresses the multivalence of collecting and making, memory and vision, consumption and production. In the context of Van Heemskerck’s emergent print practice in the late 1540s – tantamount to a campaign on the marketplace of mid-century collecting culture – the St. Luke identifies the collection environment as a hothouse of sacred discourse, intertwined with artistry and intellection. Within these broader artistic developments, Van Heemskerck made increasingly ruin-laden scenery from the mid-1540s to the end of his career.102 A few minor examples document the early phase of

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figure 6.18 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, c. 1545, oil on wood, 207.5 × 144.2 cm., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, France

figure 6.19 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck?, Casa Sassi Cortile and Sculpture Collection, 1553, Registration number 1928, 0313.176, ink on paper, 375 × 298 mm. Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

the apparent uptick in his ruin production, his growing consciousness of the many ways in which the ruin could function as a bearer of meaning. In 1545, his drawings certainly figured in the composition of the ruined structure in his painting of Venus and Cupid.103 The goddess of beauty and love reclines in the foreground. Behind her, Cupid stands before a magnificent, if awkwardly constructed, ruin fantasia suggesting a combination the circularity of the socalled Temple of Minerva Medica [cat. no. 51] and the ruined vaults in the central middle ground of his drawing of the Porta Maggiore [cat. no. 52]. Beneath the ruin, we find Vulcan’s forge, a grotto closely resembling the one appearing on two sheets portraying the

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Frontespizio di Nerone and its environs [cat. no. 29]. Vulcan has presumably forged the net with which he and his cyclopes trap the adulterous Venus and Mars. The ruin may thus complement the suggestion of the painting’s cartellino, which has Venus admonishing her son for using his “wicked” arrows recklessly, thus “making a mockery of love,” and Homer’s telling of Vulcan’s refusal of Mars’s reparations with the remark that “a bad man’s bond is bad security.”104 The following year finds Van Heemskerck relying on his drawings of Rome again, for the famed Drapers Altarpiece [fig. 0.2], which Van Mander cited as a signal of Rome’s corrupting influence on Van Heemskerck’s art.105 While the altarpiece’s ruins are secondary to its figuration, they nonetheless constitute a remarkable morass that Van Heemskerck could have only created after having drawn Rome’s ruins on a regular basis. And after a ten-year hiatus from regular ruin production, his drawings must have figured greatly in the process of composing these fantasie. The most pivotal among Van Heemskerck’s paintings for his development of the ruinscape, however, must be his St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape of 1547 [fig. 6.20].106 Unprecedented among images of the scholar saint for its copious display of allusive architectural inventions after the antique, the St. Jerome witnesses a re-emergence of the manner Van Heemskerck deployed in the Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World. In the lower left foreground, Jerome kneels, supplicant with a concise gathering of his attributes: a cardinal’s hat and vestments, books, a skull, and the stone with which he beat his breast in repentance. In relation to the majestically ruinous landscape behind him, Jerome is nearly as diminutive as the figures exploring the ruins across Van Heemskerck’s corpus of Roman ruin drawings. Like the Helen’s setting, the painting’s ruin landscape is strongly suggestive of Rome; yet it is also quite clear that it does not depict Rome. A veritable overgrowth of imagined temples, orphaned columns, piers, and arches reminds us of specific Roman buildings without quoting them verbatim. For example, we are tempted to see the prominently featured colonnade receding from view in the painting’s central middle ground as the Forum Romanum’s Temple of Saturn. However, a closer view reveals the cornice’s subtle curvature, confounding our positive identification of it as such. Likewise, a colossal Flavian amphitheater in the distance at right commands our attention. Seen from its ruined side, Van Heemskerck surely devised the broken circular building with his drawings of the Colosseum in mind. In particular, his views of the amphitheater’s ruined side [e.g., cat. nos. 9, 19, and 23] appear to have played an instrumental role in devising the painted structure.

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figure 6.20

Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape, 1547, Inv. No. G117, oil on wood, 105 × 161 cm., Lichtenstein Museum, Vienna

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Thus, as viewers would certainly find the landscape to be suggestive of Rome, they would also find it suggestive of Van Heemskerck’s powers of invention.107 Despite the prominence of the Jerome’s ruinscape, scholars have done little to relate it to the saint’s specific hagiographic and historical status. Thus, the painting’s backdrop has seemed a mere conceit for Van Heemskerck’s indulgence of ruins. Accordingly, the diminutive figure of Jerome appears as something of an afterthought compared to the ruins, which in turn appear as the artist’s true pictorial interest.108 However, the combination of scholar saint and ruinous backdrop would have provided a discursive prompt as rich as any among the multitude of St. Jerome paintings and prints that proliferated in northern Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century. After Erasmus’s publication of Jerome’s letters in 1516, discourse prevailed among Netherlandish humanist clerics concerned with the scholar-saint’s significance and in particular what might be the most edifying way to relate him to their own milieux.109 Jerome’s historically famous concern for the moral fiber of his many wealthy Roman patrons suggests that Van Heemskerck’s viewers would have found apt the painting’s startlingly novel juxtaposition of his scene of self-denial with a crumbling “new Rome.” The painting could have prompted viewers steeped in the important details of Jerome’s life to remember that his patronal obligations prompted him to discuss the fall of Rome in his letter to Principia, where he despaired that “the city which had taken the world was itself taken.”110 In vivid prose, his letter evokes the plunder of the ruined city. As markers of the passage of time and Rome’s destruction, the painting’s ruins are also evocative of Jerome’s denial of its historical status as the “eternal” city.111 Also, the painting’s audience might have plausibly drawn an analogy between the inventive aspect of Van Heemskerck’s ruins and Jerome’s declaration to Pope Damasus (r. 366–384) that he was “to make a new work from the old,” after the Pope commissioned from him his Latin translation of the scriptures.112 Clearly, then, the ruins in the St. Jerome form a potent source for knowledgeable discourse. The St. Jerome’s ruinscape proved to be a model for further inventions by Van Heemskerck in print. As we have seen, from buildings that are clearly based on identifiable Roman ones – such as its Colosseum-like structure – to original buildings after the antique, the architecture and topography in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman art signal its own origins in the Roman landscape. At the same time, however, their status as inventions would allow them to signify more expansively than the specific monuments in his drawings, perhaps to

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embed the meanings of multiple buildings, or more broadly, to suggest the timeless universality of the narrative figural content behind which they appear. In 1552, Hieronymus Cock and Van Heemskerck collaborated to circulate a print based on the Jerome’s composition [fig. 6.21]. The ruin’s prominence in the composition combined with Cock’s publication of prints of ruin vedute in the same year forms a strong suggestion that the St. Jerome painting’s ruins were a major factor in Cock’s decision to circulate the image.113 By the same token, just as the painting’s audience would find in its ruinscape plenty of content worthy of discussion, so would the print’s audience of European collectors. Another richly instructive exemplum for interpreting Van Heemskerck’s ruin fantasie comes to us in the form of a print that he and Coornhert published a few short years after he painted the St. Jerome: 1550’s double-sheeted, large scale print of the Old Testament story of Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22]. To visualize the

figure 6.22

Dirck Volkertzoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Ruth and Boaz, 1548, Registration numbers 1949,0709.42 (left) and 1949,0709.43 (right), ink on paper, 287 × 432mm (left) and 284 × 427mm (right), Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

Invention, Collecting, Antiquarianism figure 6.21 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape, 1552, Registration number 1996,0608.16, ink on paper, 230 × 427 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

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narrative in which Boaz saves Naomi and her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth from destitution, Van Heemskerck has again scaled his figures diminutively before a panoramic, ruin-rife landscape that was unprecedented in visualizations of the story prior to his. And in this example, the print is large in scale, making the diminution of the figures an amplification of the landscape,

Figure 6.22, detail.

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an invitation to look closely.114 In the central foreground, Ruth bends over to perform the backbreaking work of gleaning the field of all that was left of its wheat after it had been harvested. Boaz appears at left, asking his servant for the identity of the woman gleaning before him. At far right, we see Boaz again, declaring to the elders of Bethlehem his intention to fulfill his duty as Naomi and Ruth’s “kinsman redeemer” by purchasing all of Naomi’s property. Not long after, he marries Ruth. In an exegesis of biblical patrilineage, their coupling is supremely fruitful; they bear the line that eventually leads to Christ. We can thus view the narrative as an essay on the sacred edification in the commingling of natural, familial, and social obligation: Ruth’s poverty and the natural obligation to glean so as to not waste any of nature’s harvest have led her to Boaz. His fulfillment of familial and social obligations as Naomi’s kinsman redeemer ultimately leads to Ruth’s fecundity, which in turn begets Christ, the redeemer of humanity.115 Despite the narrative’s setting in Bethlehem, the print’s invented ruins appear as they do in the Helen and the St. Jerome; they are a fantasy unmistakably reminiscent of Rome. A Septizonium-like structure appears prominently in the composition’s central middle ground. It is heavily dependent on Van Heemskerck’s rendering of the now-destroyed building from the rear in his horizontally oriented view of the Palatine’s substructures [cat. no. 13].116 The print’s town gate at far right appears to us as a combination of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the Forum Romanum’s Temple of Castor [cat. nos. 1, 3, and 4] and the portico of San Giorgio in Velabro through the Arco Argentari [cat. no. 34]. Moreover, close examination of the print’s distant background reveals a miniscule windmill, which is, of course, more reminiscent of Van Heemskerck’s Low Countries than anywhere else. Rather than viewing the landscape’s Roman overtones as a disjunction with the narrative, we see them first as a means of universalizing it via a total displacement. We should be in Bethlehem, but we are not; we are simultaneously in Bethlehem, Rome, and even the Netherlands. We are thus nowhere. We could thus be anywhere. Seen in this light, the print’s monuments are free to signify in relation to the narrative they support. Viewers might find a particularly appropriate marker in the print’s Septizonium variant. In the popular medieval guidebook, Mirabilia Vrbis Romae, the Severan building is the Temple of the Sun and Moon, an allusion to the natural cycle, fertility, and the archetypal powers of masculine and feminine.117 As such, the print’s Septizonium-like structure signifies Ruth and Boaz’s fruitful, divine union. The Mirabilia also describes

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the Septizonium as the Temple of Fortune, making it a multivalent prompt inviting discourse on Ruth’s changing fortunes and God’s role in their profoundly redemptive turn. Thus, Van Heemskerck’s ruin landscapes and fantasie encourage a variety of ways of thinking that artistry itself prompts. As such they highlight the cultural and historical significances of their own travel and transaction: from antiquity, to the sixteenth-century present, via the eye, hand, and ingegno of their Haarlem steward and interpreter. They call attention to their own manufacture, the role of the pictorial arts in relating the present to deep historical pasts, and more broadly, in altering consciousness. Such meanings were crucial in the Roman milieu that prompted the Helen painting. This was perhaps even truer of Van Heemskerck’s northern milieu, geographically removed as it was from Rome, where antiquity possessed a greater mystique, as would an artist’s ability to convey information about antiquity’s visual aspect. His topographical inventions invite an audience familiar with the Roman landscape to play a multilayered mnemonic game; to view them is to engage his considerable mastery of antiquity and powers of invention all’antica to recollect Rome’s famous ancient ruins. Thus, it should come as no surprise that shortly after the veritable explosion of ruin production in his work from the late 1540s and early 1550s, Van Heemskerck would memorialize his self-conscious indebtedness to his time in Rome, time well spent to say the least, a harvest he had only just begun to reap.

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Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning

A Summa of the Self

In 1553, with his Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1], Maarten Van Heemskerck fashioned his own identity via Rome’s ruins. His self-conscious identification with the vestiges of the ancient Roman past already had a precedent in at least one of his Roman drawings. In one of his carefully worked, foreshortened “portraits” of the Septizonium [cat. no. 25], a sustained meditation on the building’s omnipresent and relentless decay, he has inscribed his name on the inscrutable building’s lower frieze. Described succinctly by Margaret McGowan as Van Heemskerck’s act of taking “ownership” of the building, the gesture is that and much more; indeed, the presence of Van Heemskerck’s name on the frieze of any antiquity suggests his presence in the ancient world, as if ancient Roman architects had chiseled his name into the very fabric of the building.1 However, if we read the drawing’s temporal implications reciprocally, the choice of the Septizonium appears telling. Generally speaking, Van Heemskerck’s fashioning of the building in ink to bear his figure 7.1 Maarten van Heemskerck, Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, 1553, Inventory number 103, oil on canvas, 42.2 × 54 cm., Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_012

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name suggests the building’s malleability over time. More specifically, however, its portrayal of the Septizonium intensifies such a suggestion; by the sixteenth century, so much of the building had been lost that architects were not entirely sure of what its remainder looked like. That he drew the building twice from similar angles of view may be an indication that the ruin’s asymmetry suggested to him the insufficiency of one drawing for demonstrating its structure, let alone its magnificence. The general notion of ruins as objects of making, unmaking, and re-making – and their presence in Van Heemskerck’s present – is thus all the more palpable due to his particular choice of the Septizonium. For posterity, then, the drawing bearing Van Heemskerck’s inscription on the frieze simultaneously “records” two events, only the latter of which occurred in Van Heemskerck’s pictorial imagination: antiquity’s presence in Van Heemskerck’s time and his presence in antiquity. The timelessness of the pictorial realm that van Heemskerck has established within the frame is thus not unlike the atemporality of the double-portraits conflating Raphael’s contemporaries with the great thinkers of antiquity in Raphael’s School of Athens: the painting argues that there is no temporal gap between monument and artist, past and present, antiquity and Renaissance. Via Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum’s clever pictorial explicatio – an unfolding, four-tiered recession from the viewer’s present, through the sixteenth-century, back to antiquity – Van Heemskerck consummates the supratemporal conflation of himself with antiquity that he suggested more concisely in his Septizonium drawing. In the viewing present, we stand before the Van Heemskerck of 1553, who stands proudly before a fictive painting of his younger self, presumably in Rome during the 1530s, drawing ancient Rome’s most magnificent ruin, the Colosseum.2 Pervading the painting’s concetto – its driving metaphoric concept – is the notion that drawing Rome’s ruins was the key to Van Heemskerck’s artistry and his identity, his inseparability from the antiquities that formed the objects of his career-long fixation. The self-portrait’s relation to his Roman drawings and the profusion of invented antiquities in his prints and paintings has received quite a bit of scholarly attention. However, studies have mainly focused on the painting’s expression of his artistic genius, his immortality, or conversely, its presentation of a vanitas theme.3 In this chapter, we situate Van Heemskerck’s timely aggrandizement of his Roman sojourn – and the drawing of the city’s ruins in particular – within the rise of the Netherlandish

Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning

cult of ruins, which climaxed at mid-century. Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum stands as a concise pictorial autobiography that Van Heemskerck conceived and executed at a moment when arguing for expertise with the visual language of the ruin had become a most appropriate gesture for him. This is especially so given the ruin’s broad currency in European visual culture and his instrumental role in creating that currency. A foundational element for the self-portrait’s autobiographical aspect is its status as an expression of his own consummate mastery over the antiquarianism that nurtured him, over which he was beginning to exert influence. Van Heemskerck grounded the painting in a range of pictorial sources and devices deriving from his artistic milieu. For example, as with Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World, even the self-portrait’s overall compositional scheme expresses his artistic lineage and inheritance. The juxtaposition of a foregrounded sitter adjacent to an object in the extreme background draws on a developing and vital pictorial tendency in the circles Van Heemskerck navigated over the course of his career. For example, in chapter 4’s exploration of Van Heemskerck’s compositional schemes, we compared his experiments with foreground and background to Lucas van Leyden’s exploitation of perspective’s potential for a range of proximities to the picture plane to manipulate viewing awareness of narrative content.4 In the realm of portraiture, Jan Gossart’s play with foreshortening endowed his sitters with the ability to rupture the picture plane and enter viewing space, thus more vividly fulfilling the portrait’s Albertian mission of “contain[ing] a divine force which … makes absent men present.”5 Both Lucas and Gossart appear to have had an impact on Van Heemskerck’s own use of such devices in the portraits he executed just before leaving for Rome.6 Moreover, Jefferson Harrison has cited Van Heemskerck’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt [fig. 2.2], among his most important pre-Roman works, as a pivotal compositional precedent for Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum.7 Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the present discussion, Van Heemskerck’s deployment of such strategies in the drawings he composed in the Eternal City indicates his continuing awareness and critical development of the device’s poetic potential. Van Heemskerck’s specific juxtaposition in Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum of a heavily foregrounded portrait sitter before a background ruin relates most closely to the use of the same scheme in portraits traceable to Jan van Scorel and his circle. Dirck Jacobsz’s

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Portrait of Pompeius Occo [fig. 7.2], the Basel Kunstmuseum’s Portrait of David Joris [fig. 7.3], and the Prado’s Portrait of a Humanist [fig. 7.4] – all by Van Scorel followers – feature figures before ruins. The device is ultimately traceable back to Van Scorel’s Portrait of a Man in Vienna’s Liechtenstein Museum [fig. 7.5]. For its striking similarities to Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, the Prado portrait’s composition warrants particularly close attention, however. In composition and content, it is closely comparable to Van Heemskerck’s self-portrait. While the Prado painting’s attribution to Van Scorel is in doubt, its origins in the Van Scorel circle in the years just after Van Heemskerck’s return to Haarlem are sufficient to place it in Van Heemskerck’s orbit. As in Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, the sitter in the Prado portrait appears in the painting’s left foreground. Meanwhile, we find a splendid ruined structure in the right background. While the background’s ruin is a fantasia, not a “portrait” of a specific Roman monument, its circular plan is evocative of ancient Roman mausolea, especially Augustus’s. In the early sixteenth century, archeologically inclined humanists and antiquarians had not yet achieved a thorough understanding of the construction and design details of the first emperor’s tomb. Most of the structure was buried and the site consisted of a hillock. At its peak, an outcropping of ruins suggested the circular structure that excavation has since confirmed.8 However, by the sixteenth century, the Sangallo circle had conducted a thorough enough exploration of the site to shed light on its basic configuration. The painting’s imagined monument, with its circular, towering central core, stands as a plausible speculation of the Augustan tomb’s appearance as a ruin. The combination of a portrait with a ruined, ancient tomblike structure inflects portraiture’s personal commemorative aspect with the universal vanitas embedded in antiquarianism’s interest in ruins. The painting thus augment’s Alberti’s notion that portraits make present the absent, invoking his articulation of the portrait’s ability to bridge the gap between life and death. As we shall see, although Van Heemskerck does not appear before a tomb in his self-portrait, the rhetorical force in the sitter’s juxtaposition before a ruin is one that he exploited, one closely aligned with portraiture’s commemorative function according to the terms Alberti laid out. Heightening the painting’s contrast between foreground and background – its challenge to the notion of a picture plane separating viewer and the pictured – is the trompe l’oeil cartellino appearing at bottom center. With this device’s appearance in the self-portrait, Van Heemskerck returned most effectively to a device he used in several

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figure 7.2 Dirck Jacobz, Portrait of Pompeius Occo, 1531, Object number SK-A-3924, oil on panel, 66.5 × 55.1 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 7.3 Follower of Jan van Scorel, Portrait of Anabaptist David Joris c. 1540–45, Inventory number 561, oil on panel, 88.9 × 68.4 cm., Kunstmuseum, Basel, Germany

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figure 7.4 Attributed to Jan van Scorel, Portrait of a Humanist, c. 1540, Inventory number P02580, oil on panel, 67 × 52 cm., Museo del Prado, Madrid

figure 7.5 Jan van Scorel, Portrait of a Man, c. 1520, Inventory number GE854, oil on panel, 47 × 41 cm., Lichtenstein Museum, Vienna

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figure 7.6 Lucantonio degli Uberti after Francesco Rosselli, View of Florence (the ‘Catena Map’), c. 1510, Inventory number 899-100, ink on paper, 58.5 × 131.5 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

works, including earlier ones that consummated crucial moments in his career trajectory. The cartellino made its first appearance in his oeuvre as a key element in his first masterwork, the rendering of St. Luke Painting the Virgin [fig. 2.5] he executed on the eve of his Roman sojourn. There, in addition to its status as an illusionistic device providing an additional layer of visuality, the cartellino enhances the painting’s status as the product of artistic vision, a theme most appropriate for a portrayal of Saint Luke’s founding moment of sacred painting: his vision of the Virgin and child. With an emotive inscription in his own voice, Van Heemskerck bids his viewers to pray for him as a bulwark against the danger and treachery awaiting him on his excursion to Rome. The cartellino on the St. Luke thus furnished its audience with an additional layer of personal intimacy unusual for such universalizing sacred works. Thus, in the context of Van Heemskerck’s artistic development, his first St. Luke established the cartellino as a device that foregrounds his consciousness and mediates between the painting’s ability to generate meaning and direct its reception.9 He returned to the device in several subsequent paintings and prints, revising its content in each case.10 Over the course of Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre, we can read each cartellino as part of a collectivity, seeing the repeated use of the device as a developing continuity, indicating Van Heemskerck’s self-conscious

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relation to his audiences. The inscription on the self-portrait’s cartellino functions more simply but no less effectively, to inscribe Van Heemskerck’s artistic life – his Roman journey and the drawings in particular – within the ages. Its declarative inscription, “Martyn van Hemsker / Aº Ætatis SUAE LV / 1553,” celebrates his 55th year. The cartellino also provides a subtle yet irrefutable clue that the background image to the right of the larger figure of Van Heemskerck is a fictive painting before which he stands. Although we cannot see the fictive painting’s edges, Van Heemskerck’s torso overlaps with the cartellino’s edge ever so slightly, establishing his physical place in front of it, nearer to the picture plane. Moreover, the cartellino marks time while situated between the larger figure of Van Heemskerck and the fictive painting to which it affixes. Its text, illusionism, and placement combine with the fictive painting’s portrayal of the recent and ancient past – Van Heemskerck in Rome and the ancient Colosseum, respectively – to broadcast more than just the painting’s status as a meditation on Van Heemskerck’s maturation since his time in Rome. The cartellino suggests Van Heemskerck’s pivotal place within the passage of epochal time. Van Heemskerck’s inclusion of a second image of himself drawing the Colosseum also consummates a pictorial tradition that preceded him, and which he helped to develop. The inclusion of an image of an artist drawing the view pictured gained popularity in sixteenth century vedute, cityscapes, and landscapes.11 A notable early Italian example, Lucantonio degli Uberti’s woodblock print after Francesco Rosselli’s view of Florence, which dates to c. 1505 [fig. 7.6], portrays a figure in the lower right foreground who presumably draws the very view we see before us. With this device, artist and picture conspire to claim the authenticity of the view that the image presents. While such figures do not appear in the corners or foregrounds of Van Heemskerck’s extant drawings of Roman vedute, a comparable figure appears in his small rendering of the loggia housing the Palazzo Medici’s sculpture collection [cat. no. 62]. There, Van Heemskerck has made a point of including an artist among the many sculptures; he models clay, fashioning a bozzetto of one of the sculptures he observes. Hermannus Posthumus also includes a miniscule figure sketching a river god at the center of his masterpiece painting of 1536, Tempus Edax Rerum [fig. 3.7]. We notice a conspicuous rise in the number of such images that are contemporaneous with SelfPortrait Before the Colosseum. For example, many of Leonard Thiry’s compositions for prints of fantasie [e.g., fig. 7.8] contain more than one figure intently drawing the ruins portrayed. A few prints in Hieronymus Cock’s Operum Antiquorum Romanorum [e.g., figs. 0.1

Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning

and 7.7], perhaps after drawings by Van Heemskerck, also portray an artist in the process of drawing the antiquities within his gaze. Chronologically speaking, Pieter Bruegel the Elder provides the example that is closest to Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum. A print after a Bruegel drawing now in Besançon [fig. 7.9] dated to around 1553 shows a figure situated on a riverbank, drafting the landscape before him. The drawing’s date unquestionably signals the currency of the image at the time of Van Heemskerck’s self-portrait.12 While any concrete connection between the Van Heemskerck and the Bruegel is unknown, their near contemporaneity combined with the proximity of both artists to Hieronymus Cock indicates the popularity of the device among artists who were vital to Cock’s fledgling print publishing house, as Van Heemskerck and Bruegel both certainly were in the early 1550s.13

figure 7.7 Hieronymus Cock, “Ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1551, RP-P-1882-A-6450, ink on paper, 226 × 282 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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figure 7.8 Virgil Solis after Léonard Thiry, “Artists Drawing a Ruin Fantasy,” The Little Book of Architectural Ruins, 1550–62, Museum number E.2858-1910, ink on paper, 150 × 102 mm., Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Scholars have consistently tended to interpret Van Heemskerck’s choice to portray the Colosseum in his self-portrait as his appropriation of the ancient Roman amphitheater for his personal symbol.14 This is doubtless true. As we have seen, Van Heemskerck studied the Colosseum on several extant sheets [cat. nos. 5, 9, 17–23], suggesting an intensive interest in and identification with the monument. Among these, the Colosseum’s specific appearance in the self-portrait most closely resembles a sheet in the Kupferstichkabinett’s Album I, a study of the amphitheater’s broken northwestern quadrant [cat. no. 19]. Close examination of the self-portrait reveals that Van Heemskerck shows himself in the midst of executing this particular drawing, which, in turn, likely served as the source for

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figure 7.9 Simon Novellanus after Pieter Bruegel the Elder “River Landscape with Mercury and Psyche,” Allegorical Landscapes, 1595, Registration number 1870,0625.648, ink on paper, 269 × 338 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

Hieronymus Cock’s nearly identical print of the Colosseum of c. 1550 [fig. 7.14]. Van Heemskerck’s repeated inclusion of Colosseum-like buildings in the backdrops of paintings and prints spanning his entire post-Roman career reinforces our notion of the building’s importance for his artistic identity. However, a drawing in the Codex Escurialensis and another from the Jacopo Ripanda circle [fig. 7.10] offer perhaps the closest precedents to the Colosseum’s appearance and function in Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum.15 As in Van Heemskerck’s self-portrait, these drawings show us the Colosseum’s broken portion. Moreover, in both images, the foreground before the amphitheater’s exposed system of arched vaults bears groups of figures in the same area where the younger Van Heemskerck sits and draws in his Self-Portrait. The Ripanda circle’s drawing provides an especially appropriate comparandum; its figures are clearly engaged in discourse. In a manner akin to the foregrounded figures in Raphael’s School of Athens and Disputá frescoes, they declaim, gesture towards the ruin, and refer to books. A prominent figure traces a circle on the ground with a compass in a manner echoing Raphael’s double-portrait of Donato Bramante as Euclid. While we cannot confirm Van Heemskerck’s awareness of the Ripanda circle example, it confirms the currency of portraying the study of the Colosseum among the artists with whom he consorted navigated while in Rome.

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figure 7.10 Anonymous Artist known as the ‘Master of Oxford’ (active c. 1510–20), Architects and Scholars Studying Before the Colosseum, c. 1515, Inventory number LO1028A.2WA2008.22, fol. 15v, ink on paper, 333 × 235 mm., The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

The Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum’s seamless, subtle combinative aspect suggests that Van Heemskerck conceived it as a summa, a masterwork. In turn, it broadcasts its own maker’s status as a master due to his having drawn ruins in Rome. Van Heemskerck’s selffashioning in this particular manner was a particularly appropriate gesture in 1553. Not only does the portrait mark his 55th year, but as we have seen, his use of his Roman drawings for the creation of imaginative inventions after the antique was in full bloom by then. His drawings had thus gained a newfound importance in Netherlandish visual culture. More broadly, interest in Roman antiquity was peaking among his northern European colleagues at this time. It therefore makes sense that Van Heemskerck would want to celebrate the source of his inventions as they formed the fountainhead of his art and his renown among an audience of liefhebbers and antiquarians. The most immediate audience members for Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum were Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, Hieronymus Cock, and Antoine Perrenot. Coornhert was more than Van Heemskerck’s first major print collaborator; he was a humanist of some renown, whose ideology surfaces in several of Van Heemskerck’s works.16 Cock’s publication of Italianate prints, including many that Van

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Heemskerck composed and Coornhert engraved, showcased Van Heemskerck’s vast knowledge and command of antiquity for an audience beyond Haarlem.17 And Perrenot was arguably the foremost collector of antiquities in the north. He also underwrote Cock’s Quatre Vents publishing house from its inception.18 Additionally, Perrenot is the earliest known owner of Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, perhaps its patron. It was for this esteemed trio and their retinue that Van Heemskerck memorialized drawing ruins as his means for mastering Rome in his self-portrait. He did so at the moment when the memory of the ancient Roman past had become an essential part of their professional and intellectual lives. As such, these were crucial years for Van Heemskerck’s formulation of an artistic identity as a learned painter with an intimate knowledge of Roman antiquity, a pictor doctus, as it were.

Coming of Age: The Signature Ruin and Netherlandish Antiquarianism

In the context of Van Heemskerck’s career trajectory, his production of Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum consummates the first prolific burst of ruin productions we tracked in the previous chapter. By 1553, he had cultivated the ruin fantasia to the point where it had become a signature of sorts, a hallmark motif. It comprised a form of self-fashioning for Van Heemskerck not unlike the Colosseum itself. More broadly, it had become clear that by 1553, the interest in Roman ruin imagery among Netherlanders had grown to unprecedented proportions thanks in no small part to Van Heemskerck. Thus, in addition to associating such fantasie and ruinscapes with the Eternal City, viewers in the Low Countries had likely already begun to associate them with Van Heemskerck himself. That Van Heemskerck painted his self-portrait during the years when he and his Netherlandish antiquarian contemporaries were coming of age and their careers were flourishing suggests a competitive bent to the painting’s expression of Van Heemskerck’s primacy in the production of ruin imagery.19 By the 1550s, his companions in Van Scorel’s workshop and in Rome, Hermannus Posthumus and Lambert Sustris, had come to serve prestigious patrons. Posthumus had been court painter to Louis X, Duke of Bavaria.20 Sustris had collaborated with Titian and received portrait commissions from Bavaria’s Wilhelm IV, the powerful Vohlin family, and perhaps Antoine Perrenot.21 Anthonis Mor, also a pupil of Van Scorel’s, had

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obtained the patronage of Philip II, Margaret of Parma, and Perrenot among others.22 Lambert Lombard, in Rome immediately after Van Heemskerck, founded a school of art in Liège upon his return north.23 Lombard also painted Perrenot’s portrait.24 Although Lombard’s oeuvre suggests his general disinterest in ruins, he was doubtless crucial in the mid-century development of a distinctly northern antiquarian idiom, as the work of Godelieve Denhaene and later Edward Wouk attests.25 Among Lombard’s pupils was Antwerp’s Frans Floris. From his workshop on the Meir, Floris competed with Van Heemskerck for important altarpiece commissions in all of the major cultural centers of the Low Countries, including Antwerp, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Leiden.26 Floris also designed and executed the ephemeral decorations after the antique for the Antwerp Blidje Incompst – or “joyous entry” – for Charles V to his son and heir, Philip II, to his Netherlandish territories in 1549.27 And like Van Heemskerck, Floris was a prolific composer of prints in the Italianate manner.28 Given the demand among patrons for the artistic expertise after the antique that these artists had to offer, and given the resulting competition for commissions among these Netherlandish artists who fortified their artistry via study in Rome, it should not surprise us that Van Heemskerck would want to devise a self-portrait that could instantly and unequivocally align him more closely with Rome than his contemporaries. In this context, his inclusion of himself drawing Rome is no small thing; it reminds viewers of his relatively early pursuit of antiquity compared to them. Making Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum’s assertion of Van Heemskerck’s primacy for Netherlandish antiquarianism all the more understandable is the precipitous rise in the production of ruin discourse during the first half of the 1550s among artists, patrons, publishers, poets, and literati in Van Heemskerck’s orbit and beyond. For example, the mid-1540s witnessed Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani’s publication of Urbis Romae Topographia, a re-titled version of his Topographia Antiquae Romae of 1534, expanded to include illustrations, which he cribbed from Sebastiano Serlio’s Terzo Libro.29 In 1548, Lucio Fauno published his Antichità della Citta di Romà. Essentially an Italian translation of Marliani, Fauno expanded his work in 1552, in the year preceding Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum’s completion.30 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau published prints of ruins based on Leonard Thiry’s drawings in 1550 [e.g. fig. 7.8].31 In 1552, the Roman ruins of Brittenburg, off the Katwijk coast, near Leiden, reemerged. In Rome, Etiénne Du Pérac’s arrival

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figure 7.11 Lambert Sustris, Landscape with Classical Ruins and Women Bathing, c. 1552–53, Inventory number Gemäldegalerie, 1540, oil on canvas, 101 × 150 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

in 1550 suggests the period’s determining effect on his eventual copious production of Roman ruin imagery in the print medium. Three years later, Antoine Lafrery and Antonio Salamanca joined forces in the Eternal City to produce printed images of Roman antiquities. At the same time, seemingly in response to this rapidly spreading rising pictorial interest, Joachim du Bellay began writing his monumental paean to Rome’s half-lost antiquities, Les Antiquités de Rome.32 Finally, closer to Van Heemskerck’s circle and in the same year that Van Heemskerck painted his self-portrait, Lambert Sustris produced his Landscape with Classical Ruins and Women Bathing [fig. 7.11]. The painting features an impressive, jagged semi-circular temple closely based on the Pantheon. Sustris’s fantasie themselves do not display a great creative departure from their sources. However, that a painter whose oeuvre hardly distinguishes him as a specialist in such inventions conceived and executed this particular painting in 1553 confirms the moment as one when ruin imagery flourished. Van Heemskerck’s own production in these years, preceding and following his execution of Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, indicates his place ahead of the curve and marks his rise to new levels of prominence among his fellow Netherlandish antiquarians.33 We have already noted the significant rise in Van Heemskerck’s production of prints in collaboration with Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert during this time. Such prolific output of images capable of circulation far and wide doubtless raised Van Heemskerck’s reputation before a sizable northern European audience during this period. Their output includes many of compositions discussed in chapter 6, which Van Heemskerck composed to showcase his unique and inventive mastery of the ruin, based on his Roman pictorial expertise.34 Thus,

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the topographical motifs he had collected by drawing so extensively in Rome had begun to circulate throughout the Netherlands as he integrated them into his print designs. Beginning in the early 1550s, Van Heemskerck’s inventive landscapes all’antica began to enjoy even wider circulation due to his new association with Antwerp’s Hieronymus Cock. A fledgling, ambitious publisher twelve years Van Heemskerck’s junior, Cock founded his publishing house, Aux Quatre Vents, in 1550. Cock’s decision to begin publishing prints after Van Heemskerck’s designs shortly after the inception of his own enterprise suggests that the Haarlem artist had successfully established a considerable audience for his prints.35 Even before the founding of Cock’s seminal Quatre Vents publishing house in Antwerp in 1550, Van Heemskerck and Coornhert were circulating Italianate prints from Haarlem in what appear to be unprecedented numbers.36 Significantly, the earliest known print that Cock published after a Van Heemskerck design reproduces Van Heemskerck’s first design with a ruin landscape after his return to Rome, the St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape [figs. 6.20 and 6.21], after the painting of 1547.37 The amphitheater in the print resembles Van Heemskerck’s Colosseum drawings more closely than the amphitheater in the painting, suggesting what scholars have long suspected of Cock’s own series’ of Roman ruins, but have been unable to confirm: that Van Heemskerck or Cock consulted Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings themselves when executing the print, suggesting that they were integral to the process of moving from preparatory drawing to print. A further suggestion is the vitality in the 1550s of the Roman drawings, the very notion that Van Heemskerck’s selfportrait argues.38 An exemplary product of Van Heemskerck’s new association with Hieronymus Cock is their print of Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan [fig. 7.12] from 1552. The Samaritan print departs significantly from its painted predecessor of two years prior. The painting – also notable in the context of Van Heemskerck’s self-fashioning for its display of his knowledge of the Roman landscape – features a panoramic view of the Eternal City, complete with his projection of the appearance of the New St. Peter’s basilica upon completion. The Samaritan’s aid to the proverb’s victim occurs in the painting’s extreme lower right foreground. Meanwhile, a token ruin fantasia occupies the painting’s middle ground. The non-functional ruin provides a suitable backdrop for the painting’s sub-plot; a crowd clamors before a recently discovered sculptural antiquity, ignorant of the proverbial victim’s needs. The contrast in this juxtaposition

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figure 7.12

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Joannes van Doetechum after Maarten van Heemskerck, Ruin Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, 1552, Object number RP-P-1968-174, ink on paper, 275 × 377 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

has prompted Ernst Gombrich to interpret the painting as an essay on antiquity’s power to seduce and distract the faithful from the true path.39 In its presentation of the same story, the print is not nearly so easy to read as a polemic. None of Gombrich’s “archeological Pharisees” populate the frame. However, the print’s display of ruin imagery is much more emphatic. A lush arboreal foregrounded landscape frames the scene of the Samaritan administering aid. A particularly prominent tree divides the scene’s left third. There, we find jagged outcroppings in foreground and background, which bracket what appears to be a city featuring a church or temple of some sort. With no cross or other indicators of a specific religion, we must see it as a generic place of worship. This narrative content gives way to a tangle of functionally implausible piers, vaults, and columns. In 1553, Cock published Van Heemskerck’s Samson and Delilah, which the artist

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also composed to feature a uniquely Van Heemskerck-ian tumble of ruins and elements of Roman topography.40 Van Heemskerck’s Balaam and the Angel [fig. 6.11], engraved by Coornhert, and which Cock published the year after Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, also emphasizes Van Heemskerck’s fantasie.41 With its double-plated format and panoramic ruin landscape, the print appears to be a sequel of sorts to the Van Heemskerck and Coornhert collaboration, Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22], perhaps an attempt by Van Heemskerck and Cock to duplicate, exploit, or even improve upon the earlier print’s success. This continuance by Cock of Van Heemskerck’s compositions for prints with inventive topography all’antica indicates that Cock considered the Haarlem artist’s output as a model for his own publishing enterprise.42 It thus suggests Van Heemskerck’s status as an authority of ruin imagery. Broadly speaking, Cock’s publication of compositions by Van Heemskerck was not limited to emphatically ruin-laden designs. Rather, it reflected the same variety of subjects that Van Heemskerck and Coornhert had already established in their own practice.43 Thus, we see his publication of prints by the Haarlem duo as being tantamount to an underwriting of their preexisting practice. The Quatre Vents’ output resembles the precedent Van Heemskerck and Coornhert established in several specific ways. The majority of the prints Cock published by other artists during the first years of the Quatre Vents were also in the Italianate manner.44 Cock’s oft-noted aggressiveness in the marketplace – praised as pioneering – has its antecedent and model in the sheer quantity Van Heemskerck and Coornhert produced.45 The Haarlemers also arrived earlier at the idea of marketing prints in serial, a format that Cock later used to great advantage.46 Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus Driven Out of the Temple [fig. 8.3], based on Raphael’s Vatican painting, predates Cock’s print of the School of Athens (1550) engraved by Giorgio Ghisi.47 By the same token, Van Heemskerck’s alterations to Raphael’s original design for a print audience precede Ghisi’s alterations to the School of Athens painting.48 Regardless of whether Van Heemskerck and Coornhert sold or circulated as many prints as Aux Quatre Vents, they anticipated by almost two years the market for Italianate prints that Cock exploited. Cock’s decision to publish prints in the same manner as the ones they had already been making before he even began, and his success in doing so, vindicates their entrepreneurial instincts. In light of Van Heemskerck’s primacy in the 1550s Netherlandish antiquarian print boom – and in particular, his seminal role in the

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manufacture of invented scenery after the antique – we see in SelfPortrait Before the Colosseum, his sharpened awareness that by the 1550s, his 1530s Roman journey had become supremely important for him and his visual culture. The antiquarian aspect of the prints he and Coornhert circulated from Haarlem, which they continued to circulate through Aux Quatre Vents, was entirely predicated on the study of antiquity in Rome. Thus, in the context of the early 1550s, Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum speaks of Van Heemskerck’s importance in cultivating an audience for prints that featured the topographic antiquities he invented out of his own initiative to draw Rome. Thus, in a timely fashion, Van Heemskerck’s self-portrait reminds its audience of the only means by which artists could generate the imagery after the antique then gaining popularity in his homeland; like Raphael and the other Italian masters whose designs Cock put before Netherlandish eyes, Van Heemskerck himself had learned his art by studying Rome’s antiquities first hand.

Van Heemskerck’s Drawings and Hieronymus Cock’s Præcipua aliquot Romanae Antiquitatis Ruinarum

Without doubt, Hieronymus Cock had access to Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. It is also doubtless that their aesthetic and their content had an immeasurable impact on his publications. Thus, it can be no mere coincidence that Van Heemskerck’s portrayal of himself in the process of composing a vedute of a Roman ruin coincides with Cock’s enormously popular publications of Roman vedute. In 1551, Cock issued his famous Præcipua aliquot Romanae Antiquitatis Ruinarum, a set of twenty-five views of the Eternal City’s ruinscapes.49 He followed these with two other series’ in the early 1560s, as his association with Van Heemskerck continued.50 In the context of the self-portrait’s image of Van Heemskerck drawing a Roman ruin, we cannot underestimate the powerful examples his trip to Rome and the topographical drawings he produced there must have provided for Cock’s vedute. We are aware that Cock, himself a talented draftsman, went to Rome in the late 1540s. While there, he probably made his own topographical drawings. Some of these may have served as source material for his vedute. However, only three drawings of Roman buildings believed to be from Cock’s hand survive. All of these functioned as preparatory sketches for the 1551 series’ plates.51 Cock may have only drawn one of these while in Rome.52 This lack of field drawings attributable to Cock combined

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with the certainty that he had access to Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings has invited speculation that the Antwerp publisher borrowed Roman topographical source material from the Haarlem artist. However, conclusive evidence to support such extreme claims has been difficult to come by.53 Van Heemskerck’s Roman topographical drawings undoubtedly comprised the most complete corpus in the Antwerp publisher’s proximity during the 1550s. Shared aspects between the two sets of Roman views suggest that Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome did indeed serve Cock as a most useful point of reference.54 For example, Van Heemskerck’s explorations of the Colosseum and the Palatine over many sheets portraying a variety of views find their echo in Cock’s emphases on the same sites. Other physical evidence suggests that Cock devised his vedute by consulting his own drawings, Van Heemskerck’s, and perhaps those by others, while calling on his skills as a draftsman to make transfer drawings. Such a method would have offered Cock considerable advantages over using only the drawings that he had executed in Rome. He could ensure a more varied and authoritative set of images; the 1551 series’ multiple views of the Colosseum and the buildings on the Palatine suggest that this was one of his aims. Moreover, making transfer drawings expressly for print purposes could give Cock’s disparate sources coherence as a presentable series. This would explain why the only surviving drawings that correspond directly to the series’ prints are preparatory sketches by Cock. While no Van Heemskerck sheet shares a one-to-one correspondence with a Cock vedute, some bear a close relation. For example, Cock’s prints of the Baths of Caracalla [fig. 7.13] and the famous northwestern break in the Colosseum’s façade [fig. 7.14] are close to drawings by Van Heemskerck [cat. nos. 47 and 19, respectively].55 Cock’s prints from 1551 are larger than Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the 1530s, thus eliminating the possibility of direct transfer.56 The prints also show the buildings from slightly different angles than Van Heemskerck’s drawings and contain alterations in the natural topography that imbue them with a uniform look. Further suggesting the importance of Van Heemskerck’s drawings for Cock is the compelling evidence of a vedute from the 1561 series. As we have seen, one of Cock’s prints [fig. 7.15] derives from Van Heemskerck’s magisterial 1530s view from atop the Palatine looking northeast towards the Colosseum [cat. no. 9]. Unlike other examples we have discussed here, however, a comparison of drawn source and

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Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning

figure 7.13 Hieronymus Cock after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1551, RP-P-1882-A-6455, ink on paper, 226 × 299 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 7.14 Hieronymus Cock after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Colosseum,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1551, RP-P-1882-A-6441, ink on paper, 302 × 223 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

print reveals that Van Heemskerck’s drawing is larger than Cock’s print.57 Cock has once again altered the details of the natural topography to match the overall appearance of the other prints in the series. Moreover, the drawing is one of the only surviving Van

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Hieronymus Cock / Johannes or Lucas van Doetechum after Maarten van Heemskerck, “View from Palace of Septimius Severus towards the Colosseum,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1561/1578, RP-P-1985-211, ink on paper, 245 × 325 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Heemskercks that has been cut down. Its cropping matches the composition of Cock’s print. Clearly then, since the Palatine sheet was the source for a vedute, it endured a busier afterlife. As one of the only surviving sheets that served as a source for Cock, one that also bears the marks of the extra wear and tear imposed on drawings that functioned as reference material, it comprises a strong suggestion that the Van Heemskerck drawings Cock consulted are less likely to have survived.58 Seen in this light, the very absence of the views appearing in Cock’s prints among Van Heemskerck’s surviving drawings may also indicate that they were a point of reference for Cock. This speculative notion finds support in two vedute of 1551 portraying a ruin whose identity eludes us.59 Cock’s barrel-vaulted structure culminating in an oculus finds no counterpart among Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. However, it does receive a striking echo in Van Heemskerck’s “Adoration of the Shepherds,” from his 1569 Clades Judaeae Gentis series of prints.60 Like Self-Portrait Before

Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning

the Colosseum, the frontispiece to the Clades series [fig. 8.4] witnesses Van Heemskerck depict his reliance on – and invention from – the Roman drawings. Thus, even though we have no Roman drawing of the vaulted structure that Cock produced in print, its appearance in both sets of prints suggests the loss of a drawing by Van Heemskerck that both he and Cock used later for prints. While none of the physical evidence presented here definitively identifies Van Heemskerck as the “author” of all of Cock’s vedute, it strongly suggests that his drawings were integral in their conception. Thus, Cock’s publication of Roman vedute and his collaborations with Van Heemskerck persuade us to view Self Portrait Before the Colosseum as an expression of the artist’s seminal status in the Netherlandish production and consumption of Roman ruin landscapes. His corpus of Roman ruinscape drawings was the preeminent precedent for Cock’s vedute. And as we have seen, it was within the publisher’s reach. Additionally, Van Heemskerck’s prints featuring Roman ruinscapes and fantasie furnished Cock with an authoritative example for the mass production of Roman topographical imagery. Timothy Riggs has accurately described Cock’s series of 1551 as “the first to present views of genuine Roman ruins in the context of picturesque landscapes.”61 However, upon viewing Van Heemskerck’s 1530s drawings and the emphatic displays of ruins and inventions after the antique in the prints from the late 1540s we explored here and in the previous chapter, it would be absolutely clear to any viewer familiar with ancient Rome that Van Heemskerck’s inventions resulted from drawing in Rome. Thus, in a sense that Cock himself must have understood, Van Heemskerck had published images of “genuine Roman ruins in the context of picturesque landscapes” before him. As the Maarten Van Heemskerck of 1553 stands proudly before an image of himself drawing a view of the Colosseum in the 1530s much like one that Cock had just mass produced, it is apparent that he is demonstrating this very notion.

Self-Portrait before the Colosseum’s Antiquarian Audience

Given the currency that Van Heemskerck’s Roman topographical motifs were enjoying in the late 1540s and early 1550s, it is unlikely that the significance of his self-portrait commemoration of his Roman drawing sojourn was lost on Hieronymus Cock or his Quatre Vents associates. Among those in Van Heemskerck’s and Cock’s circle, we must consider the role of Antoine Perrenot, also known as Cardinal Granvelle, Bishop of Arras, and minister to Charles V and Philip II.

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Perrenot inherited a passion for Roman antiquity from his father Nicolas (1448–1550) who preceded him as Charles’ minister and was among the earliest importers of Roman statuary to the north, the famed Jupiter statue that had once been in the Villa Madama.62 The late 1540s and early 1550s were years of ascendancy for young Antoine, just as they were for Van Heemskerck. The younger Perrenot took over as Charles’ minister upon his father’s death in 1550. He also inherited his father’s collection and took up his voracious collecting habits. Perrenot even attempted in 1550 to acquire Primaticcio’s famous molds of the Vatican’s antiquities for his magnificent palace all’antica in Brussels.63 Antoine Perrenot was a no less avid exponent of his artistic contemporaries, especially those in the retinue surrounding Hieronymus Cock and Maarten Van Heemskerck.64 He lent active support to the Quatre Vents during its pivotal early years, subsidizing or commissioning numerous early publications, including the 1551 series of ruins, a set of perspective views all’antica, and a sumptuous plan and elevation of the Baths of Diocletian by Sebastian van Noyen.65 Perrenot is also the first owner of Self Portrait Before the Colosseum and Van Heemskerck’s Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater [fig. 7.16],

figure 7.16

Maarten van Heemskerck, Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater, 1552, Inventory number P819, oil on wood, 75 × 121 cm., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille

Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning

painted the previous year. The latter painting features an imaginative, Colosseum-like amphitheater with a Jupiter statue at its center resembling the one Perrenot’s father had acquired. The exact circumstances surrounding Perrenot’s ownership of either painting are unknown. C. Malcom Brown has argued that Perrenot commissioned Bullfight from Van Heemskerck to celebrate his father’s ancient Roman Jupiter statue, which was undoubtedly among the brightest jewels in the Perrenot collection.66 But with no conclusive evidence of direct contact between Van Heemskerck and Perrenot, we must consider the possibility that the paintings came into his possession via a third party. Naturally, Hieronymus Cock, who also listed art dealer among his many vocations, is likeliest to have performed in such a capacity. Cock could have brokered Perrenot’s commission or purchase of Van Heemskerck’s paintings in a number of scenarios; Perrenot may have commissioned both paintings from Van Heemskerck via Cock; or the Antwerp publisher may have arranged the commission of the earlier Bullfight painting, after which, Van Heemskerck offered Perrenot the smaller self-portrait as a token of his gratitude; Perrenot may have also purchased both via Cock after Van Heemskerck completed them with no particular audience in mind. While each possibility suggests that Van Heemskerck devised Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum for different reasons, they all suggest a linkage between the two paintings.67 That Van Heemskerck painted Self Portrait Before the Colosseum a year after Bullfight and both paintings belonged to Perrenot endows the self-portrait’s emphasis on Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Rome with further import. One imagines the two paintings displayed side-by-side in Perrenot’s palace, amidst his impressive collection. Displayed next to Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater, the smaller Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum would reveal to viewers Van Heemskerck’s method for inventing the larger painting. In the shadow of the colossal ruin, we see a bustling scene of human life, almost Bruegelian in its variety of follies. Flagellants, worshippers in prayer, and quack salesmen all go about their business before the teeming humanity on hand to view the entertainments being staged in the half-wrecked amphitheater. In order to devise this grand genre scene, Van Heemskerck again used his drawings to recall the Colosseum’s grandeur and yet again reinvented it according to his own vision, just as he had in the St. Jerome painting. He also recalled his experiences in the tumultuous post-Sack Rome of the 1530s.68 As an antiquarian and well-traveled contemporary of Van Heemskerck’s who had spent plenty of time in Rome, Perrenot

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certainly would have enjoyed the painting’s erudite architectural creation after the amphitheater, the city’s most famous ruin. Perhaps more stimulating was Van Heemskerck’s clever projection of sixteenth century life in the Eternal City onto an invented backdrop that cannot be placed in the past, present, or future. As a painting that explains Van Heemskerck’s draftsmanship as the cause of such provocative inventions, Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum surely had particular resonance for Perrenot. Thus, the self-portrait is comparable to Diego Velasquez’ Las Meninas in its appeal to a privileged gaze. Van Heemskerck tells his patrons, Cock and Perrenot, of the commercial, artistic, and intellectual worth of his twenty-year old Roman drawings and the multifariousness of the pictorial memory he achieved by making them. With Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum, Van Heemskerck highlights the unity of his artistic trajectory at mid-century, from drawing Rome, to assimilating the Roman landscape in order to invent from it in his paintings and prints. While that unity has perhaps always seemed manifest to us, we must recognize not only the insightful memory the self-portrait’s conception required of Van Heemskerck, but also its foresight. Undoubtedly, with Self Portrait Before the Colosseum, Van Heemskerck simultaneously describes and bridges a twenty-year gap by acknowledging that his drawings of Rome were the most crucial aspect of his artistic past to survive into the 1550s. The choice to show himself drawing the Colosseum is a logical one given the amphitheater’s status as a frequently drawn monument, emblematic of Rome and antiquity, not to mention its persistence in varied forms in his oeuvre. Self Portrait Before the Colosseum is thus more than an ingenious manifestation of Van Heemskerck’s unique forms of intellectual and artistic supremacy and the means by which he obtained them. As we shall see, in light of the manifest truth of its claims, the painting is also prophetic.

chapter 8

Regnum, Reform, and Ruin

Van Heemskerck and the Destruction of Art in the ‘Age of Art’

Maarten Van Heemskerck deployed his artistic identity as a master of antiquity and the ruin in response to the image debate, its attendant iconoclasm, and the start of the Eighty Years War. With the ruin’s cautionary embodiment of antiquity’s destruction, its status as a marker of the loss of memory and history, Van Heemskerck used his authority as a master of antiquity to warn his audiences of the grave consequences in war and the erasure of sacred art. We have already seen how several of his works from the 1540s and 50s contain ruin fantasie he devised out of the raw pictorial material in his Roman drawings. This same period also witnessed his production of sacred imagery after the antique that countered the anti-image view by arguing with firm subtlety for art’s instructive capacities. After the beeldenstorm of 1566 compromised Habsburg authority and shook the Netherlandish urban landscape to its very core, open conflict with the Spanish crown moved towards inevitability with alarming rapidity.1 By 1568, the Eighty Years War had begun. In response to these events, Van Heemskerck determined that the ruin, his own image, and his Roman sojourn’s status as the defining event of his career should function as crucial content in the prints he composed and circulated. His use of his ruin drawings became especially provocative, doubtless even appearing trenchant in the eyes of some viewers, depending upon their beliefs and allegiances. Van Heemskerck’s development of the ruin fantasia as a powerful signifying image culminated in the production of a large scale print and two series’ of prints appearing in 1569: The Fall of Babylon [fig. 8.9], King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord [figs. 8.6, 7, and 8], and Clades Judaeae Gentis (“The Disasters of the Jewish People”) [figs. 8.4, 5, 11, 12, and 13].2 With their presentation of Old Testament narratives before ruinous scenes of the fall of civilizations, temple looting, and idol destruction, these prints invited viewers concerned with the image debate and the war between the Netherlands and the Spanish crown to consider the timely, related topics of the questions surrounding idol worship and imperial rule’s part in ecclesiastical affairs. The Clades series is especially pointed in its profuse deployment of ruin

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_013

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imagery. Part of a succession of key works from over the course of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman period, these prints represent the culmination of his career long meditation on how to devise imagery to embody art’s instructiveness in sacred matters. Most scholarship on the image debate has focused on its conspicuous nodes: its impassioned beginnings in the 1520s, its violent climax in the mid-1560s, and its denouement at the turn of the seventeenth century.3 Because Van Heemskerck’s career spans the image debate’s first two phases and that the peak of his artistic production occurred from the 1530s to the 1560s, we begin by seeking the impact of the period after the initial iconoclastic outbursts of the 1520s and before the violence of 1566 on the choices he made as conceived and executed sacred works. David Freedberg’s formative approach to the study of the image debate was to seek “practical connections between [anti-image literature] and the great iconoclastic outbursts of the sixteenth century.”4 In light of Hans Belting’s pioneering book, Bild und Kult (Likeness and Presence) we invert Freedberg’s question to clarify the relation between Van Heemskerck’s sacred art and the image debate. Rather than identifying the discursive ferment that caused sacred art’s destruction, we should situate its production in the historiographic moment after Belting’s groundbreaking identification of a transformation in sacred art’s reception. Belting observed that the first quarter of the sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of an “age of art” for sacred images. They no longer functioned solely as the icon had throughout the middle ages, to facilitate worship. Increasingly, viewers of sacred images had begun to bring broadly secular and specifically artistic concerns to sacred art. They began to perceive and discuss the images before them as products of artistic choices. Sacred images became multivalent bearers of aesthetic signposts that could transform their meanings and functions.5 Using Belting’s observation as a point of departure, Marcia Hall has explored the production of sacred art in Italy during the sixteenth century.6 She has asked how artists working in Belting’s age of art responded to the tension between the continuing demands for sacred imagery on the one hand and the modern demands placed on them, falling under the rubric of art, on the other. In Hall’s vision, Italian artists embroiled in the Counter-Reformation attempted the mastery of a lexicon of artistic choices – quotations of earlier key figural and compositional motifs and color schemes, for example – to pervade their sacred pictures with a multivalent rhetoric accommodating the new demands on sacred imagery. In

Regnum, Reform, and Ruin

addition to conveying sacred content, mid sixteenth-century Italian paintings bore responses to the developing discourse on the sacred image’s role. Chief among Reform concerns, of course, was idol worship. Viewed by Reformers as the basest of viewing relations to the image, idol worship is traceable to pagan modes of veneration of antiquities, wherein worshippers believed the art before them possessed the presence of the god or goddess portrayed. As such, Reform attempts to root out the practice of idol worship among sixteenth century Christians would appear to implicate any art fashioned in a manner after the antique. To date, however, no sustained, rigorous study has related Reform calls for sacred art’s removal to northern European art after the antique by Van Heemskerck and his gifted contemporaries.7 As we have seen in the previous chapter, they continued to gain prestigious secular and sacred commissions during the 1540s and 50s. During these years, however, tensions around the image debate increased. Reformers could have only found problematic their ability to fashion sacred images to appear as “new antiquities.” Further, as our tracking of Van Heemskerck’s rise to new levels of prominence in the 1540s and 50s has revealed, those who underwrote him and his antiquarian peers came from the Netherlandish establishment. The patrons to whom Van Heemskerck and his colleagues frequently appealed were lovers of antiquities who traveled in Europe’s most elite circles, none other than frequent Vatican ally, Emperor Charles V, his son and heir, Philip II, and one of their most important advisors, Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle. Given such high-level ties, one would expect Van Heemskerck and his art to function as instruments of imperial desire. His Victories of Charles V series of prints [figs. 3.1 and 3.2] certainly performed this function. However, his close and sustained collaboration with humanistengraver Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert – an advocate of religious tolerance – demands that we seek greater nuance as we approach Van Heemskerck’s art abutting religious themes. We situate his conspicuously antiquarian art within a daunting complex of Catholic, imperial, and Reform-related concerns for a diverse audience in possession of a range of opinions. His responsiveness to this tenuous milieu – which entailed his familiarity with issues of local, regional, and European socio-political, exegetical, and spiritual currency – enabled him to enrich his sacred artistry. We therefore envision the diverse modes of reception his mid-sixteenth century religious works invited. This latter line of inquiry is especially cogent with

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regard to the consumption of Van Heemskerck’s prints bearing complex visual and textual exegeses, which traveled to viewers near and far. With no documentation available to confirm Van Heemskerck’s views on the image debate, scholars have only been able to link him to it superficially. However, biographical and pictorial evidence suggests that he was well versed in the practical, pictorial implications embedded in the challenge to the notion of sacred art’s spiritual utility.8 We cannot verify Karel Van Mander’s statement that iconoclasts of the beeldenstorm of 1566 “shamefully destroyed” many of Van Heemskerck’s works for churches.9 However, the claim is certainly plausible; as is well known, iconoclasts destroyed the wings of Frans Floris’s Fall of the Rebel Angels, a painting like many of Van Heemskerck’s, overflowing with figuration after the antique. Similarly, only Dirck Barendsz’s drawing of the same subject survives. Portraying a comparably robust tangle of bodies, the altarpiece itself was also lost to the beeldenstorm.10 Thus, at the very least, Van Heemskerck should have had an inkling of the possibility that image breakers may have depleted his own sacred oeuvre, if not full consciousness that it had actually happened. The controversy over sacred art’s role in worship remained inflamed over the entirety of Van Heemskerck’s career. That he worked in a time and place when discourse on the destruction of the very kinds of objects he made for a living was ubiquitous and continuous must mean that he was intimately familiar with the threat to his livelihood that the anti-image view posed. As Van Heemskerck’s artistry developed during the early part of his career in the 1520s and 30s, events in the image debate likely spurred his awareness of the role of sacred art’s materiality in promoting idol worship as a developing and crucial discursive concern. Concurrent with the start of his career, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Ludwig Hätzer, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Luther, and Desiderius Erasmus among others began weaving a complex discourse that was tantamount to an interrogation of art’s usefulness in worship contexts.11 While their solutions to the problem of sacred art differed, they each expressed related concerns about its materiality. They found its combination of sumptuousness and illusionism overpowering. The artist’s masterful manipulation of art’s materials dazzled worshippers and could convince those among the more easily seduced of the image’s living presence and, in turn, promote idol worship. Karlstadt successfully provoked the removal of images in Wittenberg in 1522 and the breaking of images in Zurich in 1523. In his anti-image rhetoric, he decried

Regnum, Reform, and Ruin

church art “painted with satin and damask […] adorned with gold crowns.” In a powerful, albeit hyperbolic rhetorical turn, Karlstadt further conjectured that on occasion, even the artist himself could find that his own art had deceived him, compelling him to “bend double before it [having] forgotten that the image’s eyes do not see.” Karlstadt’s comments evoke Michelangelo’s legendary demand of his own sculpture to speak. For Erasmus’s part, although he did not condone the destruction of church art, he also cited it as a potential temptation to idol worship, noting that the cult of relics has its “legacy in paganism.” By the same token, although arch-Reformer Martin Luther opposed the extreme violence of iconoclasm, he yet invoked the power in sacred art’s material presence as he proclaimed its capacity to steal the worshipper’s heart and soul. He also lamented the vivid sight of the “broken arms and legs” of sacred figural sculptures after their destruction.12 As this discourse emerged, Van Heemskerck’s own artistic development – particularly the climax of his early training as Jan van Scorel’s assistant – introduced him to the newly emerging challenges the image debate posed to any northern European artist working in a manner after the antique. Van Scorel’s tenure as keeper of Vatican antiquities under Adrian VI Boeyens (r. 1522–23) could not have occurred at a more tenuous time; the Dutch pope donned the tiara just as the first wave of anti-papist reform was gaining serious momentum. Even the earliest Reformation rhetoric included critiques of indulgently sumptuous sacred art. Adrian’s attitudes towards art, far from the affection for it of his Italian predecessors and successors, exemplified the era’s growing awareness of the distinction between the sacred and the artful. Sheryl Reiss has contrasted Adrian’s veneration of an allegedly miraculous medieval image of the Virgin, which children presented to him during his possesso, with his famed disdain for antiquities and art after the antique.13 Adrian never appears to have questioned the icon’s role for worship. However, despite his deserved reputation as a hater of antiquities, he did maintain their status as historical artifacts worthy of preservation. Thus, as Van Scorel conveyed his Vatican experiences to Van Heemskerck in Haarlem workshop, discussions must have been ongoing regarding how to best conceive sacred artworks within the era’s increasingly polemical parameters, how to navigate the perceived rupture between icon and artifice. By the time Van Heemskerck left Van Scorel’s workshop in 1530 to begin the extended wanderjahr that culminated with his Roman journey, extremist calls for the destruction of sacred art had reached

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an early peak. The relative calm after the iconoclasm that Karlstadt had helped precipitate in Zürch (1523) met with interruption as the new decade began; outbreaks occurred in Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), and Augsburg (1537).14 The earliest of these occurred while Van Heemskerck was in Haarlem, where news of the outbreak undoubtedly reached him. The last three occurred during his Roman stay, while he was busy recording the city’s antiquities. As his drawings of sculptures and sculpture collections indicate, he consorted with the city’s highest ranked clerics; thus, he must have also received news of these iconoclastic outbreaks while he was in the Eternal City.15 Van Heemskerck’s continuous production of sacred art required that he vigilantly maintain a nuanced understanding of the iconoclast’s motives.16 His Roman drawings – so emphatic in their portrayal of antiquity’s fragmented remains – impel us to imagine how the repeated act of drawing broken works of ancient art and architecture resonated with the effects of iconoclasm closer to home in northern Europe; this analogy doubtless added a millennial dimension to his understanding of art’s instructive properties and the deleterious effects of art’s loss on cultural and historical memory. Mining Van Heemskerck’s sacred artworks for the notions of memory they embed reveals the regimes of historical time and timelessness they consummated for mid-sixteenth century audiences intent on using sacred art for the spiritually edifying interpretation of the present in relation to history as it unfolded divinely in the scriptures. Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman sacred oeuvre suggests that upon returning north, the image debate and art’s instructiveness for worship were among his primary ongoing concerns. Even in the years immediately following his return to Haarlem from Rome – nearly thirty years before the discourse on sacred images devolved into the violence of the beeldenstorm of 1566 – Van Heemskerck made sacred art addressing the terms by which reformers would have had images broken or removed from churches, expunged from the visual culture of his day.

Before the Beeldenstorm, After the Antique

Van Heemskerck’s most important sacred commission during the years immediately following his return to Haarlem, the St. Lawrence Altarpiece [fig. 8.1], issues a strong provocation to the anti-image view.17 Although he did not deploy ruin imagery in the monumental

Regnum, Reform, and Ruin

figure 8.1 Maarten van Heemskerck, St. Lawrence Altarpiece (Interior), 1538–42, oil on panel, 5.2 × 7.36 m., Domkyrkan Linköping, Sweden. Photo by Margareta Svensson

polyptych, he did devise for it a vivid pictorial formula embodying art’s ability to impress its viewer with an emphatic spiritual appeal. Figures forthrightly after the antique, frankly corporeal, bodying forth their own sculptural three-dimensionality, appear within a relief-like pictorial scheme.18 In each panel, the foreground can barely contain the morass of flesh, muscle, and overwrought faces challenging the picture plane in a manner comparable to the way antiquities in some of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings encroach viewing space.19 Only in the upper portions of each of the polyptych’s frames do we find even a modicum of release from the altarpiece’s abundant foregrounded figural clutter: a distant background bearing an obelisk and other motifs generically after the antique, only vaguely indebted to the Roman landscape that Van Heemskerck knew so well. Along with many of his post-Roman works, especially the much later Victories of Charles V series of prints, the St. Lawrence Altarpiece bears strong figural and compositional evidence that he spent a substantial amount of time developing an intimate familiarity with the cluttered imbroglio of figures on ancient Roman

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sarcophagi in the Vatican collection and the frescoes they inspired by Raphael and Giulio Romano in the Vatican’s Sala di Costantino.20 The St. Lawrence Altarpiece’s conspicuously art-conscious manner mounts an aggressive challenge to the then current Reform criticism that artfulness distracted from worship; whether or not contemporary viewers recognized the painting’s visual histrionics as an attempt to impress sacred content deeply into their memories, it stood a better chance of doing so via its striking visual effects. The painting’s emphatic figural challenges to the picture plane remind us of Frances Yates’ illumination of formulae for visual memory prevalent from antiquity through the late middle ages.21 For ancient and medieval thinkers concerned with the workings of the memory, vivid imagery, contrast, and volumes encroaching viewing space remained in mind and thus offered themselves for recollection more easily. Worshippers among the more thoughtful would also notice that the painting’s figures mimic those appearing in similarly sized sculpted altarpieces. The St. Lawrence Altarpiece thus also engages a paragone with sacred sculpture, suggesting pictorial illusionism’s ability to mount an appeal to the viewer’s sacred imagination and memory that is more striking than sculpture’s due to its striking ability to approximate sculpture’s affect with illusionism. Thus, the St. Lawrence Altarpiece’s strong multivalent appeal – spiritual, intellectual, visual, and artistic – would have found favor with humanist viewers concerned with Reform challenges to sacred art’s established primacy in worship. A survey of Van Heemskerck’s works from the mid-to-late 1540s reveals his continued development of methods for broadcasting antiquity’s edifying potential via sophisticated pictorial rhetorical turns. In particular, his Caritas of c. 1545 [fig. 8.2], his second painting of St. Luke Portraying the Virgin [fig. 6.18] of the same period, and his print of Heliodorus Driven from the Temple of 1549 [fig. 8.3] stand as touchstones. While their status as antiquarian images of the 1540s may at first seem to distance them from the concerns of the image debate, neither their conspicuously antique affects nor their timing should disqualify them from consideration within Reform contexts. Collectively, these three works are more than rich enough in content to provide an index of Van Heemskerck’s capacity for devising imagery that anticipated a range of attitudes towards the image debate. Caritas, for example, is a painting so rife with sacred references and pictorial allusions relatable to reform issues that one must inevitably – and thus finally – receive it as an essay on art’s rich capacity for instruction on sacred matters.22 It is likely that Van

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figure 8.2 Maarten van Heemskerck, Caritas, c. 1545, Inventory number GG2683, oil on panel, 715 × 365 mm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna

Heemskerck painted the panel for Charles de Croÿ, Bishop of Tournai (b. 1506–d. 1564, r. 1524–64).23 With its abundant referentiality, its appeals to memory and intellection, Caritas is like Van Heemskerck’s inventions we discussed in chapter 6, most suitable for a studiolo or kunstkammer environment. De Croÿ was in the process of building a new chateau at the time when Van Heemskerck made the painting; such a setting seems most appropriate for the painting. De Croÿ’s chateau was to be in Moorsel, a small Brabantine village that he likely chose for strategic reasons if not for mere convenience. Moorsel is near Brussels and Leuven, and roughly equidistant from the Catholic strongholds of Tournai, Ghent, and Antwerp. Caritas would have constituted a personal means for de Croÿ to revisit and reaffirm his earliest ecclesiastical education and lineage. In his youth,

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he studied at the University of Leuven. There, he learned under the tutelage of Martin Luther’s famous opponent, master inquisitor, Jacobus Latomus (b. c. 1475–d. 1544). Among the issues over which Latomus and Luther disputed publicly was the status of the virtue of Charity. Luther was a proponent of sola fide, the notion that one could achieve salvation only through faith. Latomus, on the other hand, championed Charity, good works, as the means to salvation.24 Latomus died in the mid-1540s, at the same historical moment when de Croÿ had begun the construction of his chateau. Thus, the very choice of Caritas as a subject for a painting would have resonated for its audience, with personal memories for de Croÿ and more current refractions for his associates, guests to his chateau. Even before considering the painting’s finer points, viewers might have drawn significance from Van Heemskerck’s treatment of scale, which suggests a biblical passage that was then current in Christian polemics. The extant panel personifying the virtue of Charity was originally the largest, central painting of a small triptych, flanked by smaller wings containing images of Fides and Spes (left and right, respectively).25 The painting thus embodies St. Paul’s seminal statement on charity in his first letter to the Corinthians: “Now abideth faith, hope, and charity, but the greatest of these is charity.”26 Thus, Van Heemskerck has scaled the triptych’s panels according to Paul’s famous privileging of Charity. The painting would have provided a forthright invitation for further examination as a means for mediating the reform debate’s key talking points. Other details in the triptych’s presentation of form and content are no less rich in references to issues at the center of the image debate, matters that a Catholic Bishop in the Low Countries was duty bound to consider during the tumultuous era of reform at mid-century. In keeping with most portrayals of the virtue, Van Heemskerck depicted a woman nurturing toddlers, many of which climb on her lap and play beneath and behind her robe.27 However, unique among contemporary portrayals of Caritas is his pointed deployment of his technical mastery of paint’s illusionistic qualities. With his ability to imitate surface textures with convincing Eyckian realism, Van Heemskerck portrayed the central panel’s personification of Charity as if she is a sculpture made of marble.28 Several details enlivening the figures to appear as if they are on the verge of animation further distinguish Van Heemskerck’s portrayal of Charity. Thus, as sacred art animating an antiquity, the painting embodies two of the chief concerns of image debate opponents: sacred art’s relation

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to antique idols, and their perceived function as vessels for the sacred figure portrayed. The Caritas’s compositional aspect bears copious references to other sculptures, thus underscoring the painting’s status as an argument for the instructive potential of sacred pictures. The main figure reads as a veritable agglomeration of sculptures from antiquity and after the antique. Knowledgeable viewers – especially the overlapping circles of humanists, liefhebbers, and cognoscenti to whom Van Heemskerck’s art was particularly appealing – would have doubtless recognized the rich authenticity in Caritas’s status as a sculptural invention. The Casa Sassi Apollo, which we know Van Heemskerck drew [see fig. 6.19 and cat. no. 68], appears to have been the most important source for the panel’s main figure. Van Heemskerck has maintained the antique source’s braids, which knot a bun at the crown of her head. The Apollo and Caritas wear the same garment, gathered just below the breast by a knotted drawstring; the legs of both the Apollo and Caritas splay asymmetrically in something like a seated contrapposto. The highly referential figure of Caritas would have also reminded Van Heemskerck’s knowledgeable audience of Michelangelo’s Virgin and Child sculptures. In particular Van Heemskerck’s figure Charity would have invoked memories of the Bruges Madonna, which was in the Low Countries by 1506 and which Van Heemskerck must have seen.29 In the same pictorial moment that Caritas forced its audiences to consider what the portrayal of a Christian virtue based on an antiquity might signify, it is no less assertive in its suggestion of living presence. Several details bring Van Heemskerck’s figures virtually to life. A chaotic tangle of youthful exuberance, the seven children surrounding Caritas play in the unsettled manner of toddlers. The child on the virtue’s lap at left tugs at her garment. At right, his counterpart tries to climb her stomach. As his head turns to face the viewer, the flesh of his shoulders and neck gather and bunch, indicating that he looks back reflexively, not deliberately; he has become aware rather suddenly that we view him.30 At Caritas’s feet are three more children; one plays peek-a-boo with viewers from beneath the virtue’s garment; another plays with the first’s genitals; the third reclines, his right leg foreshortened and breaking the picture plane. Caritas herself also displays signs of animation. Van Heemskerck has posed both her arms to display her reflexes conspicuously; she uses both hands to shield the romping children from falling. Van Heemskerck also shows a lock of Caritas’s hair loosed from her bun, pointedly

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deviating from his antique source in the Sassi collection. This device, as if improvised, departs from the figure’s overall illusion of being composed of marble. The emphatically animate qualities shown by these apparently sculpted figures seem calculated to evoke the anti-image view that impressionable worshippers must be protected from confusing image and prototype. Van Heemskerck’s depiction of Caritas as an animated sculpture heightens the figure’s status as a potent, even confounding example of prosopopoeia. At the heart of the painting’s rhetoric is its broadcast of its own reach beyond simple personification. Via a conspicuous, multi-layered artifice, Van Heemskerck distinguishes Caritas from traditional sacred imagery; paint imitates stone hewn to resemble a figure, which in turn, embodies a concept. He has thus devised Caritas to put its audience at three removes from the notion portrayed, making the act of observant viewing a de facto meditation on sacred imagery’s function. Within the terms of the image debate, Caritas problematizes the reform critique of the relation between sacred art’s form, function, and content. Viewers of the piece can only have access to the idea portrayed before them through an understanding of the very notion of artifice’s role in conveying it to them. Thus, for its mid-sixteenth century viewers, Caritas embodied art’s ability to teach and therefore its preeminence for worship. With its personification of Charity as an antique sculpture on the verge of animation, the painting would have prompted a rich response from any viewer familiar with the terms of the image debate. Van Heemskerck’s second St. Luke [fig. 6.18], contemporaneous with Caritas, offers a more direct argument for the importance of antiquities in the making of spiritually enlightening sacred art. As we have seen, his second portrayal of the icon’s founding moment also appropriated and revised the sculpture of Apollo from the Casa Sassi collection, which provided the figural source for Caritas. Here, the strong echo of the Apollo appears in the figure of the Virgin Mary as she manifests before St. Luke, engrossed in the act of recording his iconic vision of her in the painting’s foreground. Since the sculpture also appears in the painting’s background, viewers can easily recognize the Apollo’s echo in Mary’s pose, clothing, and braided hair. As a portrayal of the patron saint’s vision before antiquities, the St. Luke mounts a strong argument for the merits of collecting and preserving art as a means for the perpetuation of sacred memory, and the invention of sacred artworks. It embodies the elision of the icon and the artful in Belting’s “age of art.” Some of Van Heemskerck’s prints that Coornhert engraved, dating to the earliest days of their campaign on the print collecting

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market of the late 1540s, also contain appeals to broad audiences of mid-century viewers concerned with Reform issues and the image debate in particular. Comparable to Caritas’s status as a discursive prompt appealing to a range of viewing proclivities, these prints refract Reform issues while inviting interrogation and resisting closure. We find a prime example of Van Heemskerck’s developing interrogative mode in the subtle but pointed sacred pictorial rhetoric he fashioned for the print, Heliodorus Driven from the Temple [fig. 8.3].31 Published in 1549, the print would have appealed to a mixed northern European audience, viewers entangled in a complex set of relations to Habsburg and Vatican power. This large scale, double-sheeted print is not merely “reproductive” of the Vatican’s portrayal of 2 Maccabees chapter 3, the Expulsion of Heliodorus by Raphael.32 Rather, Van Heemskerck’s print revises its Vatican prototype. Raphael’s painting – a one-of-a-kind image, only viewable in a privileged space within the Vatican complex – asserts the papacy’s super-temporal omnipotence.33 By contrast, Van Heemskerck’s revision of the painting – mass-produced and widely circulated in a

figure 8.3 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Heliodorus Driven from the Temple, Object number 1549, RP-P-1965-788, two plates, 36.7 × 27.1 cm. (left plate): 36.6 × 27.0 cm. (right plate), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Reform charged environment – catechized the Reform suspicion of images and provided a platform for interrogating the Vatican’s artistic, political, and exegetical authority in the North. Beneath the lip of the revised composition’s foregrounded platform, we read Van Heemskerck’s name and the chapter and verse portrayed inscribed to cross over both sheets of the print: “Martinus Heemskerc • In • 2 • mach • 3 •.”34 With this, the print’s sole textual content, Van Heemskerck boldly declares himself as its inventor. Putting the finest point on the print’s status as his own creation, Van Heemskerck has provided no textual mention whatsoever of Raphael. This is an especially incisive gesture if we follow Michael Schwartz’s convincing assertion that Raphael’s audience understood the Vatican Heliodorus as “pivotal […] in the Renaissance emergence of painter as artist – as the human agent essentially responsible for the visualization of religious themes.”35 Examining Van Heemskerck’s print alongside its painted prototype reveals the considerable liberties he took in translating the image from fresco to print. However, it also reveals the persistence of Raphael’s composition, even in many of its details. The print simultaneously achieves fidelity to its prototype and departure from it so deftly, so thoroughly, that its revisions are clearly the product of considerable deliberations and must have been among its most important devices for generating meaning. Though he composed within a rectangle rather than a lunette, Van Heemskerck relied on Raphael’s architectural and figural framework. He retained Raphael’s monumental setting: a grand Temple of Jerusalem interior departing from traditional Temple depictions.36 A central vanishing point and the Temple’s massive piers order the narrative, dividing the space into vertical thirds. In the central third’s deepest background, Onias kneels before the altar. He prays for the divine thwarting of Heliodorus’s attempt to carry out King Seleucus’s order to steal the Temple’s riches. Both painting and print show a cluster of figures in the left foreground; the women and children who are the beneficiaries of the treasury clamor at the sight of the dramatic action in the right foreground, Heliodorus’s expulsion. Heliodorus lunges. Recoiling from three divine avengers, he lays prone, poised to fall out of the frame. The treasury’s riches lie strewn before him. Van Heemskerck also retained enough of the attitudes and poses of Raphael’s figures to sustain the viewer’s memory of the painting’s details. In the group at left, both images share the prominent figure of the kneeling woman who twists, arms outstretched in a reflexive “cognizance of divine matters,” in the words of Michael

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Schwartz.37 At right, painting and print feature a horse rearing over a Heliodorus figure derived from two of antiquity’s hallmark sculptures: the Dying Gallic Trumpeter’s pose and, in Van Heemskerck’s example, Laocoön’s despairing gestures. Van Heemskerck has even maintained the upraised arms of a figure behind the melee around Heliodorus. In Raphael’s composition, this figure absconds with the Temple’s strongbox. But Van Heemskerck has transformed him into one of the avenging angels who fends off Heliodorus’s attendants. Other smaller similarities – for example, in both images, Onias faces right, opposite a foreshortened menorah and bier – give way to Van Heemskerck’s revisions, woven into Raphael’s compositional framework. Gone are Raphael’s smooth surfaces and empty spaces, the taut clarity that inspired Sydney Freedberg’s observation of the painting’s “swiftly consummated action.”38 In their place is a clutter of minutiae: Onias’s decorative papal vestments, the bier’s clawed feet, coffering, fluting, Van Heemskerck’s exaggerated drapery folds and muscles. Cacophony penetrates Van Heemskerck’s print. A developing awareness of such details begins the process of distinguishing Van Heemskerck’s print from its prototype. Enumerating Van Heemskerck’s revisions of greater substance, however, evinces the print’s provocative nature. Among the print’s key alterations: Onias appear closer to the picture plane in Van Heemskerck’s print than in Raphael’s fresco, as do the altar and menorah before him. Heeemskerck has also covered the sky beyond the barrel vaulting of Raphael’s Temple with a lunette displaying Moses bearing the Tablets of Law. Raphael’s burnished arches and engaged columns give way to fluted pilasters and coffering, making the Temple resemble the setting of Raphael’s School of Athens and the interior of the new St. Peter’s.39 Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the unfinished church reveal that its central piers and vaults with pilasters and coffering are like the ones he designed for this print [cat. nos. 42 and 43]. Conspicuous changes to the figures also alter content. Van Heemskerck has traded Onias’s skullcap for a miter. His portrayal of the scuffle around Heliodorus at foreground right contains fewer figures than Raphael’s. However, this figure group emits more visual clutter. Smoke billows around the rearing horse and the avenging angels, announcing their arrival in a mystical visual language more in keeping with the biblical description of them as a “great apparition.”40 Moreover, this group of figures acts out their part in the narrative from a platform that does not appear in Raphael’s example. With this addition, Van Heemskerck has eliminated Raphael’s elegant symmetry: the group at left is further from the picture plane than it appears in

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Raphael’s painting; the group at right advances on the picture plane more aggressively; both groups crowd the composition’s center. However, no revision to the Raphael prototype is more pointed than Van Heemskerck’s elimination of Raphael’s portrayal of Julius II. In the Vatican painting, Julius famously appears at lower left on a sedan.41 The only figures on the left in Van Heemskerck’s print as prominent as Julius and his retinue are two hooded figures leaning on the Temple’s left column, variations on figures in the right background of the Raphael workshop’s Donation of Constantine.42 Neither sees Heliodorus’s expulsion. Their lack of vision for the events before them contrasts with Raphael’s portrayal of Julius, at once majestic and engrossed, gazing piercingly over the action before him, leaning subtly forward as if resisting a reflex to rise and participate. One reason for Julius’s absence is surely the passage of time; by 1549, it would have been inappropriate to issue a print portraying a Pope who died in 1513 unless the print in question aspired to a purely reproductive function, which we have seen is not the case with Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus. The print updates the painting. We therefore must pursue a line of inquiry resembling the one that forms the basis for chapter 7’s exploration of Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum: what circumstances in Van Heemskerck’s and Coornhert’s milieu would have invited them to devise such a print at this particular time? Further, how would northern audiences have read Heemskerk’s Heliodorus? It is tempting to conclude that he devised the print to exploit the growing local desire for Italianate or “Romanist” imagery while broadcasting his mastery of antiquity and Raphael’s important Vatican works.43 The print is thus notable for its anticipation of the same market that Hieronymus Cock pursued with prints after Raphael and Bronzino.44 However, while this art-driven explanation of Heliodorus is not entirely incorrect, it risks circularity in its reasoning. This is to say that the notion of Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus as an emulation of Raphael’s painting aggrandizes its prototype, making of artistic manner both means and end. Given the development into the late 1540s of Europe’s growing transalpine religious and political unrest, artistic emulation does not adequately explain the Heliodorus print’s details.45 It is unlikely that a print bearing significant revisions of a Vatican painting would have provoked discussions of art alone. Considering Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus in context reveals a more felicitous production than we might expect of a print altering a painting that was already nearly forty years old by 1549, conceived and executed for a powerful pontifical milieu whose time had

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passed. Debates over canonicity and tensions resulting from the assertion of Habsburg-Vatican authority in the north were coming to a head at the very moment Van Heemskerck devised his Heliodorus print. In his Wittenberg Bible, Martin Luther had deemed apocryphal the books from the Septuagint that appeared only in Koine Greek, not in Hebrew.46 Luther’s apocrypha contained all three books of Maccabees including the Heliodorus episode. Rather than eschewing them entirely, Luther sequenced them between his Old and New Testaments with the prefatory assessment that they were “not equal to the Holy Scriptures […] [but] profitable and good to read.”47 His writings from the period, however, reveal his exceedingly dim view of 2 Maccabees in particular, which he remarked should be “thrown out.”48 With the convening of the Council of Trent in 1546, not long after Luther’s death, the Vatican responded: without even mentioning Luther, the Council confirmed the canonical status of all the books of the Septuagint, including Maccabees.49 In 1549, tensions gained precipitously between the HabsburgVatican alliance and the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of rebellious Saxon princes of Reform leanings. In the aftermath of the Battle of Mühlberg of 1547, both sides reached an unsatisfying diplomatic compromise called the Augsburg Interim.50 Authored in 1548 and endorsed by Paul III Farnese in August of 1549, the Interim codified episcopal authority in Saxony. It required ultramontane bishops to concede marriage to Lutheran priests. However, it also enumerated their enforcement of the Vatican’s main tenets.51 These intertwined political and scriptural conflicts make crucial Coornhert’s likely status as a collaborator on Heliodorus and his status as a nascent religious critic at the time of its publication.52 In his mature phase, Coornhert advocated tolerance. Although Carl Stridbeck’s location of Coornhert at the center of a “circle of political and religious radical humanists” is somewhat over played, Coornhert did envision an “invisible church,” or a “true church,” comprised of the spiritually aligned souls in every denomination, not the Catholic Church alone.53 He was therefore frequently at loggerheads with both Vatican loyalists and Reformers.54 Neither Van Heemskerck nor Coornhert ever renounced their Catholicism. And although Coornhert saw the Catholic Church as the only one with divine attestation, he was vocal against religious tyranny from any quarter. Like Reformers, Coornhert lamented Vatican corruption. However, he also argued with equal ardor that the Reform movement had hardened to the point of intolerance.55 On freedom of conscience he famously – and rather controversially – articulated sixteen spiritual

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transgressions committed by both Catholics and Protestants.56 Likewise, his rejection of dogma in favor of humanist inquiry tempered his supremely un-Catholic acceptance of sola scriptura, which excluded the apocrypha.57 Thus, although Coornhert had yet to issue any of his most important tracts when he engraved Heliodorus, the print’s presentation of a scene from a book deemed apocryphal on the one hand and canonical on the other accords with his ideology of tolerant discourse. Adherents to either side in the conflict between the Vatican and Reformers and the debate over the apocrypha would have found in Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus a topical discursive prompt. We trace such historically progressive forbearance to Coornhert’s interest Ciceronian thinking.58 The venerated Roman philosopher-statesman extolled the intellectual enrichment in thoughtful, reasoned debate among friends holding opposing views. Crucial for understanding the Heliodorus print is our recognition of its core mechanism: thrusting Raphael’s Vatican concetto into open discourse in an ultramontane image-debate context. Its status as a recontextualized compendium of motifs from antiquity and the art of Raphael, proclaiming Van Heemskerck as its inventor is clear; as such, the Heliodorus print consummately attests to Van Heemskerck’s inheritance and revision of artistic authority. Moreover, as we now can see, it anticipates the claims he made for himself in Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum. However, we locate the Heliodorus print’s broader rhetorical thrust in its status as an image appropriated from its Vatican context and inserted into a fraught milieu, a print directed towards an audience comprised of those who contested Vatican authority as well as those who affirmed it. Thus, as an image of an episode from a contested text, the print also elicits discourse on the dual exegetical functions the Heliodorus episode had accrued up to that point: to proclaim Vatican authority on the one hand and to exemplify the requisite purification of the Temple (viz., the Church) on the other. Thus, in the context of the image debate, the Heliodorus’s usefulness in prompting discourse on topical issues affirms the authority of the image in the age of art. Close readings of Van Heemskerck’s imagery after the antique during the years after his Roman sojourn and before the beeldenstorm reveal his investment in the rhetoric of the image, its instructive capacity. As we have seen, for example, Van Heemskerck’s second St. Luke Painting the Virgin [fig. 6.18] broadcasts the centrality of collecting, preserving, and studying antiquities for sacred artistic vision. Other of his paintings and prints from the 1540s and 50s deepen our understanding of his subtle response to image debate

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figure 8.4 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Self-Portrait Frontispiece,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4109, ink on paper, 142 × 200 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

conditions. These works thus embody the virtue of the image. However, they rarely do so without at least invoking, if not provoking, those who thought of all sacred images as de facto temptations to idol worship requiring erasure from sacred environments. In the 1560s, tension around reform issues and the image debate increased to the breaking point and open war percolated in the wake of the beeldenstorm. Iconoclasts left sacred art scattered on Netherlandish streets and church floors, fragmented like the antiquities Van Heemskerck drew in the 1530s. Van Heemskerck’s pictorial rhetoric sharpened in response. He began to deploy the ruin as a cautionary image.

1569: The Rhetoric of Ruination

In 1569, Maarten Van Heemskerck once again deployed ruin imagery to forthrightly mark the consummation of his artistic life. His

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self-fashioning is the key to understanding the prints he composed in response to his culminating career, the beeldenstorm of 1566, and the start of the conflict that would come to be known as the Eighty Years War. The intense portrayal of calamitous discord in Van Heemskerck’s “Destruction of Ai and the Stoning of Achan” [fig. 8.5], the eighth print of his Clades Judaeae Gentis series of prints from 1569, stands as a vivid example of the mode of picturing he devised at this confluence of conditions.59 It also provides a point of entry for our exploration of Van Heemskerck’s deft end-of-career conflation of his mastery of multiple forms of pictorial memory: antiquity, the ruin, history, sacred art, and visual exegesis. Its depiction of copious ruination in progress is exceptional even for his ruin-laden oeuvre. The print portrays the Old Testament hero Joshua’s divinely sanctioned ambush of the Canaanite stronghold of Ai and the stoning to death of Achan, the Israelite whose thievery had previously resulted in the punishment of his people.60 At left, half of a semicircular temple featuring an interior based on Rome’s Pantheon tumbles into the composition’s middle ground. Further left, in mid-plunge, the temple’s nearest bay falls out of the print’s frame. The right half of the composition features monumental rusticated masonry and substructures collapsing. Were these buildings portrayed as intact and unspoiled instead of falling, they would nonetheless appear as functionally impossible, architecturally cacophonous mishmashes. Viewers might be tempted to read such a feature as a signal that Ai was predestined to ruin, as its name suggests.61 The print’s portrayal of extreme commotion appeals to more than just the viewer’s sense of sight. The tumult is graphic enough to prompt sensitive, meditative viewers to imagine the earth shaking with the landing of each massive peer. Plumes of smoke and flames billow out of the frame, completely obscuring the sky behind them, evoking the smell of the burning city. In the foreground of the composition, Joshua’s men stone Achan, inviting viewers to imagine the nightmarish sound of bloodthirsty screams and wails of pain. The ruins dwarf these figures whose diminutive scale and legion numbers are comparable to the swirl of troops in Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Issus, thus enhancing the print’s epochal overtones. And yet, without doubt, the print’s portrayal of lawlessness and violence would have had special resonance for Van Heemskerck’s post-beeldenstorm Netherlandish audiences, who witnessed comparable calamities in their own time. The image’s suggestion of the present’s connectedness to the past, even the full collapse of vast temporal expanses onto one another, rendered it universal, interpretatively open. As we have seen, these

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figure 8.5 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Destruction of Ai and the Stoning of Achan,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4116, ink on paper, 140 × 201 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

features were hallmarks of Van Heemskerck’s invented ruinscapes, his self-portraiture, and his sacred art. Thus, we find in the Clades Judaeae Gentis yet another reflexive moment in Van Heemskerck’s career, wherein he put his identity at the forefront of his art’s generation of meaning according to the devices he had developed so determinedly for decades. Van Heemskerck’s depiction of Ai’s ruination ostensibly constitutes a visual ekphrasis of verses 19–20 of Joshua’s 8th chapter. The textual source simply states that the Old Testament hero’s men ambushed the royal Canaanite stronghold.62 However, Van Heemskerck’s choice to show such extensive destruction – so many falling buildings, so much smoke and fire – also invokes Joshua 8:28, which describes the narrative’s denouement in a retrospective voice: “Joshua burned Ai and made it forever a heap of ruins.”63 Van Heemskerck, the artist whose art had for decades proclaimed the ruin as one of his greatest specialties, must have viewed this passage as license to deploy his pictorial prowess in composing portrayals of

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abundant wreckage. Notable, however, is this print’s contrast with the Roman drawings and the prints dating back to the late 1540s and early 1550s that mark his first forays into the realm of invented ruinscapes; those images feature the fragmented remains of the ancient past in a relative stasis, overgrown with vegetation, their moments of destruction and collapse long passed. This print’s portrayal of ruination in medias res, on the other hand, distinguishes it from the ruin imagery he had typically produced up to this point in his career, giving the ruin a new, more immediate vitality that was appropriate for the dire conditions in the Netherlands during the late 1560s. “The Destruction of Ai and the Stoning of Achan” is but one among many images that Van Heemskerck fashioned in 1569 refracting post-beeldenstorm tensions via ekphrastic portrayals of cataclysm and destruction. The Clades series, engraved by Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert’s pupil, Philips Galle, contains twenty-two prints. All twenty-one of its narrative images portray ruins, if not the making of them. This is even true of the series’ frontispiece [fig. 8.4], the series’ keystone image, Van Heemskerck’s return to self-portraiture via the ruin. Similarly, five of the eight scenes belonging to the series King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, which also appeared in 1569, contain at least some ruin imagery [e.g., figs. 8.6 and 7].64 Those prints chronicle the Old Testament King Josiah’s efforts to purge ancient temples of their idols. The series features Van Heemskerck’s famous depiction of the “Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom,” [fig. 8.6] an image that has drawn considerable scholarly scrutiny for its vivid portrayal of temple desecration, even prompting David Freedberg to suggest that it was the source for Frans Hogenberg’s allegedly journalistic, documentarian portrayal of the beeldenstorm. Like the graphic images in the Clades prints, the Josiah series’ content surely also appeared to be timely and topical to Van Heemskerck’s audiences concerned with the terms of the image debate, the beeldenstorm, and the subsequent open conflict with the Spanish crown. Van Heemskerck’s Fall of Babylon [fig. 8.9], also a product of 1569, portrays the scene of the prosperous ancient Near Eastern city’s destruction, which the book of Revelations elaborates over 25 verses.65 With their emphases on images of ruins in the making, Van Heemskerck’s post-beeldenstorm productions prompt us to ask: as the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries found themselves embroiled in an increasingly violent conflict with the HabsburgVatican alliance, what might the liefhebbers among his viewers have said to one another before selections of such graphic biblical

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figure 8.6 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom,” King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, 1569, Object number RP-P-OB-5940, ink on paper, 203 × 252 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

imagery? Further afield, how did Van Heemskerck’s broader northern European audience – those less directly or not at all involved in the conflict – receive these prints? Finally, how did the fashioning of these images by a famous Netherlandish pictor doctus, an artist renowned for having been to Rome and making art after the antique, affect their reception? As we have seen, even Van Heemskerck’s print of Heliodorus Driven from the Temple – an image that at first glance appears to be nothing more than an homage to Raphael, not especially polemical or politically charged – must have elicited topical discourse among those who were attentive enough to think through the full religious and political implications in its details. By the same token, while viewing and discussing Van Heemskerck’s ruinous prints, it seems highly unlikely that concerned viewers would have found in the practical and formal matters of image-making an insular or even singular line of inquiry unrelated to current events. As scholars have continued to grapple with the task of interpreting these images, intrinsically and in context, they have laid the foundation for our understanding of them. An ongoing point of fixation and difficulty has been the notion that they might manifest Van Heemskerck’s personal opinion of the image debate. David Freedberg has noted the elusiveness of Van Heemskerck’s view of the matter in specific images showing idol destruction.66 According to Freedberg, one could easily see some of the prints in the Clades Judaeae Gentis series as broadcasts of the artist’s criticism of iconoclasm.67 Conversely, Freedberg saw in Van Heemskerck’s depiction of “The Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom” [fig. 8.6] an image that only could have won favor with anti-image viewers; Josiah’s men wreak havoc with such destructive

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energy that the king’s historical status as a righteous cleanser of sacred spaces – and thus, his status as an anti-image exemplar – confirms the print’s unequivocal vindication of the anti-image point of view. In perhaps the most extreme interpretation of the Josiah prints, Horst Bredekamp has argued that the series broadcasts Van Heemskerck’s vigorously anti-papal stance.68 Recently, David Kunzle perpetuated this line of thinking, insisting that Van Heemskerck’s prints of 1569 confirm that by then, he and Coornhert had turned straightforwardly sympathetic to iconoclasm.69 We find further support for the notion of Van Heemskerck’s anti-Papal stance beyond the immediate scope of the late 1560s. Ernst Gombrich speculated on the presence of anti-papal overtones in Van Heemskerck’s painting, Roman Panorama with the Good Samaritan of 1550.70 Therein, the Pontiff and his retinue fixate on the unearthing of an ancient sculpture. He is distracted, oblivious to the plight of the robbery victim to whom the Good Samaritan attends. The painting’s suggestion, Gombrich argues, is one that plays directly into Reform thinking; the Papacy’s interest in pagan antiquities outstripped its dutifulness, its desire to perform good works, the very acts that its own rhetoric proclaimed as the key to salvation. Perhaps Gombrich’s observation encourages us to see anti-papal sentiments in the Heliodorus print, where Van Heemskerck has substituted Raphael’s riveted Julius for disinterested figures. Perhaps his interpretation further buttresses the scholarly notion that 1569’s images of temple destruction assert Van Heemskerck’s sympathy for the anti-image view. However, such arguments must concede that Van Heemskerck denies anti-papal interpretations with his choice to dress the Heliodorus narrative’s savior of the temple, Onias, in papal vestments. More broadly speaking, Van Heemskerck’s output from the 1540s–60s suggests a scenario of much greater complexity; if he harbored any genuinely felt antipapal or anti-image opinions, they did not stop him from producing sacred paintings for churches throughout the 1550s and 60s, including an emotionally evocative Lamentation of 1566.71 Conversely, if he was incapable of thinking critically about the Habsburg-Vatican alliance’s actions in the wake of the beeldenstorm, he would not have been able to devise images like those provoking the reasonable supposition of their broadcast of an anti-image view by Freedberg, Bredekamp, Kunzle. Seen in this light, viewing the Josiah series as Freedberg suggested and Bredekamp elaborated – as intrinsically containing a definitive anti-papal opinion – limits our understanding of the ways in the sequence of prints invites a range of viewing responses from viewers on all sides of the image debate to the

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tempered, tolerant humanists in the Van Heemskerck-Coornhert circle that included their engraver and publisher, Phillips Galle. The prints we examine here contain no explicit or exclusive prohibitions to the anti-image point of view, no patent refusals of the desire to destroy the beautiful things in churches. They accord well with Freedberg’s observation that some images from this period appear to revel in such wanton destruction. However, there can also be no doubt that those opposing the ideology that precipitated the beeldenstorm would find horror in such depictions of temple desecration. Such viewers could argue that the very same choice to portray destructive behavior so graphically provides an anti-exemplum, an image arguing against the validity of the extreme anti-image stance, simply by invoking Christ’s most famous advocacy of restraint, “all who take the sword, will perish by the sword.”72 This was precisely the danger Netherlanders faced in 1569. Further, one could justifiably read the final print of the Josiah series [fig. 8.8] as a suggestion of power’s potential to corrupt; that print depicts the denouement of Josiah’s purging rampage. Josiah, the anti-image hero, celebrates Passover in a setting even more enriched and opulent than those he destroyed, conspicuously comparable in structure to the previous print’s Temple of Samaria [fig. 8.7]. Freedberg’s identification of opposing views among some of Van Heemskerck’s prints suggests a more plausible interpretive approach than the notion that they propagate a singular viewpoint, an anti-image opinion in particular. Coornhert’s espousals of religious tolerance and thoughtful debate begin to suggest the misguided nature of the notion that the anti-image view finds exclusive expression in these post-beeldenstorm prints. One can easily imagine Van figure 8.7 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Destruction of the Temple of Samaria,” King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, 1569, Object number RP-P-1890-A-15414, 194 × 253 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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figure 8.8 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Josiah Celebrating Passover,” King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, 1569, Accession number, 65.587.8, ink on paper, 195 × 250 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Heemskerck’s viewers of varying proclivities embroiled in the heat of the moment, voicing a range of interpretations that resemble the differing scholarly responses we have rehearsed above. In such a context, we should be hesitant to equate a critique of HabsburgVatican oppression with a complete turn towards Lutheranism or Calvinism. And where we see the expression of anti-papal sentiment, we should not interpret it as a de facto endorsement of the anti-image view. Moreover, it behooves us to remember that print’s capacity for reaching a multitude of viewers – undoubtedly of varying opinions – encouraged artists to devise images that made broad appeals. And while prints circulating amongst a varied public did not function in the same capacity as the sacred art in churches, the notion that Van Heemskerck would have chosen to deploy artfully crafted images bearing sacred content to argue for the destruction of sacred images approaches oxymoronic forms of reasoning. We more readily suspect that Van Heemskerck’s circulation of prints portraying ruination and temple destruction in a hyperbolic mode bordering on the lurid performed an instructive function. Van Heemskerck’s large-scale, stand-alone print, The Fall of Babylon [fig. 8.9], provides another instructive example of his ability to appeal to multiple forms of visual memory and multiple positions embroiled in the Netherlands’ conflict of the late 1560s. The artist has chosen to keep the portrayal of ruins and ruination to a minimum in favor of a panorama with details clearly meant to suggest an invented city akin to the one we explored in Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22]. In Van Heemskerck’s vision, the biblical Babylon shares some topographical features with Rome and others with the cities of northern Europe. For example, at left, a succession of arcaded bridges cross a

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figure 8.9 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Fall of Babylon, 1569, Accession number: 65.587.8, ink on paper, 238 × 413 mm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York figure 8.10 Hartman Schedel “Destruction of Babylon,” Weltchronik, 1493, Call No. D17.S34 1493b, f. 25, 65, ink on paper, USC Libraries, Special Collections

foreshortened river, similar to the view of Rome’s Tiber river afforded from many vantage points, including from the Aventine Hill, where Van Heemskerck’s drew a panorama portraying the Ripa Grande and points north [cat. no. 56]. The exterior of the tower at the city’s center bears a spiral not unlike those on the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, and sculptural niches like so many Van Heemskerck had seen in Rome. Northern European features of this invented Babylon include houses on the banks of the river with crow-stepped gables, an unmistakable feature of Dutch domestic architecture. His use of

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such a motif to portray the destruction of Babylon would have been familiar to viewers who could remember the image portraying the same episode in the Weltchronik [fig. 8.10].73 While the print’s Roman overtones would have appealed to Reformers given the Papacy’s status in their eyes as the “Whore of Babylon,” Van Heemskerck’s multivalent portrayal of the city suggests that Rome and the Vatican are not the print’s exclusive objects of criticism. The print’s bridge at furthest right culminates in a triumphal arch that would remind many among Van Heemskerck’s viewers of Antwerp’s Gate of St. George, especially as portrayed by Pieter Bruegel in 1558.74 That construction after the antique, which had taken place in the 1550s, not long before the Babylon print’s publication, met with considerable controversy; the city’s bourgomaster embezzled labor and money from the project’s publicly funded coffers for the construction of his own estate on the outskirts of the city.75 Thus, those willing to look long enough and with an honest enough mind, would find among the print’s details undeniable reminders that even nearby locales could compare reasonably with Babylon, where an unseemly blend of greed, vanity, oppression, and neglect led to the fall of a glorious city. Recent scholarship on the Clades series, an essay co-written by Marco Folin and Monica Preti in particular, has elaborated the notion that the prints in question are like the art by Van Heemskerck that we have already surveyed in this chapter; they too are “polysemous,” resistant to closed, singular, exclusive interpretations.76 We should add, however, their interrogative function, their capacity to prompt curiosity, questions eliciting discourse comprised of various responses.77 Eleanor Saunders was the first to identify a pattern in the Clades series’ presentation of Old Testament scenes: repeated pairings of episodes of divine favor with the failures that followed them.78 In this scheme, “Lot and his Family Leaving Sodom” [fig. 8.11] precedes “Lot Making Love to His Daughters,” [fig. 8.12] and “Noah’s Sacrifice” precedes “The Drunkenness of Noah.” [fig. 8.13] Saunders also contextualized the series within the sociopolitical milieu of Van Heemskerck’s Haarlem of the late 1560s. However, she did not address with much depth the series’ most salient feature: the architecture’s prominence within the composition of each print. However, Merel Groentjes has offered a particularly edifying essay focusing on the significance of the ruinous scenery in the Clades. Groentjes locates the prints’ rhetorical leverage in an “innovatively used typology to argue for the exegetical authority of the visual arts.”79 Via a detailed exploration of the series’ architecture, Groentjes elaborates an analogy between the form – especially degree of ruination – and the

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narrative of each print. She builds on Saunders’s holistic findings to construe a “pattern of destruction” and reconstruction that accords with the Israelites’ understanding of divine favor. The ruination of architecture, Groentjes argues, provides God with the means for expressing his displeasure with the Jewish people. To further understand Van Heemskerck’s post-beeldenstorm ruin images, we locate him in the thick of a tumultuous local milieu. The Netherlandish conflict with the Habsburg-Vatican alliance provides a constitutive backdrop for both their conceptualization and reception. In the years leading up to their publication, Haarlem had become subject to forces that had increasingly frittered away at the freedoms of her citizens.80 The Vatican applied pressure first. In 1559, Pius IV Medici (r. 1559–1565) had invested Haarlem as the bishopric “Haarlemensis.” The city’s newfound prestige sparked a short-lived controversy over which of its churches should function as the seat of the new episcopate.81 The Vatican eventually gained the coveted St. Bavokerk. Haarlem’s main church, St. Bavo’s was not only among the most opulent churches in the Low Countries, but the one overlooking the city’s largest public square and grote markt. The church was uncontested in its status as the one most central to Haarlem’s spiritual life, but also its civic, public life. Management of the city’s central church gave the papacy a new vantage point for exercising more intensive scrutiny over activities in the city. Pointedly, in his Sacrosancta Romana bull of 1561, Pius placed financial restrictions on local officials who were accustomed to using the funds their churches generated as they saw fit. As the 1560s progressed, the Habsburg-Vatican alliance was increasingly at odds with nobles throughout the Low Countries. Relations between imperial authorities and Haarlem’s nobility were no less tense, not despite – but perhaps because of – the city’s status as a Catholic stronghold. In 1565, Phillip II’s attempts to enforce the edicts of the Council of Trent became a sticking point in his alliance with Netherlandish aristocrats who were Catholic in practice, but advocated religious tolerance at the very least. Haarlem did not fall victim to attacks when these tensions reached a violent crescendo in the summer of 1566. However, the city’s built environment was not free from contestation. In the autumn following the beeldenstorm, the weather was extremely poor. Members of Reformist consisteries were therefore unable to preach regularly in public. Consisteries were the local committees that navigated the Reform movement’s difficult course through its increasingly inflamed Netherlandish religious milieu. They were thus crucial for Reform-minded Christians,

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as was their practice known as haagpreken or public hedge-preaching, since they did not have churches of their own in which to meet. Sensing that these conditions might exacerbate an already tense situation, the Haarlem Corporation allowed the city’s local consistery to build a wooden church. The city’s nobility even contributed funds to the project, albeit in secret. On behalf of the Spanish Crown, the Duke of Alva, the so-called “Iron Duke,” responded to the unpleasant news that Haarlem’s highest officials had elected to exercise tolerance and encourage plurality in the face of Reform by forcing a confession from Haarlem’s head burgomaster, Jan van Zuren; Alva’s hope was to learn the names of the secret contributors to the wooden church-building fund. Van Zuren caved, which resulted in arrests. Alva stationed troops just outside of Haarlem and resolved that they remain there until the Corporation relented and destroyed the wooden church. While no armed conflict erupted, Haarlem officials did not dispatch of the ad hoc house of worship until the following spring.82 Van Heemskerck and members of his circle were close to the fire, so to speak. From the mid-1550s until the end of his life, Van Heemskerck served as a keerkmeester (or “church master”) of the St. Bavokerk.83 The implicit invasiveness in the Vatican’s financial constraints on the church was surely not lost on him, directly involved in the church’s affairs as he was. In this capacity, he also experienced first-hand the Vatican’s increased pressures on the intertwined sacred and secular entities, “Haarlemensis” the bishopric on the one hand, and Haarlem the corporate municipality on the other. In late spring of 1566, as the threat of the beeldenstorm loomed, he participated in the decision to close St. Bavokerk’s doors to protect its sacred works against the threat that iconoclasts might enter and defile them. Meanwhile, the States of Holland responded to the rising tensions between the provinces and the crown commissioned Junius to write an account of Holland’s ancient privileges: Batavia. The result was not consistently polemical in tone. However, Junius does decry “the Spaniards who had lost all their honor” in the conflict. It nonetheless received censure.84 Despite Coornhert’s status as Jan van Zuren’s trusted secretary, he was among those whom van Zuren identified – surely with great reluctance and regret – when Alva questioned him regarding the identities of those who aided in the construction of the wooden Reform church. Amidst these circumstances, we can easily see how contemporary unrest helps to explain Van Heemskerck’s relentless presentation of emphatically ruined architectural antiquities as well as his

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choice to exploit the immediacy in the portrayal of the ruination as it happened. The time and place of the conception of the prints was fraught oppression, violence, and authoritarian compromises to the religious freedoms of a community that was becoming increasingly diverse in its religious practices. The swift build towards war in the Low Countries during the 1560s caused a sustained direct threat to the Netherlandish urban fabric. As such, for Van Heemskerck’s viewers, these pictures of ruin and looted temples alluded to more than iconoclasm. They spoke with equal resonance to the pervasive instability of the period, likening historically significant catastrophic events to current conditions. Contemporaneous responses to these culture wars clarify matters further. Van Heemskerck’s images of violence were of a piece with the visual, literary, and even musical cultures of the time. Ruinous imagery occupied a central place in the Netherlands during the years immediately following the beeldenstorm. Popular songs and literature from the time deployed a voice that we can accurately describe as apocalyptic in tone. For example, a 1567 song described contemporary conditions by speaking of “wars, difficult times, floods [and]… the plague.” Some songs highlighted ruination more explicitly; one decried the presence of Spanish troops gathered, “in order to ruin this [Netherlandish] city.” In the same polemical spirit, a pamphlet addressing Spanish troops stated, “by your violence … the Netherlands are totally ruined … subjected to the tyranny of the Cardinal and his papists. You bring the … free Netherlands … into the greatest ruin.”85 We may thus view Van Heemskerck’s proliferation of ruinous imagery in the late 1560s as a visual analogue to these popular expressions. These prints are so emphatic in their display of the wreckage civilization because of anxiety over the threat posed to the Netherlandish built environment by Spanish and Papal policies. Together with the Netherlandish humanist perception of history and the Old Testament, pioneered by Coornhert himself, these circumstances help to explain the literary content of Van Heemskerck’s portrayals of destruction of 1569. Circulating Old Testament stories in response to contemporary events reflects Coornhert’s progressive approach to exegesis. In Coornhert’s vision, the Old Testament’s narratives, figures, and events could still function in a typological relation to New Testament content, as they had in the medieval tradition best exemplified in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. Coornhert, however, innovated exegetical tradition by exploiting the Old Testament’s ability to stand on its own, its narratives functioning as exempla, didactics offering morally edifying, universal lessons.

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Interpreted judiciously, these lessons could apply to the complex of contemporary conditions that Van Heemskerck’s post-beeldenstorm viewers navigated in their overlapping personal, spiritual, and civic lives.86 Thus, depending on viewing context and leanings, the meaning of a specific Old Testament narrative was fluid. This was doubtless the point of portraying of Old Testament stories of idol worship, temple destruction, and open violence for audiences experiencing those phenomena in previously stable loci. Such a pictorial strategy moreover renders secondary the notion of Van Heemskerck’s own opinions on the image debate, or their determining effect on his portrayal of content in any single image or over the course of an entire print series. While the search for Van Heemskerck’s personal opinion among his post-beeldenstorm images ultimately proves elusive, reading the Clades series in light of his identity as he crafted it – the pictor doctus who studied the ruins of Rome – is imperative to interpreting the series; it is a line of inquiry that Van Heemskerck himself implores his viewers to pursue. Out of the hundreds of print series’ Van Heemskerck devised, the Clades Judaeae Gentis is the only one to begin with his self-portrait [fig. 8.4]. And it indeed does impel us to ask why he invited his viewer to associate his identity – and his Roman sojourn – with the destruction of classical architecture in a series of prints portraying Old Testament episodes of shame. What of Van Heemskerck’s role as the designer of these prints, so prominently displayed in the frontispiece? We can read the unprecedented gesture in Van Heemskerck’s inclusion of a self-portrait at the beginning of the Clades Judaeae Gentis as visual evidence of his desire to present the series as a signature work. More than this, however, it expresses his wish to press the authority of his lifetime of experiences and knowledge into service as a means of persuading his viewers – many of whom were of no small consequence to European affairs – to consider thoughtfully the consequences of their current hostilities. Rome’s ruins continued to impress him as timeless universal prompts for thinking about the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual value of art.87 The manner in which he designed the Clades’ frontispiece suggests such multivalence. Like its earlier painted counterpart, the frontispiece cites the source of Van Heemskerck’s mastery of antiquity in his study of ruins. And as in the painted example, the frontispiece shows Van Heemskerck twice; a prominent portrait appears centrally, in the form of a portrait bust on the base of a fictive monument. He appears in the background, drawing the Eternal City’s ruinous monuments. The image’s

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two portraits correspond to two inscriptions. One appears on the base of the portrait bust and another on the monument’s socle. The inscription next to the portrait-bust calls Van Heemskerck “another Apelles,” from his own era, “the father of [the series’] inventions,” which it further says he “depicted from life.” The inscription on the marble slab introduces the series “in memory of the disasters of the Jewish people” and describes Roman ruins, “shown as observed,” as “examples of sins from the past … with the present … as well as … for the future.”88 The first inscription’s evocation of the Greek painter Apelles ranks Van Heemskerck with the ancients. Moreover, Ilja Veldman has pointed out that in the sixteenth century, it was common to call a painter a “second Apelles” as a way of establishing his general knowledge and worldliness.89 The smaller portrait of Van Heemskerck in the act of drawing the ruins and apparently discoursing with another figure also renders crucial the inclusion of the phrase “drawn from life.” The phrase does not indicate, as is often suggested, that the prints portray what a viewer would actually see in Rome. Rather, it signals to the reader that Van Heemskerck has been to Rome, that he has observed and drawn there, and has made these pictures out of those experiences. Thus, in combination with the print’s small image of Van Heemskerck drawing ruins, the inscription also suggests that doing so extended his knowledge beyond the pictorial; he has imbued his art with the wisdom and authority he gained at the feet of those instructive “examples from the past.” The actual Roman ruins performed their instructive function via the agency of the “second Apelles” who drew them, interpreted them, and invented instructive exempla, and anti-exempla as it were, out of them. Through his intimate, first-hand knowledge of the ruins, Van Heemskerck imbued the Clades ruinscapes with the power of authenticity. Thus, he must have perceived the necessity for highlighting his authorship of the series. The Clades’ frontispiece does more than suggest Van Heemskerck’s authority as the foundation for the instructive capacity of the series’ invented ruins. It elucidates the rhetorical import of the series’ backdrops in particular by framing viewing attention on them.90 It is likely due to the frontispiece’s emphatic focus on Van Heemskerck himself that scholars before Groentjes have not sought substantial links between the frontispiece and the prints that follow it. For instance, Saunders wrote that the image “hardly prepar[es] viewers for the violence that follows.”91 Its proliferation of ruins and a falling obelisk provides a strong suggestion otherwise. The frontispiece’s backdrop corresponds compositionally with the placement of the

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ruinous scenery in the backgrounds of the subsequent prints in the series. We can therefore also read the image of the smaller Van Heemskerck as a more specific form of visual instruction for how to read the series’ subsequent prints. With this small figure of himself, Van Heemskerck suggests our emulation of him, our need to scrutinize the backdrops as he portrays himself doing. That is where the smaller image of Van Heemskerck directs his gaze. It is also the object of his pictorial ruminations. The frontispiece thus shows its audience how Van Heemskerck gained his capacity to invent the images they are about to view – the genesis of the ruinous inventions in the backdrops that follow – and suggests that viewers can best understand them by doing as he did while he was in Rome: by looking closely at the ruins and pondering their profound significance. As the introductory image of the series, then, the frontispiece suggests a didactic function for the images in the series. figure 8.11 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Lot and his Family Leaving Sodom,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4113, ink on paper, 141 × 202 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

figure 8.12 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Lot Making Love to his Daughters,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4114, ink on paper, 141 × 201 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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figure 8.13

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Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Drunkenness of Noah,” Clades Judaeae Gentis, 1569, Object number RP-P-1880-A-4110, ink on paper, 139 × 201 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

As is to be expected, the content of the series’ subsequent backdrops confirms the Roman sojourn’s importance for their making; some of the buildings Van Heemskerck would have encountered in Rome are present in reconfigured-but-recognizable form. For example, as we have seen, the temple of Ai as Van Heemskerck depicted it in “The Destruction of Ai” [fig. 8.5] contains a Pantheon-like interior. In the print portraying the Chaldeans’ looting of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Pantheon’s coffered ceiling appears. Here, Van Heemskerck has conflated it with an ambulatory like the one he saw when he visited Santo Stefano Rotondo.92 Bramante’s spiral staircase in the Vatican provides an awkward, dematerializing setting for the “Adoration of the Magi.”93 We can also trace some of the architecture in the backdrops directly to extant sheets among Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. An arch reminiscent of Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16] appears in “Lot and His Family Leaving Sodom” [fig. 8.11].94 The structure serving as the backdrop in “The

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Drunkenness of Noah” [fig. 8.13] contains a variation on the ruins of the Temple dedicated to Minerva in the Forum Nervae, which Van Heemskerck drew [cat. no. 26].95 He even made use of his drawing of the exedra of Severus’s palace on the southwestern slope of the Palatine [cat. no. 12], a seemingly minor motif, hastily rendered. It appears reversed in the landscape behind “Lot Making Love to His Daughters” [fig. 8.12].96 Close comparison of the ruins surrounding the exedra in drawing and print reveals that Van Heemskerck has even maintained several parts of the ruined structures on either side of it in his composition of the print. Thus, while the frontispiece backdrop presents Van Heemskerck in the act of compiling knowledge, the Disasters backdrops confirm that knowledge through their display. The Clades backdrops also function more universally and timelessly, as an architectural vanitas that depends on Van Heemskerck’s authorship for the full force of its rhetorical impact. Any of the prints in the Clades series lead the reader to contemplate the consequences of ill-conceived human action via the evidence of its wrecked aftermath. With the urban fabric of the Netherlands under attack, Van Heemskerck was uniquely qualified to comment with his art. He had been to Rome right after the sack and had drawn the Eternal City’s ruins, timeless examples of human achievement and human error. He was also a highly visible authority in Haarlem’s ecclesiastical affairs and an authoritative elder. Thus, establishing links between conditions in Van Heemskerck’s immediate vicinity and the Clades backdrops inevitably returns us to their maker, Van Heemskerck himself. It is tempting to call them a nonverbal proclamation against Habsburg-Vatican oppression. However, in the time and place of their publication, via their choice of ruin motifs after the antique, these backdrops function with multiple meanings. There is no question that Van Heemskerck’s ruin imagery must have resonated viscerally with any and all members of his Netherlandish audience as timely and symptomatic of recent violence. However, their showcases of Roman grandeur in the process of ruin form a reminder of the potential hubris in any imperial ambition, a timeless universal vanitas. Clearly, this too would have resonated in the Netherlands during the late 1560s. Where the architecture collapses from its backdrop and crumbles into the foreground to play a lead role, images of temple destruction confront contemporary viewers at a time when distant powers tried to dictate religious practice, reformers were unable to prevent the destruction of their own temporary house of worship, and elsewhere wrought

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destruction on other houses of worship. Behind recurring themes of idol worship, the scenery of the Clades Judaeae Gentis alludes to this contemporary violence rather than advocate or condemn it. With the ruin, Europe’s pictorial lingua franca, which Van Heemskerck spoke with impressive fluency, the Clades suggests that civilization is fragile and easily ruined at a time when it must have seemed so to his Netherlandish compatriots. Presented as inventions resulting from artistic inquiry, they are an insistent reminder of the instructiveness of art, and that the art of the past is mute without the judicious interpretation of the artist. We thus regard Van Heemskerck’s ruinous images of 1569 as his consummation of numerous developing artistic, religious, and political circumstances, a final flowering of his career-long interest in the pictorial potency of the ruin and his evolving response to the image debate. Indeed, it is imperative that we read his images from this time in the variety of ways that Saunders, Freedberg, Bredekamp, Kunzle have, within the immediate context of the late 1560s, and the violent, changing conditions in the Habsburg Netherlands, and Haarlem in particular. We should also consider the intrinsic relation of their conspicuous displays of ruination to one another, as Groentjes has. Likewise, Folin and Preti’s assertion of their multivalence should seem clear to us given Van Heemskerck’s developing tendency towards the crafting of open works. However, situating the ruin-laden productions of 1569 more holistically, within the full implications of Van Heemskerck’s self-fashioning, reveals the depth of their status as exempla. This is to say, in addition to remembering Van Heemskerck’s continuing conceptualization of images via a multivalent mode that consistently argued for art’s instructive capacity, we must consider these images of ruination in light of the Roman journey’s impact on his artistry; the ruinous aspect of the prints themselves makes clear that even 35 years after he returned to Haarlem from the Eternal City, the Roman sojourn remained a crucial aspect of his historical and pictorial consciousness. Thus, the images can be about the present, the beeldenstorm, but they are also about how Van Heemskerck has conveyed them to his audience as events that are folded into a cyclical, historically vast, epochal expanse of time, broader in compass than the life span of any one individual. With his rhetoric of the ruin, Van Heemskerck broadcast himself as a most qualified and therefore important facilitator of discourse on the matters of nations and God, one who, although ephemeral, made art that transcended time via memory.

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After Van Heemskerck, After the Antique: A Continuum of Pictorial Memory

The year after his publication of the Clades Judaeae Gentis, Maarten van Heemskerck began work on one final magnum opus, his series of prints of 1572 entitled the Eight Wonders of the World.1 The series epitomizes several core aspects of his artistry as it had evolved over the course of his career, especially his inventiveness after the antique, his “millennial consciousness,” and his ambition. As I hope this book has shown, each was of the broadest compass he could possibly imagine, as each was a self-conscious pursuit of his. In the pictorial language with which Van Heemskerck’s audience must have been abundantly familiar by the early 1570s, the Eight Wonders series brings together the traditionally conceived seven wonders of the world: the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Pharos (or Lighthouse) of Alexandria, the Colossal Statue of Zeus in Olympia, The Colossus of Rhodes, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and the Great Walls of Babylon. The series’ eighth wonder is, unsurprisingly, Rome’s Colosseum [fig. 8.14], among the monuments Van Heemskerck drew most frequently if his extant oeuvre of Roman drawings is any indicator.2 In no example from the Wonders has Van Heemskerck relied on his drawings for direct or slavish quotations of motifs. Each print is a monument to his capacity for using his ample pictorial memory to invent, to create new wonders out of his imagination for ancient ones. His print of the Great Pyramids, for example [fig. 8.15], eschews the obvious solution to the problem of representing something he had never seen, opting instead for something more synthetic, more imaginative, and ultimately ekphrastic in relation to its object; rather than rely solely on his drawings of the Pyramid of Cestius [cat. nos. 53 and 57], he combined them with his drawings of Rome’s obelisks to compose the pyramids – among the tallest buildings in the world for roughly three millennia by Van Heemskerck’s lifetime – as “towering miracles” with “rising stairs,” in accordance with the print’s inscription, crafted by Hadrianus Junius. While the result is not true to the appearance of the megalithic structures in Giza, it is emblematic of the awe they evoked in the imaginations of many. Van Heemskerck’s addition of Rome’s Colosseum as an eighth wonder should appear to us as a flourish of self-fashioning; of course,

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figure 8.14 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Amphitheatrum,” The Eight Wonders of the World, 1572, Registration number 1875,0710.2822, ink on paper, 215 × 262 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London

figure 8.15 Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Pyramids of Egypt,” The Eight Wonders of the World, 1569 Object number RP-P-1904-3298, ink on paper, 211 × 257 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

we associate the building with him because he suggested so convincingly that we do so back in 1553. Thus, along with the Eight Wonders’ publication near the end of Van Heemskerck’s life, the Colosseum’s inclusion in the series imbues it with personalized overtones that it might not otherwise possess, the sense that the Eight Wonders witnesses Van Heemskerck’s self-conscious delivery of his own narrative full circle; in visualizing all of the world’s ancient wonders, he returned to the earliest of his inventions after the antique, endowing the Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World with a sense of completion; his monumental first postRoman magnum opus displayed some but not all of the ancient wonders. It should seem fitting then, that for his prints showing the traditional seven ancient wonders, Van Heemskerck has chosen to portray completely reconstituted antiquities, buildings no longer in

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ruin. They appear as constructions that are so pristine we can hardly even imagine their destruction. It should also seem fitting that the Colosseum itself is the one exception among these reconstructions. Van Heemskerck has composed image of the amphitheater to once again – and for one last time – flaunt the amphitheater’s ruined side; jagged edges and conspicuous tufts of vegetal onset form the building’s most distant silhouette. Thus, the Eight Wonders furthers Van Heemskerck’s continuing claims of antiquity’s timelessness and his own ephemeral role in perpetuating it. Subsequent years saw his posthumous reputation make good on those claims. Van Heemskerck’s nearly ceaseless interest in picturing antiquity and the ruin outlasted even him. After his death in 1574, many of his prints continued to enjoy circulation.3 If we search for examples of his art’s endurance in the century after his storied life was over, we find no shortage of examples. In addition to the continued use of the Roman drawings in Goltzius’s Haarlem circle, and later Pieter Saenredam, a Neapolitan writing cabinet in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (c. 1700) bears revisions of Van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V prints.4 The Wonders, moreover, enjoyed an especially rich afterlife. Seventeenth-century cartographer Willem Blaeu juxtaposed them, minus the Colosseum, with his world map, Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis (1635). They also served as the basis for Flemish tapestry designs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5 Even as the Netherlandish antique manner’s grip on visual culture in the Low Countries began to loosen in favor of the earthier style that the Bamboccianti and Rembrandt pioneered, we see the reverberations of Van Heemskerck’s importance. One imagines that Rembrandt, whose collection contained Van Heemskerck’s prints, had his Haarlem predecessor in mind when he declared that it was no longer necessary to go to Italy to learn to paint; there were enough antiquities in the Low Countries, he stated.6 While a fair amount of antiquities had indeed made their way north, one cannot imagine Rembrandt making such a declaration without the profusion of Netherlandish art after the antique of the previous century that Van Heemskerck had pioneered. Most telling of Van Heemskerck’s enduring reputation as a master of the ruin in particular – and perhaps the most fitting image with which to end this book – is Landscape with Ruins [fig. 8.14].7 Hendrick Hondius engraved and published the print 22 years after Van Heemskerck’s death. The obelisk at left bears an inscription declaring Van Heemskerck as the print’s inventor. However, the long gap between his death and its publication suggests something

Epilogue

figure 8.16

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Hendrick Hondius in the manner of Maarten van Heemskerck, Landscape with Ruins, 1590, ink on paper, 344 × 275, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

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less clear-cut than his composition of a design that Hondius waited two decades to engrave. Rather, it suggests the ubiquity of Van Heemskerck’s pictorial facility with the ruin; 22 years after his death, his manner permeated Netherlandish visual culture. Ruins after Van Heemskerck had gained the status of a language that younger members of his circle spoke fluently, but still felt the need to acknowledge as his. Replete with “Heemskerck-esque” motifs, the print appears as something of a concise retrospective display of his Roman journey and the ruinous aspect of his work in particular. The obelisk bears an orb at its apex and thus resembles the Capitoline and Vatican Obelisks as Van Heemskerck drew them [e.g., cat. nos. 5, 6, and 44]. River god sculptures in the middle ground at left and right further remind us of Van Heemskerck’s exploration of the antique treasures on the Capitoline [e.g., cat. no. 7]. Making the print even more thoroughly reminiscent of Van Heemskerck is its inclusion of one of his pet compositional devices, which we have observed in so many of his hallmark drawings [e.g., cat. nos. 9 and 17]: the positioning of an object – in this example, a column and base at right – in the extreme foreground. The background’s confounding combination of broken arches, cluttered columns, and vegetal onset amounts to more than a conspicuous display of ruination; its non-functioning architectural discord also emblematizes inventive facility with the ruin. However, while Landscape with Ruins should therefore remind us of the many imagined cacophonies by Van Heemskerck that this book cites, this print is unlike those earlier works in one crucial way; no narrative plays itself out in the print’s foreground. But the absence of a narrative does not make the print fall silent. The ruins of its backdrop, the memory of Van Heemskerck’s copious ruinscapes, are all it has to offer. And that is enough. As we continue to search it, allowing our imagination to complete this or that fallen arch, we are at its inventor’s mercy. Just as Rome’s ruins impressed themselves into Van Heemskerck’s memory, so has his mastery of them impressed itself into ours. To look thoughtfully at the image, then, is to continue to remember him.

part 4 A Catalog of Maarten van Heemskerck’s Roman Ruin Drawings

∵

A Note on the Catalog I have based my selection of drawings for this catalog on my study of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of Roman topography, with an emphasis on his portrayals of architectural ruins. The catalog contains drawings by Van Heemskerck and copies after lost drawings by him. I also include in the catalog drawings of previously questioned or unsubstantiated attribution that I have given to Van Heemskerck [e.g., cat. no. 28].1 Drawings whose previous attribution to Van Heemskerck I find doubtful or I have overturned appear at the end of the catalog, followed by a list of drawings that scholars after Hülsen and Egger and before the present volume have taken from Van Heemskerck. These are deattributions I accept. In addition to vedute and drawings of single buildings, I have included Van Heemskerck’s broad-view panoramas, his drawings of architectural fragments, and his drawings of sculpture groups or collections where he devoted equal focus to the sculptures and their settings, such as vaulted cortile or sculpture gardens with classical niches. I have not, however, included Van Heemskerck’s drawings of individual pieces of sculpture, sculptural fragments drawn without their settings, or sculpture gardens without their settings portrayed; those drawings fall beyond the scope of this book’s concerns.2 I have grouped drawings according to the locations in Rome they portray. Thus, all of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the Colosseum are together, as are his drawings of St. Peter’s, the Capitoline, the Palatine, and so on. I have sequenced the groupings to emanate from the Forum Romanum and then move to surrounding areas. The first group of drawings, “In and Around the Forum,” includes drawings of the nearby Capitoline and Palatine Hills, the Arch of Titus, the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, the Septizonium and the Forum Nervae. The monuments on the Quirinal Hill come next, including the now destroyed Frontespizio di Nerone and Trofei di Mario. We then move to the city’s interior to view the Pantheon, the Piazza del Popolo, and the monuments Van Heemskerck drew in the area of Rome near the Tiber’s east bank: The Forum Boarium and the Porticus Octaviae. We then cross the Tiber into the neighborhood known as Borgo, where Van Heemskerck drew Raphael’s Palazzo Branconio d’all Acquila. Then we move on to the Vatican. Our last major group of drawings comprises views of monuments near Rome’s south wall such as the Pyramid of Cestius and the Porta Maggiore. Not to be overlooked are Van Heemskerck’s explorations

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further afield, to ancient and Renaissance villas in Tivoli and Monte Mario, where the Medici were in the process of building the Villa Madama. These drawings comprise their own group. Within each group of drawings showing a specific location, I base the sequence of individual images on a set of criteria that loosely prioritizes – in order of descending importance – autograph status, the quality of the drawing, its degree of finish, its manner of portraying its subject – this is to say, complete views of buildings or vistas come before fragmented ones – and its usefulness to Van Heemskerck in his postRoman compositions. Copies of drawings by Van Heemskerck and drawings of questionable attribution appear at the end of each group. For example, though ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus’s copy of Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the Colosseum [cat. no. 21] is an exquisite specimen, it nonetheless appears here as the last of Van Heemskerck’s five drawings of the amphitheater. In rare cases, drawings that were barely started, which nonetheless portray identifiable vistas, appear after copies. I have only departed from groupings based on geographical location in order to bring together distinct pictorial categories and special exceptions; Van Heemskerck’s broad-view panoramas [cat. nos. 56–60], his drawings of sculpture collections [cat. nos. 61–68], his drawings of architectural fragments [cat. nos. 69–72], a rare example of a drawn fantasia [cat. no. 73], and four sheets bearing what might be copies of multiple drawings by Van Heemskerck within a single frame – sheets from the so-called “de Vos Sketchbook” – appear together in their own groups at catalog’s end [cat. nos. 74–77]. Each broad-view panorama portrays too much of Rome within a single frame to be included among any of the other more specific geographical groupings. Likewise, drawings of sculpture collections, sculpture gardens, and cortile containing sculptures do not emphasize their situation within the larger Roman urban ambient and thus comprise their own pictorial category. For example, the Villa Madama sculpture garden does not appear with Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the Villa Madama, but with other drawings of sculpture collections, as catalog number 64. Architectural fragments appear together in groups because even though we may know where the objects portrayed are or were located, Van Heemskerck did not compose them for a pictorial emphasis on their location. Thus, for example, his drawing of the fragments from the Temple of Faustina is not found in the Forum Romanum section, but is classified as catalog number 70.

A Note on the Catalog

All entries include the following: a descriptive title that includes the name of the location, monument, or object portrayed, and physical characteristics such as dimensions, media, watermarks if present (with Briquet number if known), and any other special marks such as evidence of underdrawing, signatures, inscriptions, or damage. Drawings in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett include the number assigned to the drawing by Hülsen and Egger. A brief “literature” section follows this physical description. Since Van Heemskerck’s views of Rome are ubiquitous in Italian Renaissance and Baroque architectural histories and vedute catalogs, these bibliographic listings must ultimately be incomplete. I have attempted to include only those books and articles where scholars have discussed and analyzed Van Heemskerck’s drawings in their own right, in ways we can bring to bear on notions of his artistry. I have excluded literature that merely mentions them without substantial analysis or only uses them as illustrations in lieu of photographs of Renaissance Rome. The major pre-Hülsen and Egger sources – Springer, Preibisz, and Michaelis – appear in entries by Hülsen and Egger. It is therefore unnecessary to replicate them here. However, where the insights of these earlier authors depart from Hülsen and Egger and impact my discussion, I cite them. I have also cited entries by Elena Filippi from her relatively recent partial catalog of drawings by Van Heemskerck and ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, though her entries do not depart in any significant ways from Hülsen and Egger and in some examples fail to distinguish drawings already deattributed from Van Heemskerck, given to ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, while never mounting an argument for their reattribution to Van Heemskerck, either. The text of every entry adheres to the following framework, with variations depending on the peculiarities of the specific drawing in question. I first describe content and vantage point. Then I discuss media and technique. Where appropriate, I discuss the relation of the drawing to others by Van Heemskerck, those in his circle, or by contemporary artists and architects who have portrayed the same monuments. I have also cited prints and paintings by Van Heemskerck containing motifs similar to those appearing in the drawing, if such objects exist. In these cases, I refer readers to the catalogs raisonnée of Van Heemskerck’s paintings by Rainhald Grosshans’ and Jefferson Harrison for paintings and I cite prints by their numbers in the New Hollstein volumes compiled by Ilja Veldman. Entries do not linger over archeological problems unless appropriate for addressing this

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book’s main concern, the impact of making these drawings on Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman art. Thus, for example, the topographical puzzle that the so-called Frontespizio di Nerone presents does not fall within the purview of the entries describing Van Heemskerck’s exploration of the site [cat. nos. 27–29]. All comments on the physical properties of the drawings cataloged here and discussed in the chapters above are on the basis of first hand observations of Van Heemskerck’s drawings in Berlin in 2005, 2009, 2011, and 2015 and in all other locations in the summer of 2011. All comments on the orientations of buildings to one another are based on first hand observation of extant monuments in Rome in the summers of 2003, 2005, 2009, 2011, and 2015.3 I consult Giambattista Nolli’s map of Rome (1748), for buildings now destroyed. Published approximately three hundred and fifteen years after Van Heemskerck drew Rome, Nolli’s map is the first accurate ichnographic map of the city, produced at a time when most of the antiquities Van Heemskerck drew were still extant. For example, the now destroyed Frontespizio di Nerone [also known as the Templum Serapidis, cat. nos. 27 and 28] and the Trofei di Mario [cat. no. 31] appear in Nolli’s map. It is therefore most suitable for determining vantage points. The Septizonium is a notable exception, the only major monument that Van Heemskerck drew that was destroyed during the interim between Van Heemskerck’s Roman stay and Nolli’s publication. Unfortunately, if we wish to determine the Septizonium’s visibility from nearby vantage points, we must read Leonardo Bufalini’s map (1551), but only with caution. It is not ichnographically accurate.

In and Around the Forum

Forum Romanum

Cat. No. 1 Maarten van Heemskerck Forum Romanum looking north from the Northern corner of the Palatine Left Sheet: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 6r 133 × 209 mm. Pen and brown ink with some brown ink wash Water Mark: none Right Sheet: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 9r 135 × 209 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk traces on lower and upper right edges Literature: Michaelis, 131; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 5–6; Winner, 1967, cat. No. 15; Filippi, 98; Stritt (2004), 68; DiFuria (2010a), 94–95; Veldman (2012), 18; Dacos (2012), 65–68.

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This polished drawing on two sheets of Van Heemskerck’s sketchbook is among his most famous. From a vantage point at the northern foot of the Palatine, some of the forum’s buildings face the picture plane while others sit at angles revealing rhythmic displays of receding columns. Van Heemskerck’s chosen viewpoint enables him to show seventeen monuments, fourteen of which appear on other sheets in closer views. Beginning at left are the remaining columns and cornices of the Temples of the Dioscurii, Saturn, and Vespasian. Ss. Sergio e Bacco, the Column of Phocas, and the Arch of Septimius Severus occupy the central middle ground. Directly behind and above the Temple of Vespasian are the Tabularium and the Palazzo dei Senatori, while Santa Maria in Aracoeli and the Capitoline Obelisk sit directly above the Severan arch.1 Unidentified medieval buildings are at the extreme right of the left sheet. The right sheet begins with the south wall of the church of S. Adriano, built from the Roman Curia. To its right, in the distance, we see the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan. In the middle ground, Van Heemskerck shows the medieval housing that was then on the site of the Basilica Amelia. Moving right, the Temple of Faustina and the Divus Romulus gradually advance to the foreground.2 In the right background, the ruined pediment of the Frontespizio di Nerone (perhaps the Templum Solis or Templum Serapidis) on the Quirinal pierces the sky above the cornice of the Temple of Faustina. Further right, the Forum Nervae’s Temple of Minerva is nestled behind the Temple of Faustina and the Divus Romulus. In the most distant right background, the Trofei di Mario sits high atop its Quirinal perch. Quickly rendered figures can be seen scattered throughout the forum. In the area before the Arch of Septimius Severus, two figures swing pickaxes while two others appear to be lugging something heavy, perhaps a block of marble. We notice several departures from the forum – and this view – as it must have appeared in the early 1530s.3 Van Heemskerck did not draw the medieval encasement on the Arch of Septimius Severus. In place of the campanile of Ss. Sergio e Bacco is a monolithic object with no windows or roof. San Lorenzo in Miranda has vanished from within the columns of the Temple of Faustina. Van Heemskerck has also “moved” the column of Marcus Aurelius to the east so that it is visible between the Curia and the Column of Trajan. Had he not taken this slight liberty, the column would have remained hidden behind the Capitoline because it is actually further west than its location in this drawing. The façade of Santa Maria in Aracoeli does not appear, though it could have been seen from this angle,

In and Around the Forum

projecting above the church’s nave. Also conspicuously absent is the Torre delle Milizie, which should appear between the Frontespizio di Nerone and the Trofei di Mario. Adolf Michaelis suggested that Van Heemskerck shows the forum in a state of preparation for Charles V’s Joyous Entry into Rome on April 5, 1536.4 While Van Heemskerck was certainly in Rome as late as 1536, his pictorial alterations to the forum’s topography make this drawing an unreliable point of reference for empirical speculation.5 However, just as Van Heemskerck removed some of the forum’s post-antique buildings in the pictorial realm, so did Paul III in the built environment.6 As such, their respective approaches are in the same spirit as Charles’ initial request for a processional route through the forum so he could see “la meraviglia della antiquitate.”7 Van Heemskerck may have also revised the forum in anticipation of a Netherlandish audience more interested in images displaying Roman antiquities than medieval buildings. His choice of a vantage point presenting as many ancient Roman buildings as possible suggests as much. This sheet offers an exemplary version of Van Heemskerck’s pure pen and brown ink technique. Of all of Van Heemskerck’s extant drawings, it is closest in technique to Jan van Scorel’s drawing of Bethlehem [fig. 2.6]. Thicker lines portray major antique monuments in the foreground and middle ground. Thinner more delicate strokes show the mostly medieval background topography. Neat, rhythmic, uniformly spaced horizontal hatches describe nearly all shadows. Only the shadows of the tree in the left foreground contain a slight ink wash. The orderliness of Van Heemskerck’s hatches does not yield precise detail upon close inspection. Even the capitals of the Temple of Castor appear in shorthand. In the mélange of vegetation and planar wall surfaces on the hill between the Curia and Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Van Heemskerck’s hatches achieve near abstraction. Though none of this drawing’s motifs reappear verbatim in Van Heemskerck’s later designs, it shares fundamental aspects with them. This angle of view leaves the central foreground clear, as in countless print designs in which architecture all’antica provides a distant backdrop for foreground figures on hilltops.8 In many print designs, Van Heemskerck shows obelisks and freestanding columns in the distance just as they appear in the present sheet.9 The group of columns and cornices in the temples at far left may have served as a point of reference for numerous inventions in later print designs as well.10 Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders

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of the World [fig. 6.1] features many of these motifs, including a triumphal arch in the foreground at nearly the same angle as the Arch of Septimius Severus appears in this drawing. A near replica of the Severan arch appears in Van Heemskerck’s design for “The Triumph of Pride,” in opposite form.11 Van Heemskerck’s use of two horizontal sheets together also anticipates the prints he composed in the late 1540s and early 1550s [figs. 6.11 and 6.22], which are abundant with inventive sketchbook quotations.12 In those prints, as in this composition, the left sheet is a more abundant design that could stand alone if necessary.

Cat. No. 2 Maarten van Heemskerck Forum Romanum from Southwest Foot of the Capitoline Hill Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. no. 6696 216 × 554 mm. Pen and brown ink with brown ink wash. Water Mark: two crossed arrows (similar to Briquet 6281) Notes: Signature “M. Heemskerck 1535” foreshortened in central foreground, on the wall of Ss. Sergio e Bacco. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 54–55; Dacos (1995), cat. no. 116. This large sheet presents a stunning view of the forum from a vantage point at the north end, perhaps the Tabularium. We look south and view the Forum in the opposite direction from the more famous view on two sketchbook sheets [cat. no. 1]. Perhaps Van Heemskerck

In and Around the Forum

drew this from within the Tabularium or up the southern slope of foot of the Capitoline. Regardless, his choice of vantage point facilitates a display of several monuments in the forum and beyond. Unlike that drawing, this one shows non-antique topographical features such as the medieval encasement on the Arch of Septimius Severus and the church of Ss. Sergio e Bacco. In technique, this sheet resembles Van Heemskerck’s masterful ink wash rendering of St. Peter’s from the north [cat. no. 43]. A drawing of such high finish on such a large sheet must have had a display function. There is also no question that Van Heemskerck shared this sheet. His travel companion in Rome, ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, copied it closely.13

Cat. No. 3 Maarten van Heemskerck Temple of Castor, Temple of Divine Augustus, and San Teodoro Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 38r 210 × 287 mm Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: Anchor (Briquet no. 749) top third only, in lower right corner Notes: Red chalk marks across bottom edge Literature: Egger, vol. 1, fig. 111; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 27.

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Cat. No. 4 Maarten van Heemskerck Temple of Divine Augustus and San Teodoro Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 38v 210 × 287 mm. Pen and brown ink Notes: Red Chalk marks throughout upper margins and lower righthand corner Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 27. Sheet 38 from Berlin’s Album II contains two drawings of the buildings on the west side of the forum Romanum, “pendants” – though they could never be displayed as such – drawn from opposite vantage points. On the recto side [cat. no. 3], we gaze southwest from a spot approaching the north foot of the Palatine, less than fifty feet north of the location where Van Heemskerck drew the famous rendering of the forum above in catalog number 1. Three buildings in the forum move us from foreground left to the distant Aventine in background right. The top of each building leads to the next in a strong diagonal from upper left to lower right. At far left are the three remaining columns and the cornice of the Temple of Castor, which

In and Around the Forum

recede towards the brick structure of the Temple of Divine Augustus in the central middle ground. Peeking out from behind Augustus’ Temple is the circular church of San Teodoro. Pairs of figures move viewing attention towards the background. Two figures before the Temple of Augustus walk towards two others crossing a bridge spanning the spring known to ancient Romans as the Lacus Curtius. These famously persistent waters flow into the Forum Boarium’s fountain called the Velabrum.14 In the middle ground, a figure near the Forum Boarium’s northern ridge appears to gesture in the direction of two others who walk up the Aventine where Santa Sabina seems to sit precariously. The Savelli tower is conspicuously absent.15 For the drawing on the verso side, Van Heemskerck stood approximately two hundred yards further west and looked east by southeast. The composition recedes from right foreground to left background. Beyond San Teodoro and Augustus’ Temple, we see the Temple of Castor, and in the distance, the Torre dei Conti. Hülsen and Egger deem both worthy of inclusion among Album II’s larger sheets displaying Van Heemskerck’s “completely matured technique.”16 The recto drawing contains a slight reduction in stroke width from foreground to background. It is not without its flaws. The Temple of Castor’s nearest column contains crooked fluting.17 Many of its vertical hatches cross the ground line. Double lines reveal an unsure handling of the furthest column’s tapering. However, Van Heemskerck appears to have taken an exceptional interest in the silhouette of this cornice, which he has rendered with a sure precision. The verso displays significantly less contrast and variety of stroke width, and thus imparts less depth. San Teodoro in the foreground and the Torre dei Conti in the furthest background have nearly equal value. Ruined structures behind San Teodoro receive only a summary treatment despite their proximity to the picture plane. Unlike the drawing on the recto, however, the verso drawing contains no pentimenti. The central middle ground of the Ruth and Boaz print [fig. 6.22] contains a circular temple that is surely a revision of San Teodoro.18 The broken cornice of the town gate at far right in the same print is indebted to Van Heemskerck’s study of the Temple of Castor in these drawings. The left backdrop of Van Heemskerck’s print design for The Burial of St. Stephen contains a circular temple more closely resembling the verso side drawing of San Teodoro.19 The verso side’s Temple of Divine Augustus is echoed in the backdrop fantasia of the Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan print [fig. 7.12].20

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Capitoline Hill

Cat. No. 5 Maarten van Heemskerck Capitoline Obelisk and Colosseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 11r 135 × 215 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk in upper left corner Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 7–8; Dacos (2004), 74; Bartsch (2008), 142; DiFuria (2012), 166. This is the superior of two drawings in Berlin showing nearly the same vista.21 Van Heemskerck stood northeast of the Palazzo dei Senatori, perhaps atop Santa Maria in Aracoeli’s steps, and gazed southeast over the Forum Romanum. One of Van Heemskerck’s “emptied out” compositions, most of the drawing occupies the left and lower thirds of the frame. We see Van Heemskerck’s customary flair for compositional dynamics; extreme foregrounding at left or right contrasts with objects in the distance.

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Santa Maria in Aracoeli’s monastery appears unfinished in the far-left foreground, where figures provide scale. The Capitoline Obelisk frames the left foreground, as it does in Van Heemskerck’s view of the Campidoglio from Santa Maria in Aracoeli [cat. no. 6], but in greater detail than on that sheet. Van Heemskerck has drawn the hieroglyphs on its authentically Egyptian top half.22 The strong diagonal of the Capitoline’s retaining wall frames the buildings of the Forum and beyond. The Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine partially blocks the Colosseum. To their right, peeking just above the retaining wall, are S. Adriano’s pediment and the Arch of Septimius Severus’ medieval tower. Further into the distance are the Torre dei Santa Francesca Romana, the bottom of which Van Heemskerck has left unfinished, the Arch of Titus within its with Medieval encasement, and the Torre Cartularia. In the furthest distance, to the amphitheater’s left, we see the aqueducts near the Porta Maggiore. A series of hills including the Celian and the Aventine are in the furthest right background. While not in Van Heemskerck’s finest hand, the overall handling of the ink suggests a deliberate plan. Some passages nevertheless reveal impressive subtlety and technical versatility. Three thicknesses of line describe foreground, middle ground, and most distant background. The obelisk receives the boldest lines and vivid contrast, especially at its decayed base. Only a single hatch of its shaft exceeds its limit. Uncertainty is evident in the outlines half way up its right-hand side. Soft hatches describe the Basilica of Maxentius’s plain surfaces and vegetal onset, while bolder lines emerge behind it to describe the shadows created by the Colosseum’s busier exterior. The distant background’s hills appear as faint, stippled contours, Van Heemskerck’s drawn version of atmospheric perspective, which appears on only a few panoramas across his oeuvre. Van Heemskerck may have referred to this sheet when composing Habakuk Bringing Food to Daniel In the Lion’s Den [fig. 6.12]; both are based on a strong diagonal declining from left to right, a circular structure in the central distance, and a cluster of buildings to its right that includes a campanile and an arch in a thick encasement.23 To a lesser degree, this may also be true of Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle [fig. 6.4], which is composed in the opposite, with a strong diagonal declining from right to left, a foreground obelisk, and a Flavian amphitheater in the central background.24

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Cat. No. 6 Maarten van Heemskerck Capitoline Obelisk, Palazzo dei Senatori, and Palazzo dei Conservatori Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 72r 208 × 263 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Literature: Michaelis, 11; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 41–42; Filippi, 100–101; Bartsch (2012), 44. We see the Campidoglio before Michelangelo’s mid-century alterations from a unique vantage point among images of this space.25 This drawing’s carefully chosen angle of view and its medium finish suggest that Van Heemskerck was more concerned with composition than a meticulous rendering. This drawing’s main compositional device, a favorite of Van Heemskerck’s – a prominent foreground

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object and a dramatic recession into the background – results from a self-conscious construction of vantage point. He stood at the eastern corner of Santa Maria in Aracoeli’s south wall and gazed southwest.26 In the extreme left foreground is the Capitoline Obelisk, which was moved to Villa Celimontana shortly after Van Heemskerck made this drawing.27 On the obelisk’s base, Van Heemskerck has written “teneijt gesprenkelt”, words that continue to puzzle art historians.28 The Palazzo dei Senatori and Palazzo dei Conservatori sit at left and center respectively. At far right, a freestanding column draws the scrutiny of two figures. The reclining ancient Roman sculptures then in front of the conservator’s palace, a building Van Heemskerck rendered on other sheets [cat. nos. 7 and 8], appear here in bold, imprecise lines.29 Louvre 11028 shows that by the mid 1540s, Michelangelo had moved them to their current place in front of the Palazzo dei Senatori. He had also built a wall through the spot where the column at right stands in the present sheet and had installed the Marcus Aurelius equestrian. Given the angle of view, the background to the left of the Conservator’s palace must show the Tarpean rock while the Janiculum with San Pietro in Montorio appears to the right of the palace. Minor topographical and pictorial errors appear. Van Heemskerck did not foreshorten the middle ground stairs leading from the Aracoeli to the Capitoline’s Piazza. Instead, he has portrayed them as if they run parallel to the façade of the Conservator’s palace. The figures before the freestanding column at right might be too small in scale. If they are not, then the figures near the column in the view from the porch of the Palazzo dei Senatori [cat. no. 7] are too big. This drawing is, moreover, one of a significant number in Berlin’s Album II displaying a loose, almost careless stroke. The half of the Palazzo dei Senatori behind and to the left of the obelisk is unfinished.30 Despite being in the foreground, the obelisk does not receive a detailed treatment either. No part of this drawing finds anything close to a verbatim replication in Van Heemskerck’s prints and paintings. But his design for the “Tower of Babel,” the third scene of 1569’s Clades Judaeae Gentis series, is framed by a foreground vertical to the left and a middle ground vertical to the right, not unlike this drawing’s framing device.31

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Cat. No. 7 Maarten van Heemskerck View looking northwest from the porch of the Palazzo dei Senatori Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 45r 133 × 209 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: Star and Arrows (Briquet 6289) Notes: Faint black chalk underdrawing articulating loggia of Palazzo dei Conservatori Literature: Michaelis, I, 146; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 24; Thoenes, 144; Dacos (2004), 74 This is another of Van Heemskerck’s spatially dynamic compositions emphasizing a dramatic recession from foreground to background. To our left, close to the picture plane, is the sculpted head of Commodus, the column with Lion sculptures appearing on another of the Berlin sheets, and reclining statues of the Tiber and the Nile.32 As the composition moves to the right, objects recede, with Castel S. Angelo in the far center background, and Pantheon’s dome in the right background. Close examination reveals that Van Heemskerck intended to show the Palazzo dei Conservatori’s facade, but did not follow through on these intentions. A faint but visible row of vertical lines applied lightly in black chalk articulate the columns of the Palazzo dei Conservatori’s loggia.

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Cat. No. 8 Maarten van Heemskerck View East from Palazzo dei Conservatori with Tiber and Nile Sculptures Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 61r 134 × 210 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk traces throughout33 Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 33; Dacos (2004), 74. In a medium finish, Van Heemskerck once again juxtaposes a foregrounded vista with objects in the deep background. We see the river gods Tiber and Nile in the foreground from the point of view of the Palazzo dei Conservatori’s portico. In the extreme right background is the Palazzo dei Senatori. The Capitoline Obelisk appears in the left background. While this particular angle of view found no afterlife in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre, it warrants attention as a unique choice among views of the Campidoglio, which became popular in the 1550s and 60s. Like this view, Hieronymus Cock’s view from the early 1550s shows the space before Michelangelo’s revisions.34 However, Cock’s angle of view is from the northwest, chosen to portray an overview of the whole rather than convey the experience of inhabiting it, exploring it, as Van Heemskerck has

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done. Etiénne Du Pérac’s view of 1569, which surely must be regarded as the definitive one, presents Michelangelo’s intentions for the space with an idealized, symmetrical bird’s-eye perspective from the northwest.35 Van Heemskerck’s Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1] contains an invented circular temple fronted by the river gods Tiber and Nile he has portrayed here. However, this drawing’s angle of view was not instrumental in his devising of that temple; the painted invention shows the river gods as if viewed from the front, not at the sharp angle portrayed in this view.

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Palatine Hill

Cat. No. 9 Maarten van Heemskerck View from Palace of Septimius Severus towards the Colosseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 55r 282 × 237 mm Pen and Brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 34; Stritt (2004), 66, 69; DiFuria (2010a), 98; Bartsch (2012); 43; DiFuria (2012), 166; Stritt (2012), 172–176.

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Van Heemskerck surmounted the Palatine and sketched a complex view to the northeast. This difficult angle of view demanded a dexterous rendering of a series of confusing forms framing an oblique view. Curved ruins in the foreground lead left, to the middle ground, and then right, to the composition’s furthest background objects gradually rather than suddenly. As is usually the case with sweeping ruinscapes such as this, Van Heemskerck’s grasp of contour, proportion, and space lend the drawing a convincing appearance despite little attention to detail. Van Heemskerck’s customary figure within an arch appears in the central foreground. Beyond, the Severan ruins provide a setting for other figures to investigate. Appearing at a great distance from the picture plane, the Colosseum sits is the angle of that Van Heemskerck uses in 1553’s Self Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1], in which we see the Colosseum’s double vaulted interior because of the break in the end of its preserved northern side. This drawing’s awkward handling of the Colosseum’s circular shape is a rare lapse in Van Heemskerck’s normally supreme command of depth, proportion, and spatial relations.36 Van Heemskerck has rendered the Arch of Constantine – nestled between the furthest end of the Palatine and the Colosseum – plausibly enough to be recognized as such. Scholars have only recently begun to recognize the importance of this drawing for the growing interest in ruin imagery among Netherlanders.37 Hieronymus Cock published a vedute in his 1561 series of views of Rome that he based on a horizontal reorientation of this sheet [fig. 7.15].38 Van Heemskerck’s drawing and Cock’s print are comparable to a drawing given to Hendrick van Cleve of the Colosseum from the Palatine from around 1550, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale.39 Van Cleve’s drawing also foregrounds the Palatine’s ruins and shows the Colosseum in the background. The main difference between the two drawings is emphasis. Van Cleve uses the Palatine’s ruins to “stage” the Colosseum. For Van Heemskerck, the Palatine’s ruins are the focal point; the Colosseum appears smaller in scale.

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Cat. No. 10 Maarten van Heemskerck Drawing of Ruins on the Palatine / View Southeast from the Palatine with towards Septizonium Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-T-2008-93(R) 187 × 282 mm Pen and Brown Ink Literature: Filedt Kok, Halsema-Kubes, and Kloek, 222, cat. no. 102; Schapelhouman and Scholten, 88–90; Van Ooteghem, 48–49. This large sheet, which does not belong to the Berlin albums, bears three masterful drawings. Van Heemskerck made the primary of the two drawings on the recto side with the sheet in a landscape orientation and then made the secondary drawing by turning it 180 degrees so that the top became the bottom and again drew in landscape orientation. In the primary rendering, Van Heemskerck studied a cluster of ruins atop the Palatine Hill. In the secondary, he rendered a magnificent view looking southeast in his finest technique. We have no way of knowing which drawing he executed first. We first consider the drawing in which unidentified ruined substructures cover a larger amount of the sheet. At left, in his boldest line, Van Heemskerck has portrayed a foreshortened groin vault from an oblique angle at relatively close range. The view through the vault reveals a knot of vegetal onset and ruins rendered in fainter strokes,

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capped with an unidentified two-story building, which appears off center beneath the arched view; flourishes of vegetation from the vault above and the ruins to the left provide a seemingly perfect frame of the building, suggesting Van Heemskerck’s manipulated composition of the view rather than its actual placement there. The ruined substructures recede to the right in a cacophony of cracked piers, orphaned arches, and Van Heemskerck’s signature vegetation. A monumentally scaled pier springing into broken arches cuts the composition in half. Here too, Van Heemskerck has deployed his boldest line to describe the arches in shadow. Even the shadows of the arcaded substructures in the drawing’s background, which peak from behind a foregrounded rock, bear bold, thick, dark strokes despite their distance from the picture plane. Archeological searchers appear at a distance, as they frequently do in Van Heemskerck’s more carefully worked drawings, perfectly positioned to fill the void between the foregrounded pier and the craggy background wall that brackets them. The groin vault’s position in the composition’s left third and its oblique angle suggest that it may have provided a source for the groin vaulted structure that frames the action on the left sheet of Van Heemskerck’s print, Balaam and the Angel [fig. 6.11]. Although the cluttered, monumental aspect of these ruins and their condition as substructures stripped of decorative marble facing suggest that they are palatial ruins, it is only upon reorienting the sheet to view its secondary drawing that we are able to confirm Van Heemskerck’s location atop the Palatine for this sheet. The secondary drawing recedes from right to left presenting a view of the Septizonium from a medium distance at lower left, as it appeared from the southeast corner of the Palatine. Beyond the Septizonium, we see the campanile of San Giovanni e Paolo and beyond it, the arcaded loggia and nave of Santa Maria in Domenica alla Navicella. The lone foregrounded ruin bracketing this composition to the right is the same one that appears in Van Heemskerck’s vertically oriented view from the Palatine with the Colosseum in the distance [cat. no. 9], which Hieronymus Cock reproduced in his second series of Roman vedute [fig. 7.15]. Van Heemskerck has furnished both of these drawings with multiple layers of contour lines and hatches in varying degrees of thickness and at a variety of angles. While this drawing has only received hesitant attribution to Van Heemskerck, and may be a copy, I deem it autograph for its consistency and fluidity of pen marks.40 No passage of this drawing – from extreme foreground to distant background – does not find a match among Van Heemskerck’s autograph sheets. This drawing bears marks of incision suggesting either copying or transfer for

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print. However, we know of no print resembling this drawing. That the main drawing’s arcuated barrel vault receives its echo in the main archway of Balaam and the Angel, as does the clutter of ruins that both drawings share, suggests that the incisions could indicate Van Heemskerck’s use of the drawing as a general guide for the composition of his print.

Cat. No. 11 Maarten van Heemskerck Ruins on the Palatine and City Walls Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-T-2008-93(V) 187 × 282 mm Pen and Brown Ink Literature: Filedt Kok, Halsema-Kubes, and Kloek, 222, cat. no. 102; Schapelhouman and Scholten, 88–90; Van Ooteghem, 48–49. This drawing appears on the verso of the Rijksmuseum’s sheet with two drawings on either long side [cat. no. 10]. As was often Van Heemskerck’s custom, he juxtaposed a foregrounded object with a distant vista. No middle ground mediates the view. Van Heemskerck has drawn what might be either a fantasia or a generic ruin on the Palatine Hill. To compose it, he stood on the peak of the Palatine’s southwestern slope and faced southeast. In the distant background, we see the campanile of the Basilica Santi Giovanni e Paolo, visible

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from many points on the Palatine’s eastern and southwestern ridges. If the foregrounded ruin is a fantasia, it is notable for its appearance as an authentic Roman ruin. It closely resembles the palatial substructures we see on this sheet’s recto side as well as those appearing in the foreground and middle ground of Van Heemskerck’s view towards the Colosseum [cat. no. 9]. In the distance, we see the campanile of San Giovanni e Paolo. The technique Van Heemskerck has deployed to render the ruined structure is slightly less finished technique than those on the sheet’s recto, comparable to what we see on his drawing of the Trofei di Mario, which also consists of concave niches like the ones articulating this ruin. Van Heemskerck’s somewhat careful attention to the foregrounded structure contrasts with the rather rote rendering of the objects in the distant background. The drawing’s overall impression is thus one of incompletion. This drawing bears no direct connection to motifs in any of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman prints or paintings.

Cat. No. 12 Maarten van Heemskerck Southwestern Slope of the Palatine Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 20r 134 × 211 mm. Pen and Brown Ink

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Water Mark: Lower Half of Briquet 6289 (Crossed Feathers) Prominent red chalk traces on bottom right and upper left corners of verso in the shape of a torso. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 11–12; Stritt (2004), 69; DiFuria (2008), 124. Standing on the Via dei Cerchi, Van Heemskerck drew the Palatine’s western face. From a vantage point at lower left, we gaze up at the substructures of the Palace of Augustus, where two small figures explore. Above and beyond the figures, crowning the hill from left to right, are the exedra of the Palace of Augustus, the coffered arches of the Palatine Stadium’s west entrance, and the ruined vaults of the Palace of Septimius Severus.41 Two silhouetted figures stand atop the substructures of Severus’ Palace. Van Heemskerck has scattered a few other figures across the Palatine’s slope. All wall surfaces facing west are free of shading, indicating that Van Heemskerck drew this in the late afternoon as the sun shone directly on the palatial ruins. The dynamic diagonal composition, convincing proportions, space, and light suggest that Van Heemskerck conceived and composed this drawing with some care and deliberation. However, he applied his ink in loose, uniformly thick strokes.42 Broad outlines describe the edges of buildings near and far, as well as their deepest shadows.43 The hatching of the foothills in the central foreground is even, but here, too, the strokes are thick, and appear at wide intervals. Hatches also overlap sloppily in places. Pentimenti appear in some passages of the substructures in the lower left foreground. Van Heemskerck used this drawing to compose part of the backdrop in his design for “Lot Making Love to His Daughters,” [fig. 8.12] from 1569’s Clades Judaeae Gentis series of prints.44 The Augustan Palace’s exedra and the wall above it reappear almost verbatim in the print. They are in the reverse of the sketch, but their differences in size preclude the possibility of a direct transfer from the Roman sketch to the print design. Van Heemskerck has added two rows of niches to the exedra, neatened the large arched window, and reduced the number of smaller windows in the wall. Objects in the area around the exedra make their way into the print design in more loosely reinterpreted forms. He has also transformed the vertical shadow of wall and vegetation to the left of the exedra in the Roman sketch into a ruined column and vault inspired by structures in his drawing of the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 26]. This structure’s barrel

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vault appears to have been inspired by the coffered vaults of the sketch’s stadium entrance. Two arches to the right of the sketched exedra reappear to the left of the exedra in the print. However, the printed arches face the same direction as in the sketch, unlike the exedra. Van Heemskerck’s print of “Tempus” from his Triumphs of Petrarch series also contains a variation on the exedra.45

Cat. No. 13 Maarten van Heemskerck Palatine Substructures with Septizonium Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 14r 205 × 246 mm Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 12–13; Stritt (2004), 70; DiFuria (2012), 166; DiFuria (2017), 412.

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Van Heemskerck stood at the southeastern end of the Circus Maximus and looked to the north and northeast to draw Severan ruins to the left, the Septizonium in right middle ground, and SS Giovanni e Paolo in the far-right background. The substructures in the foreground once supported the seating of the ancient Circus Maximus. Figures are scattered throughout. No known drawings or prints of this part of Rome are composed precisely like this one by Van Heemskerck, from this particular angle. Hieronymus Cock published views of this area of the Palatine, however, without the same simplicity of composition. Cock’s view is from the Palatine, towards the clutter of ruins that the seating substructures appearing so prominently in this drawing partially hide from view.46 This drawing’s finished form differs radically from its underdrawing; the Septizonium’s underdrawn lines are story higher; the hills in the right foreground are also much lower than the underdrawn part. Technically speaking, Van Heemskerck has given us a drawing that borders on high finish. The Septizonium at far right, the shadows beneath the substructures, and the Severan vaults to the far left receive multiple layers of hatches. The vaults at far left may have served as the inspiration for the vaults that Van Heemskerck portrays himself drawing in the frontispiece for the Clades Judaeae Gentis series of prints, published in 1569 [fig. 8.4]. The structure atop the Palatine, which brackets the composition on the far left, might be the unidentified structure that Van Heemskerck drew on the verso of the sheet now in the Rijksmuseum [cat. no. 11]. This drawing was instrumental in Van Heemskerck’s devising of the middle ground of his print, Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22]. At print’s center, an edifice resembling the Septizonium appears at the same angle as we see in this drawing. Moreover, Van Heemskerck has translated the vegetation before the Septizonium into the print’s tree, which echoes Ruth’s pose, suggesting her fecundity in bearing Christ’s ancestors.

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Cat. No. 14 Maarten van Heemskerck Looking South at Severan Palace Remains from the Circus Maximus / Villa Madama Elephant Fountain47 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 40r 125 × 199 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Notes: Faint black chalk mark from the lower right half the upper middle in the shape of an arch Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 22; Veldman (in Bartsch and Seiler), 16.

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Standing on the slope of the Circus Maximus, Van Heemskerck chose a vantage point that shows us two levels of arches, the top one fragmented less than half way after it springs from its support. Appearing within these arches, in rhythmic sequence, are the arches behind them. Van Heemskerck has coupled a light stroke with a deeper, thicker stroke for the shadowed passages closest to the picture plane. The Severan structures appear in sparing, quickly applied, but precise outlines. Several post-Roman designs have broken vaults and piers atop hillsides like these, but there are no direct quotations of this drawing in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre.48

Cat. No. 15 Copy After Maarten van Heemskerck (by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus?) Northern Side of the Palatine Hill Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 47v 198 × 308 mm. Pen and brown ink with some black ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 29; DiFuria (2012), 160. Van Heemskerck gazed south from the northern foot of the Palatine to compose a grand drawing of the ruined Palace of Septimius Severus that resulted in this drawing, a copy by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus. The left middle ground shows a series of arched substructures perched halfway up the Palatine and extending to the left background. Vegetation growing in the foreground is hatched with thick lines at wide intervals in black ink. Like the composition on this sheet’s recto side [cat. no. 21], the composition here appears to be Van Heemskerck’s; the chosen vantage point necessitated a rendering of the substructures with the extreme foreshortening of which Van Heemskerck was so fond. The technique on display here is generally less confident than Van Heemskerck’s. Strokes are guided, deliberate, bearing no evidence of Van Heemskerck’s quick application, which is even evident in his highly finished drawings.

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Nonetheless, the artist of this sheet appears to have attempted Van Heemskerck’s signature hatching; even the careless handling of the vegetation in the foreground imitates the recurring vegetal motif found among Van Heemskerck’s drawings. Continuous, looped hatches in the foreground resemble those in catalog numbers 79 and 80. Some pure pen and ink examples perhaps by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus contain the longer, thinner, looped, lines we see in this drawing.49 The absence of any other drawings from a similar vantage point on any sheet traditionally attributed to Van Heemskerck further suggests this drawing as a copy of his concetto, as do prints with vaulting resembling the substructures that recede from the picture plane in the center of this drawing, such as “The Triumph of Death,” from his Triumphs of Petrarch. “The Chaldeans Carrying Away the Temple Treasures,” from the Clades Judaeae Gentis series.50

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Arch of Titus

Cat. No. 16 Maarten van Heemskerck Arch of Titus Framing the Forum Romanum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 56r 269 × 195 mm. Pen and brown ink with some ink wash Water Mark: Anchor in a Circle (Briquet 586–589) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 34; Filippi, 109; Stritt (2004), 68.

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This drawing on a large sheet from the second Berlin album served as a reference for a print design over thirty years after its execution. Van Heemskerck records the appearance of the Arch of Titus within its medieval encasement, as it remained until Giuseppe Valadier’s alterations of 1822.51 He has written the attic story’s dedication to Titus in his own handwriting, showing only the first word, “S E N A T V S,” as it appears on the arch’s southeastern attic story, in the Roman font.52 A figure walks through the arch towards the Forum Romanum. Within the arch, from left, we see the Temples of Castor, Saturn, and Vespasian. The Column of Phocus sits in front of the church of Ss. Sergio e Bacco. Unlike the rendering of the church in catalog number 1’s view of the forum, this drawing shows the church’s campanile. Van Heemskerck therefore must have executed this before Paul III’s demolitions in preparation for Charles V’s triumphal entry of April 1536. Half of the Arch of Septimius Severus is visible next to Ss. Sergio e Bacco.53 Above the forum, on the Capitoline, are the Palazzo dei Senatori, Santa Maria in Aracoeli, and the Capitoline Obelisk. Van Heemskerck uses mostly hatching in this drawing. He renders the buildings in the forum with a tighter, subtler, thinner stroke than the looser, much larger strokes he uses for the arch. Exceptional are the inking of the arch’s coffering – with such thick lines, heavy strokes and so much ink, that Van Heemskerck has weakened the paper – and the application of brown ink wash without any gradations to the foreground, the left pier of the arch, and the hills in the middle ground. The buildings of the Capitoline appear in a garbled form that one cannot fully explain. Clearly, Van Heemskerck never satisfactorily completed his underdrawing of this portion.54 Two towers extend from the Palazzo dei Senatori.55 The crenellated tower on the right resembles the Palazzo’s tower, but appears too far to the right. Below this tower, a structure resembling the buttress on the Tabularium’s southeast corner appears with only one crenellation, which is partially obscured by a passage of wavy lines that may represent a flag. Van Heemskerck has drawn a tunnel to the left of the palazzo where none existed. He has also drawn buildings with eaves against the wall of the Tabularium where it had none. Unfinished horizontal lines extending from the left side of the right tower suggest that it is actually the Tabularium’s crenellated north buttress, pictorially displaced, too high on the sheet. Directly below is a passage of unfinished lines and shading. These incomplete portions suggest that

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Van Heemskerck applied ink to this sheet only after leaving Rome, without having the Capitoline as a point of reference. Oddly, it also indicates that he did not consult his own drawings of the Capitoline in order to finish this one. Some of the ambiguities in Van Heemskerck’s rendering of the Capitoline may have resulted from its execution from different vantage points.56 To render the exterior of the Arch of Titus, which appears in elevation except for its foreshortened keystone and interior, Van Heemskerck must have stood about twenty feet south east of the arch, on the elevated ground near the Torre Cartularia.57 But observation of the site reveals that Van Heemskerck shows more buildings in the forum than are visible from this spot. He would have needed a closer view, and may have even walked through the arch to draw the parts of the vista he could not see. If he had drawn some parts from each vantage point, their appearance in relation to one another would have become confused. This would explain the misalignment of the Tabularium’s north buttress. This view of the Arch of Titus was the basis for Van Heemskerck’s design of “Lot and His Family Leaving Sodom” [fig. 8.11] in the Clades Judaeae Gentis series.58 The arch in the print is reversed from the sketch. However, the designs do not correspond in size. While Van Heemskerck did not transfer the sketchbook drawing for his print design, he retained several of the sketchbook drawing’s elements in its translation to a print: the Victory reliefs in the arch’s spandrels, composite capitals, frieze, and cornice appear in drawing and print. The cracks to the right of the arch’s right column occupy the corresponding spot on the print’s left column. In other places, Van Heemskerck has reworked elements from the original drawing for the print. Where the drawing shows a missing piece in the cornice, the line has received translation into Sodom’s flames in the print. Van Heemskerck has translated the cracks in the arch as well, placing them at more regular intervals in the print design. His sketchbook drawing of the “spoils relief” on the arch’s interior only shows one horse, a few lances, and one figure. He has further simplified the relief in the print, eliminating all extraneous elements to show a single horse and lance. Likewise, Van Heemskerck’s drawing reduces the arch’s coffering from seven rows to five, while the print shows two rows. Van Heemskerck has also combined and enlarged the Temples of Castor and Vespasian. Finally, the lines created by the hill in front of the drawing’s arch and at the foot of the Palatine reappear in the print as a torrent of flames and a fallen cornice.

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Colosseum

Cat. No. 17 Maarten van Heemskerck Overturned Composite Capital with view looking east towards Colosseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 28v 135 × 211 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 17; Filippi, 99–100; Dacos (2004), 74–75; Stritt (2004), 89; Bartsch (2007), 27–38; DiFuria (2012), 159–160, 164–165. In his most masterful technique, Van Heemskerck has devised a dynamic composition. Sitting at an oblique angle in the extreme right foreground is an exquisitely rendered late imperial composite capital replete with unbroken acanthus leaves, vegetal volutes, egg and dart, and bead patterns. The Colosseum’s ruined southwest quadrant provides a backdrop to the left. As in his rendering of the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum [cat. no. 22], the Colosseum’s stark ruin offsets a lavish, ornamental display in the foreground. It is not certain if Van Heemskerck drew this particular juxtaposition of capital and Colosseum from life. He rendered the Colosseum

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from a spot south of the Arch of Constantine.59 The capital might be a remnant of the Temple of Divus Claudius, which occupied the area where Van Heemskerck sat to draw the Colosseum.60 Lanciani reports that Michelangelo used a capital from Claudius’s temple to complete his renovation of the Baths of Diocletian.61 This accords neatly with Hülsen’s observation that Van Heemskerck’s overturned capital is “almost exactly like” those in the main hall of the Baths of Diocletian.62 The capitals Van Heemskerck drew in catalog number 69 suggest that he found a capital, studied it from a few different angles, and then used it later in this composition. In both drawings, capitals lay overturned amidst vegetation with the shaft of a column nearby. Van Heemskerck drew the capitals in catalog number 69 in enough detail to confirm that they share all of the same decorative elements with the capital in the present sheet.63 Van Heemskerck could have just as easily created a fictive juxtaposition of Colosseum and capital by using a capital on the nearby Arch of Septimius Severus, an even closer match with the overturned one in this composition. This drawing may have been meant for display, presentation, or conversion into a print. Even if this drawing is naer het leven – that is, even Van Heemskerck happened upon the very scene we see here – its worm’s eye view, extreme perspective, and other pictorial manipulations suggest a function besides documenting the area near the Colosseum. Van Heemskerck has distorted the capital’s proportions. Turning the sheet to view the capital right-side-up reveals its attenuation compared to its closest matches on the arch of Septimius Severus and catalog number 69; Van Heemskerck has stretched the area between the acanthus leaves and the horizontal bead pattern. He may have lengthened the capital’s shaft because achieving a harmonious composition was more important than rendering the capital with precise fidelity to its actual proportions.64 Also suggesting a presentation or display function is this sheet’s finish, which is of the highest order. Hatching even suggests the possibility of print reproduction. Only this and a few other Roman sketches contain hatching that so closely resembles the system Van Heemskerck used in his preparatory drawings for prints. Van Heemskerck’s hatches vary from the dark thick lines beneath and directly behind the capital to the adroitly applied thinner strokes describing the breaks in the furthest portions of the Colosseum’s upper story. These slight lines show the subtle play of light and shadow in fractures of the Colosseum’s walls. Apparently, Van Heemskerck never returned to this drawing to mine its motifs for his subsequent designs for prints or paintings.

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While an overturned composite capital appears in the foreground of his 1572 print of the “Temple of Diana” from his Eight Wonders of the World series, that capital is viewed from above, much further from the picture plane, and much smaller in relation to its frame.65 Of course, the Colosseum and fantasia inspired by it appear in numerous works from Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman period. But in all of those examples the amphitheater appears from a higher angle of view and a vantage point further north than the one Van Heemskerck shows here.

Cat. No. 18 Maarten van Heemskerck Northwestern side of Colosseum in extreme foreground and Trajan’s baths in left background Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 69v 125 × 199 mm Pen and brown ink with some ink wash Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 36; DiFuria (2012), 160. Perhaps Van Heemskerck conceived this drawing as a pendant of sorts to the one on the recto of this sheet, which depicts the Arch of Constantine in the extreme left foreground and the Colosseum in the distant background. However, in technique, this Van Heemskerck

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has not matched the virtuosity of that tour de force. On this side, he has composed the sweeping curve of the Colosseum’s exterior to lead us from the right foreground to the left background, which shows the mottled ruins of the Baths of Trajan.66 At far right, in the deepest shadows, we see the Colosseum’s interior through the fragmented arch of its ruined northwest side. Three figures wander from center to lower left, perhaps towards via Sacra and the Forum Romanum beyond. ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus sketched a comparable view from beneath the Colosseum’s ruined vaults, from a quadrant further east.67 Pen and ink hatching was Van Heemskerck’s sole means of describing shadows on this sheet, except for a passage of light brown ink wash at right depicting the Colosseum’s darkened interior. Throughout, hatches are primarily horizontal, at medium to wide intervals. Unlike the technical variety on display on this sheet’s recto side, most lines here are thick, whether they are hatches or outlines describing the contours of foreground or background objects. The most noticeable difference between the drawings on the two sides of this sheet appears in Van Heemskerck’s treatment of the background buildings; the Baths of Trajan appear on this sheet with much less precision and focus than the recto’s Colosseum backdrop, which is rendered with striking subtlety and a varied touch oscillating between delicate and forthright. Van Heemskerck’s foreshortening of the graceful curve of the Colosseum’s exterior is for the most part masterful. Each abacus atop its Doric capital turns gradually to face the picture plane and both cornices widen convincingly as they approach. Slight difficulties appear in his encounters with the arches. The molding of the third arch from right, for example, yawns open awkwardly and is too short in relation to its neighboring arch to the right. Telltale pentimenti appear in the molding of each arch. Post-Rome, Van Heemskerck apparently found this drawing useful. Foreshortened circular structures near the frame appear frequently in his print designs. A near verbatim appropriation appears in the print “Feeding the Hungry”, from the Last Judgment and Six Works of Mercy series.68 In “Mary, Mother of Christ”, from the Exemplary Women series, a ruined, broken arch springing from a Colosseum-like pier “exits stage right” like this sheet’s broken arch at extreme right. Other designs appear to have benefited from general consultation with this drawing.69 The piers of the bridge in the painting and the print of “Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd” may have benefited from consultation with this drawing.70 And surely, the foreshortened bridge in the central middle ground of Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22] also bears this drawing’s patrimony; Van Heemskerck has

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even translated the jagged diagonal line on this sheet’s lower right into the stairway appearing before the bridge.

Cat. No. 19 Maarten van Heemskerck Close view of Northwestern break in Colosseum’s vaults Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 70r 131 × 205 mm. Pen and Black ink and black chalk. Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 36; DiFuria (2010a), 97–98.

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The famous break in the northwestern quadrant of the Colosseum advances on the viewer in a veritable tidal wave of vaults and piers. There is a mound in front of the break in the vaults that is consistent with views of this part of the Colosseum in the Codex Escurialensis [e.g. fig. 4.6] and published by Hieronymus Cock [fig. 7.14].71 In the left background, we see a barely visible series of arches, perhaps belonging to the Baths of Titus. Van Heemskerck has rendered this view in black pen and charcoal. This is the only known drawing of a building in which Van Heemskerck used charcoal rather than hatching or ink wash to describe shadows in combination with ink lines for describing contours. The ink lines are stark, often not blended with the charcoal, which is soft by contrast. The two media do not blend and in Van Heemskerck’s rendering of contours and shadows on the second level, the media seem to fight each other, resulting in an almost abstract composition. Thus it is not surprising that this combination of media is unique among Van Heemskerck’s sketches. The angle of view nearly makes a cross section. We face the sheer side of each of the Colosseum’s circumferential walls as it rounds the northwest quadrant to the building’s ruined side. Due to Van Heemskerck’s choice of vantage point, the amphitheater’s exterior wall at left is in stark silhouette, with no charcoal. Van Heemskerck has used the chalk to show us the subtle lighting effects created by the play of light, coming in through the arches, on the soft curve of the vaults. Through careful observation, Van Heemskerck assimilated the formal language of the Colosseum’s vaulting, piers, and broken arches in several post-Roman designs showing the ruined sides of Colosseum-like amphitheaters.72 This may be the drawing that was most important for his Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1]; close examination of the painting reveals that Van Heemskerck has portrayed himself executing a drawing much like the present sheet.

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Cat. No. 20 Maarten van Heemskerck View through the Interior of the Colosseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 3r 134 × 211 mm Pen and brown ink with some ink wash Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 3; Stritt (2004), 78; Bartsch (2012), 27 We gaze through two massive, arched piers on the Colosseum’s second floor in the northwestern quadrant, close to its ruined side.73 In the foreground at far left, Van Heemskerck has given his audience a glimpse through a barrel vault leading to the building’s exterior. Its foreshortened arch advances beyond the left frame. The arch left of center is parallel to the picture plane. The right arch, approaching the frame’s right edge at roughly forty-five degrees, frames a radiating barrel vault leading to the seating area. Beyond the foreground vaults, the Colosseum’s interior beckons. Two miniscule figures at lower right walk on the amphitheater’s proscenium. Vegetation grows over the left lintel, and throughout the seating area. Van Heemskerck has chosen a challenging viewpoint for yet another of his many studies of the picturesque foreground and

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background interplay that pervades Roman topography. With its view through massive arches, this sheet bears comparison with catalog number 16, which shows the forum through the Arch of Titus. As a drawing of the amphitheater’s interior, it is comparable to the drawing in Darmstadt of doubtful attribution to Van Heemskerck. Unlike that drawing, the present rendering shows greater concern with the space beyond the amphitheater’s interior vaulting. Drawing from the precise spot where the ridge of the Colosseum’s highest wall is visible just under the left arch, Van Heemskerck has rendered the myriad angles of the Colosseum’s interior in virtuosic fashion. In the gradually changing angles of the seating area, substructures curve elegantly into the distance from left to right. The only difficulty appears in the radiating vault at right, where the retaining arch does not recede in conformity with the foreshortening of the vault or the wall from which it springs. Foreground hatching appears at wider intervals than in Van Heemskerck’s more meticulously inked examples.74 Apparently, the simple forms of the right barrel vault did not inspire him; an awkward passage of straight diagonal hatches struggles to describe the vault’s curved transition from wall to arch. Elsewhere, however, Van Heemskerck has achieved nuance and finish. Lines become more delicate as they recede into the distance, but not at the expense of contrast. Even the heavy masonry at left contains thin hatches describing shadows. Likewise, heavy dark passages punctuate the backdrop’s slight lines to show the marked contrast that the tunnels leading to the seating area create. A light ink wash on this sheet’s upper right hand corner and bottom edge combines with hatching to approximate the more acute sense of texture resulting from greater proximity to the viewer. In subject matter, this drawing, the Darmstadt sheet, and a view of the Colosseum’s performance area by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus are ahead of their time; we know of no other details of the Colosseum’s interior until Hieronymus Cock’s publications of the early 1550s, which obsess on the subject with no less than five interior views.75 Although this drawing does not find a verbatim counterpart among Van Heemskerck’s finished designs, many of his prints appear to have benefited from general reference to it, or others like it now lost. Van Heemskerck frequently designed prints with rusticated walls foreshortened towards print’s edge.76

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Cat. No. 21 Copy after Maarten van Heemskerck (by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus?) Close view looking east at Colosseum in perspective Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 47r 209 × 318 mm Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 29; Thoenes, 143; Stritt (2004), 67. This drawing shows the artist in deep meditation on the Colosseum’s ruined side. The composition emphasizes the successive foreshortening of the bays as they radiate from the center of the circular Flavian amphitheater. The draftsman, probably ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, uses only hatching to articulate shadows.77 A signature, “M. Heemskerck,” in different ink than that of the drawing, appears at lower right.78 From a closer vantage point than Jan Gossart’s famous view of 1508 [fig. 1.4], or Du Pérac’s of 1585, Van Heemskerck’s composition draws closest comparison with drawings by C. M. Pomodello and Hieronymus Cock.79 Along with Van Heemskerck’s close view of the Colosseum’s northwestern break [cat. no. 19] and view of the amphitheater from the interior of the Arch of Constantine [cat. no. 23], the original drawing that sired this copy may have served Van Heemskerck as a reference for the Colosseum’s appearance in in Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1].

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Arch of Constantine

Cat. No. 22 Maarten van Heemskerck South sides of Arch of Constantine and Colosseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 69r 133 × 209 mm. Pen and brown ink with some black ink

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Water Mark: none Notes: Red Chalk traces cover the entire bottom half of the arch and portions of the top edge.80 Literature: Filippi, 109.81 Seen from a dramatic worm’s eye view in Van Heemskerck’s finest technique, the Arch of Constantine recedes dramatically from the extreme left foreground to the right middle ground. The break in the Colosseum’s south side provides a stark backdrop in contrast to the arch’s ornate, decorative surface.82 At first glance, it appears as though Van Heemskerck has adhered to a strict Brunelleschian or Albertian systematic perspective. However, what seem at first glance to be sharply angled orthogonal lines leading us from lower and upper left to a vanishing point in the lower right third of this sheet are in fact slightly bowed. The curved line articulating the top of the Colosseum leads to the arch’s impost blocks, which appear in profile.83 As was often the convention in drawings of architecture, Van Heemskerck has rendered only the beginnings of each column’s fluting at the base and top.84 This is one of many drawings that Van Heemskerck composed with an object in the extreme foreground and one in the background.85 Unlike most of the other examples of that type in his corpus of Roman drawings, however, this composition is vertical. Because of its ground level perspective, high degree of finish, its delicate rendering of the Colosseum, and its emphasis on ornament, this drawing is most closely related to Van Heemskerck’s view of an overturned composite capital [cat. no. 17]. Just as we might imagine the foreshortened view of the Colosseum on this sheet’s verso as a pendant to the present drawing, one can also easily imagine its pairing with the drawing of the overturned capital, or as part of a set of vedute prompting discourse on the Roman history as it played itself out in the area near the Colosseum, just off the forum. This drawing is a unique specimen in the sense that it is the only known example of a drawing from the sixteenth century showing the Arch from such a dramatic perspective. Van Heemskerck’s contemporary, Sebastiano Serlio, showed the arch in strict elevation with the exception of the barrel vaulting of each passageway. Serlio stripped the arch of all of its statuary, relief sculpture, and coffering. Van Heemskerck’s drawing, on the other hand, suggests a living arch, not beholden to the limits of the straight edge, but one approached by a sentient consciousness in a place and a time. It

In and Around the Forum

is only with Claude and later, Piranesi, that we find similar expressions of the arch’s relation to the onset of time and nature. Perhaps the closest comparable contemporary example is a large drawing by little known Sienese artist Bartolomeo Neroni (known as “Il Riccio,” 1505/15–1571). Neroni’s drawing also shows the Arch in elevation with its impost blocks and the coffered barrel vaulting of each of its archways in perspective.86 Like Van Heemskerck, however, Neroni strives to show his viewer all of the relief sculpture he can see, but does not render it in exacting detail. Both draftsmen convey instead the suggestion of the relief sculptures, with the sum being the Arch’s generally cluttered affect. Such approaches may reflect the awakening consciousness of the arch as a palimpsest of spolia, first expressed by Raphael in his famous letter to Leo X, probably co-authored with Baldassare Castiglione.87 Van Heemskerck’s technique here is careful but not cautious. He has worked the sheet heavily, but has applied his line with flair and variety. Thin lines describing the columns and the archway’s molding contain the drawing’s only visible pentimenti. It is unlikely that Van Heemskerck used a straight edge when applying ink.88 All lines bear the energetic waves of his freehand stroke. This is even true of the straightest lines of the near column’s base. The pilaster behind the second column and the lintel’s molding arc ever so slightly, approximating the optical distortion that results from looking up at a tall edifice at close range. Van Heemskerck’s rendering of the arch’s columns shows their delicate tapering, revealing his sensitivity to the subtleties of design in ancient Roman architecture. He has also lavished more than his usual amount of hatching on surfaces throughout this composition, whether they are in light or shadow. Even the sculpture atop the furthest column is carefully observed and shaded with deliberation. Van Heemskerck has rendered the most heavily shaded parts of both edifices and the arch’s relief sculpture with black ink and a much thicker stroke. A greater than normal amount of diagonal and vertical hatches appears. This drawing found no afterlife in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre. Its finish, and its resemblance in technique to his preparatory sketches for prints suggest that it was a finished design that he may have intended for display or print production.

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Cat. No. 23 Maarten van Heemskerck View from the Interior of Arch of Constantine with Colosseum and Septizonium Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 56v 186 × 260 mm Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: Anchor in a Circle (Briquet 586–589) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 34–35; Filippi, 109–110; Thoenes, 146; Bartsch (2012): 27. In this quickly rendered drawing, we stand beneath the Arch of Constantine facing east. Although Van Heemskerck has apparently rendered this view in extreme haste, he has portrayed the reliefs on the interior of the eastern side of the central arch with enough fidelity for them to be recognizable. Simultaneously, we glance to our left and to our right, where we see the Colosseum and Septizonium, respectively. The relation of the monuments as they appear on this page reflects their true orientation in relation to one another; were we to face east from within the central arch and glance left, we would see the Colosseum. Similarly, the Septizonium would be to our right. However, Van Heemskerck shows the three buildings in a manner that could not possibly appear to the human eye in one gaze, at the same time. From within the Arch of Constantine, a single gaze cannot encompass the Colosseum and the site of the

In and Around the Forum

Septizonium. This sheet therefore ranks as one of the few to suggest Van Heemskerck’s ability to reconfigure Rome’s topography in the pictorial realm. Aside from a drawing from atop the Palatine [cat. no. 15], this is the only other drawing that shows the Colosseum at the angle Van Heemskerck used later in his Self Portrait Before the Colosseum [fig. 7.1].

Septizonium89

Cat. No. 24 Maarten van Heemskerck Perspective view Septizonium Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Inv. no. 3381–492. 295 × 160 mm. Pen and brown ink with slight minimal ink wash Literature: Egger, 1911, Taf. 93; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 55.

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Cat. No. 25 Maarten van Heemskerck Perspective view of Septizonium Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Inv. no. 3381–491 295 × 170 mm Pen and Brown Ink Notes: Inscription on first floor frieze: “MARTIN HEMSKERCK (sic.) DE H” (meaning “of Haarlem”). Literature: Egger, 1911, Taf. 92; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 55; Dacos (1995), cat. no. 115.

In and Around the Forum

On two splendid drawings of high finish, Van Heemskerck portrayed from two different angles Septimius Severus’s now destroyed ruin at the end of the via Appia. The first [cat. no. 24] shows the southeastern façade parallel to the picture plane. Such simplicity is a rare choice of vantage point for Van Heemskerck. However, this angle is not without its pictorial challenges. Even from this straight on view, the building’s asymmetrical configuration required subtle handlings of depth and height: the receding row of columns at lower right and the coffered ceilings of the third level. More in keeping with Van Heemskerck’s penchant for dynamic angles of view is the second drawing [cat. no. 25], shows the building from an oblique angle, a vantage point slightly further north of the building.90 Where technique is concerned, the shadowed areas of the second drawing bear greater contrast, suggesting that Van Heemskerck paid more attention to it in the finishing stages. He affixed his signature to this latter drawing by writing his name on the first floor frieze, suggesting that he himself saw this sheet as a superior example of his craftsmanship. Van Heemskerck’s use of his name on the frieze functions as more than a signature; it likens him to a patron, someone responsible for the creation of the building, as patrons names regularly adorned the friezes of Roman buildings. Moreover, it affects a collapse of antiquity onto Van Heemskerck’s present and vice versa. Both drawings are of the highest order, suitable for display. The Roman provenance of these drawings suggests that they never left the city. Their high finish and their close resemblance to one another further suggest that Van Heemskerck made them both for Roman patrons, or perhaps as gifts for collectors. The likelihood that these sheets never left Rome also allows us to speculate that one of them served as the source for Antoine (Italianized as “Antonio”) Lafréry’s print of the lost Severan building; published in 1546, the Septizonium print is one of the earliest Lafréry issued in his ongoing Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae series.91 Structures resembling the Septizonium appear in several of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman designs.92 Some contain buildings akin to speculative reconstructions of the Septizonium by contemporaries.93

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Forum Nervae

Cat. No. 26 Maarten van Heemskerck View looking north in Forum Nervae with Temple of Minerva and Albani Puteal Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 37r 210 × 287 mm Pen and brown ink Water Mark: Briquet no. 50 Notes: Black chalk underdrawing above the colonnacce at right Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 26–27; Filippi, 98; DiFuria (2008), 124; Veldman (2012), 19. On a large sheet, Van Heemskerck has executed one of his most virtuosic performances of an ancient site, which ranks among those most frequently drawn by sixteenth-century artists.94 All other examples are from nearly the same vantage point as Van Heemskerck’s, each with slight adjustments. Van Heemskerck shows us the Temple of Minerva’s façade parallel to the picture plane while the elaborate cornice construction to the right is in three quarters view. Figures

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appear in the middle ground beneath the rusticated arch of the bridge. The bridge leads us from the temple and the tower at the center of the composition to the colonnacce at right, which in turn leads to the heavily foregrounded Albani Puteal. The staffage figures exploring the site correspond in scale and pose with the sculpted ones (both free standing and in relief). An architectural fragment in the foreground contains an inscription, the first line of which reads “P E D I,” the second of which reads “M H…. k.” This may or may not be a quasi-signature of sorts. Technically speaking, this is a tour de force performance in a single layer of ink. Only the darkest shadows of the Temple of Minerva and its surrounding natural topography have received a second pass. Van Heemskerck’s uses of this drawing are most conspicuous. It thus appears to have been among the most useful Roman drawings for his post-Roman oeuvre. The colonnacce and bridge motif at right appear in several prints, including Balaam and the Angel [fig. 6.11] and Satan Smiting Job with Boils [fig. 6.9].95 Variations on the Temple of Minerva appear in Van Heemskerck’s print of the “Drunkenness of Noah” [fig. 8.13], from his Clades Judaeae Gentis series.96

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On the Quirinal Hill

Frontespizio di Nerone

Cat. No. 27 Maarten van Heemskerck Frontespizio di Nerone (or Templum Serapidis) in the Giardino Colonna, with Crater from S. Cecilia in Trastevere in Foreground Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 36r 135 × 210 mm. Water Mark: none Notes: Black chalk traces around the Crater’s right handle, right side, left handle, and bottom left side. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 20–21. The famous, often reproduced Crater from the courtyard of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere appears in the extreme foreground.1 It is one of two craters Van Heemskerck is known to have drawn while in Rome.2 In the pictorial reality Van Heemskerck has created here, the ancient Roman Frontespizio di Nerone (also known as the Templum Serapidis, Aedes Serapidis, or Templum Solis) on the Quirinal Hill sits “behind” the crater. Van Heemskerck has placed a figure before © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_017

On the Quirinal Hill

the altar, perhaps as a means of revealing its scale. If the figure here is in true scale with the monument, then Van Heemskerck has suggested that the sculpture on the frieze was life size. A site of frequent archeological and pictorial scrutiny in the sixteenth century, the altar had become part of the Palazzo Colonna in Van Heemskerck’s time.3 As with some other drawings, Van Heemskerck has here made two objects share pictorial space – he has created the appearance that they are in physical proximity to one another – by blending the foreground line with the middle ground and the background object. However, the objects he has juxtaposed were never in the same part of Rome, let alone in this particular physical relation to one another. Scholars have not noted that Van Heemskerck has perhaps also invented the placement of the vaulted grotto and its attached wall, both of which appear beneath Nero’s altar, oddly constructed for pictorial purposes. A view of the site by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, also from a comparable vantage point, shows more of the altar’s uphill approach, but no grotto where Van Heemskerck shows one.4 Rather, he shows an arched entrance with voussoirs further down the approach. An ink wash drawing of the altar by Dosio also shows no place for a grotto and resembles ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus’s drawing more closely than this one by Van Heemskerck.5 Van Heemskerck did not draw the buttresses that are visible in either the “Posthumus” or Dosio view.6 Another drawing by Giovan Antonio Dosio of substructures on the Palatine shows a grotto somewhat like the one Van Heemskerck has drawn here, leaving open the possibility that it is a second fictive juxtaposition within the same drawing.7 That these objects appear in the same scale with their parts aligned to one another suggests this drawing as a study of perspective, proportion, scale, and design; the base of the crater corresponds with the ground line beneath the temple, the curves of the crater’s bottom half respond to the arches of the vaulted grotto beneath the temple, the crater’s bottom half ends at the same height as a small wall in front of the temple, and its shaft extends to the same height as the temple’s main wall. The crater’s scrolled handles and the temple’s cornice are also at the same latitude. Van Heemskerck made use of this sheet in a print design. “Job on the Dunghill with his Wife and Three Friends” [fig. 6.7] contains a backdrop with a temple that is clearly based on the Templum as it appears in this sketch.8 He has changed the angle of the grotto. The half-pediment is not reversed in the print.

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Cat. No. 28 Maarten van Heemskerck Palazzo Colonna and Frontespizio di Nerone Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Inv. No. KA (IP) 5004r 283 × 199 mm Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen, 1927. This drawing of the Colonna family’s medieval palace behind the Frontespizio di Nerone is an autograph Van Heemskerck living away from the Berlin albums. The Palazzo Colonna’s portico with caryatids faces us, parallel to the picture plane. Behind the Palace is the Frontespizio di Nerine’s broken pediment, also on view in catalog number 27. Leaving the frame at right is the old wall of the Frontespizio, of which we see more in ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus’s drawing of the same site.9 To the left of the loggia is an ancient barrel vault and wall advancing towards the picture plane, which bears comparison to the manner in which Van Heemskerck has portrayed the Colosseum’s vaults [e.g. cat. nos. 19 and 20] and the substructures of the Palatine in his horizontal view including the Septizonium [cat. no. 13]. At the edge of this wall, two figures appear to converse. Further on to the left, in the lightest, rapidly applied strokes, are unfinished renderings of walls with arches and crenellations. These are also foreshortened, fanning out to our left to become increasingly parallel to

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the picture plane. In their summary handling, these thin, wispy lines bear comparison to the technique in passages of Van Heemskerck’s least finished drawings, such as the drawing from within the Arch of Constantine’s center arch [cat. no. 23]. Several technical aspects argue for Van Heemskerck’s hand. He has used brown ink, not as dark, for example, as the ink in his mediumview panorama of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1] or his drawing of the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 26]. In tone and hue, it is more akin to the ink used for the outline pen strokes on the chalk drawing of the Colosseum’s broken quadrant [cat. no. 19], or the long view towards the Colosseum [cat. no. 5]. The strokes here are thin, and nearly uniform in width, similar to the hatching in the Lugt collection drawing [cat. no. 78]. However, unlike the technique on that sheet, this one shows more points of contrast, despite the consistent thinness of line. Van Heemskerck’s method for building up dark passages is to increase the thickness of the line ever so slightly, to press harder, but mainly to move hatches closer together. The house’s distance and parallel orientation from the picture plane is a determining factor in the nearly uniform thinness of this drawing’s strokes. This is also in keeping with the technique on display in the Forum Nervae drawing [cat. no. 26], even confirming Van Heemskerck’s handling of ink in comparable drawings where he renders objects extremely close to the picture plane in thicker strokes, but then uses the stroke we see here in the middle ground. In only a few places there are lighter lines beneath the dark lines, with the former being less precise than the latter. Examples include the left side of the broken arch in the wall above the loggia, and the lines articulating the steps at the far right of the house’s basement story. Delicate passages like the arch in the wall above the loggia, which allows a view to an arcuated wall behind it argue for Van Heemskerck’s hand; in form, they are lose to his masterful handling of similar background passages in the Overturned Capital [cat. no. 17] and the oblique view of the Arch of Constantine [cat. no. 22], where the Colosseum appears with the same technique. Vegetation just below, to the right of, and spatially before, the Frontespizio’s pediment is very similar to that which we see in several drawings, for example catalog number 9, where vegetation sprouts from a hill beyond the prominent ruined post in the middle ground. This view of the antiquity is comparable to Du Pérac’s view.10 Not previously noted by scholars is that the drawing of the same structure by Lambert Sustris, identified by Nicole Dacos, shows the structure in reverse and a portico with what appears to be four caryatids, while this drawing portrays six load bearing columns.11 A drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art records almost the same view as the one presented here.12

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Cat. No. 29 Maarten van Heemskerck Grotto Beneath Frontespizio di Nerone? Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Inv. No. KA (IP) 5004 283 × 199mm Water Mark: none Notes: Mark in lower left corner: 790 (in black ink), lower right “40 x” in red chalk, above and to the right of this “120” in pencil and above and to the right of this, “1565,” also in pencil. The sheet has glue all around its edges, indicating that when originally mounted, this side was hidden. Arguing further for Van Heemskerck’s hand on the previous drawing of the Palazzo Colonna is this drawing, which until now has been ignored, appearing on the verso of catalog number 28. This might be a truer to life portrayal of a grotto on the Palazzo Colonna complex, which perhaps inspired the vaulted grotto that we see in his other drawing of his Berlin drawing of the Frontespizio [cat. no. 27].13 However, this is a much more rusticated, organic, and much less systematized structure than the one appearing in that drawing. Regarding the technique here, in contrast to the delicate touch that features in the drawing on this sheet’s recto side, Van Heemskerck has used the thickest network of strokes to portray the rough stone and the dank cavern. He has layered a network of vertical, diagonal and horizontal hatches over his rendering of the object. The area

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surrounding the grotto recedes to show less carefully worked passages. Above the grotto, we are not sure if we see the wall leading up to the altar that appears on the recto exiting the frame at right. There appear to be the faintest repetitions of arched windows, like those in the wall itself. Moreover, the direction of the topography, upwards from right to left, is opposite to that appearing in the Berlin portrayal [cat. no. 27], which might mean that this drawing portrays the opposite end of the grotto, or at a different structure than the one appearing on the Berlin sheet. This drawing formed the basis for the rock formation in Van Heemskerck’s print “The Diligent Worker Aspiring to the Righteousness of the Lord.”14

Baths of Diocletian

Cat. No. 30 Maarten van Heemskerck Perspective View of the Baths of Diocletian15 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 7r 134 × 207 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: Asterisk and arrowheads (Upper half of Briquet 6289) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 6; Stritt (2004), 73.

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As in Van Heemskerck’s drawings of the Baths of Caracalla [cat. nos. 47 and 48], we gaze through a series of colossal bath vaults.16 From Van Heemskerck’s chosen vantage point, the furthest arch is barely visible behind a pier in the drawing’s middle ground. Meanwhile, the engaged column in the drawing’s distant central vault nearly escapes the upper left corner of the page. Van Heemskerck’s chosen an angle of view emphasizes the ruined state of the baths because the rhythm of the arches should continue in the nearest vault, but cannot, due to decay. He has rendered these ruins in a medium finish. Architectural details appear only summarily, thus creating ambiguities; coffering at the top of the structure on the right blends with the shadows where cavities in the structure appear and even with the shadow caused by an interior cornice. However, perspective, proportions, and shapes are precise. The central right backdrop of Van Heemskerck’s undated “Adoration of the Magi” contains vaulting that may be indebted to the right pier of the main arch in this drawing.17 In a much more general sense, he may have brought his experience with rendering these particular forms to bear on his design for the fantasie of springing vaults in the backdrop of the Drapers altarpiece [fig. 0.2].

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Trofei di Mario

Cat. No. 31 Maarten van Heemskerck Trofei di Mario Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 49r 212 × 287 mm. Pen and Brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 30; DiFuria (2012), 160. This is one of Van Heemskerck’s quick drawings. As in so many of his more hastily rendered drawings, he has here captured the general shape, proportion, and lighting of the ruined ancient Severan nymphaeum with notable veracity. In its three-bay configuration, it is more comparable to the Wijngartdranken impresa that Veldman attributes to Van Heemskerck than anything else in the entire extant corpus of Roman drawings.18 Van Heemskerck has chosen the natural vantage point from which to render the monument, gazing south towards its display side; he has portrayed it in elevation, parallel to the picture plane, as Du Pérac later did.19

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San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure

Cat. No. 32 Maarten van Heemskerck View with San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure / Decorative motifs from the frieze of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura20 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 21r 134 × 206 mm. Pen and Brown ink with sparing use of ink wash Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 12; Filippi, 101. In another handsome medium-view panorama (despite a low finish), Van Heemskerck stood facing northeast to draw San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure at an oblique angle that shows the portico’s profile. At bottom center, he has written “S. Laurencin” in the same ink he used for the main drawing. At bottom right, another inscription reads “A. S. Lorenzo” in red chalk. Van Heemskerck used the same reddishbrown ink wash he used in his drawing of composite capitals [cat. no. 69]. Overall, the hatching technique is more vertical and applied with much less precision than we have seen in Van Heemskerck’s other pure pen and ink drawings.

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Porticus Octaviae

Cat. No. 33 Maarten van Heemskerck Sculpture of a Foot with view looking northeast at Porticus Octaviae and figures in left background Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 32r 134 × 211 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Notes: A faint black chalk mark appears just below the Porticus’ cornice. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, I, 19; Filippi, 110–111; Eventuate, 34 The southern half of the Porticus Octaviae appears in perspective in this drawing’s left background.1 Within, Van Heemskerck’s customary summarily rendered staffage figures mingle around a canopied market table. The extreme right central foreground shows an unidentifiable sculptural fragment of a foot in a sandal.2 This drawing

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_018

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may be unfinished; there is no backdrop other than the Porticus, and the entire right quarter of this sheet is blank. The closest known match for the foot is the Pie di Marmo. However, Christian Hülsen correctly rejected this identification because this sheet shows a right foot, and the Pie di Marmo is a left foot. Moreover, the Pie di Marmo is much more worn than the foot Van Heemskerck has rendered here. Thus, we leave open the possibility that this might be a drawing of an invented sculpted foot inspired by the Pie di Marmo. Hülsen pointed out that ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus provided a closer match to the Pie di Marmo in Berlin’s Album II.3 The foot on the present sheet may also be a composite that Van Heemskerck based on his sketches of other sculptures of sandaled feet.4 This juxtaposition of foot and portico probably does not document Roman topography as Van Heemskerck found it. For these objects to appear in this physical relation, the foot would have to be at the southwestern end of the Jewish ghetto, near the banks of the Tiber. No records indicate that any such sculptural fragment ever occupied that part of the city. However, it is clear that Van Heemskerck intended the foot and the Porticus to appear as though they share the same physical space rather than simply appearing on the same page. He drew the sculpture’s base as if it is in front of a marble slab before the Porticus’ right pilaster. In the lower left corner, Van Heemskerck used horizontal hatching to blend the sculpture’s ground line with the middle ground. The deliberate choice to show only half of the Porticus suggests Van Heemskerck’s concern with placing the ancient gate in a composition.5 This drawing’s somewhat summary technique also suggests that pictorial concerns were a higher priority than detail or finish. While there is evidence of a second darker inking phase in the shadows of the portico and the combination of thin and thicker strokes of the foot, the thicker lack subtle variations, and appear at wide intervals. Van Heemskerck’s attention to design and shape, however, is precise throughout. In particular, he has captured the proportions of the Porticus convincingly. Thus, an accretion of hastily applied lines seems to give us more precise details than are actually present because they appear contained within the context of an authoritative grasp of contour and proportion. The right foot from a sculpture of Nero appears twice in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre: in the left foreground of his design for the “Amphitheatrum” print of 1572’s Eight Wonders of the World series, and in the left foreground of the painting Triumph of

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Bacchus [fig. 3.4].6 Porticus-like structures appear in the backdrops of Van Heemskerck’s print designs for “Jezebel Stealing the Forged Letters” from Ahab, Jezebel and Naboth, and “The Departure of the Angel” from his Story of Tobias.7

Forum Boarium

Cat. No. 34 Maarten van Heemskerck Arch of Janus (Janus Quadrifrons), Arco Argentari, the Fontana di S. Giorgio in Velabro, and Figures Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 29r 126 × 203 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none. Notes: Faint black chalk or charcoal traces on the arch, the letter’s “B” and “A” to the left and right of the campanile, and smudges obscuring the details of the arch. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 17. Van Heemskerck has again chosen his vantage point with exceptional deliberation in this unique view of this area of Rome, tucked away in the low lying area between the Tiber (approximately 600

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feet to the east), the Palatine and the Circo Massimo (due south and southwest, respectively), and the Capitoline (directly north): an ancient Roman cattle market known as the Forum Boarium, which artists drew less frequently than other nearby ancient sites.8 From west of the spring known to ancient Romans as the velabrum, we gaze slightly northwest along the Arch of Janus’s north/south axis. Van Heemskerck thus shows the arch’s southeastern façade in perfect parallel to the picture plane, in elevation, with its vaulting in perspective and the drawing’s primary vanishing point at its center. We can therefore see the interior of all four of the arch’s vaults. San Giorgio in Velabro and the ancient Roman Arco Argentari, affixed to the church to the left of its portico, nave, and campanile, appear in the right background. Van Heemskerck has also composed the church complex so that we are able to see the row of columns of the Arco Argentari receding into space while its west end is parallel the picture plane, indicating that he has taken liberties with the placement of the topography on the site. This portrayal is not as it would appear if one were to occupy either of the places where Van Heemskerck stood to draw either monument as we see them here; in reality, their facades sit at angles to one another. Moreover, other views of this area from other vantage points – those by Du Pérac and Dosio, for example – suggest that Van Heemskerck has portrayed a greater distance between the arch and the church than was actually the case.9 In this same vein, he has included the circular church of San Teodoro, which is much further away from San Giorgio in Velabro than it appears in this drawing. In its technical aspect, this drawing bears some high finish characteristics, such as a second layer of darker ink in the foreground and a light touch in the middle ground. Ultimately, however, it is a drawing that Van Heemskerck did not bring to the high level of finish pervading other sheets; the application of hatches in the foreground is especially heavy handed. Rare for Van Heemskerck is the inclusion of genre content, the laying out of clothes to dry after having been laundered in the ancient velabrum’s waters. More figures populate this view than any other that Van Heemskerck drew of Rome. While this drawing did not receive verbatim quotation in any of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman works, his study of the Arch of Janus on this sheet and the one in Hamburg [cat. no. 35] must have contributed to the invented ruin we find in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, in turn quoted in his Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulchre [fig. 6.3] and the triumphal arch in the central middle ground of The Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], which also has four openings.10

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Cat. No. 35 Maarten van Heemskerck Arch of Janus (Janus Quadrifrons), Arco Argentari, and San Giorgio in Velabro Hamburg, Kunsthalle Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. No. 21803 138 × 198 mm. Water Mark: none Literature: Bartsch (2008), 148. In yet another drawing juxtaposing an object in foreground and background, Van Heemskerck shows the four-sided Arch of Janus from a closer vantage point than in catalog number 34 above. For this drawing, Van Heemskerck has positioned himself to the east, and gazed west towards the Tiber. He has given the portico of San Giorgio in Velabro a hasty finish, especially at far right, where hatches rush to completion. The Arco Argentari likewise has received only hastily applied strokes. However, Van Heemskerck has handled the Arch of Janus, the drawing’s feature monument, with impressive facility. It bears the blend of precision and rapidity that prompted Van Mander’s assessment of his technique as having a “light, free handling,” which would also become the hallmark of Van Heemskerck’s deft handling of paint.11 Through the four-sided Arch we see the Temple of Hercules Victor. To the left of the Arch, we see

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the campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. This drawing’s rendering appears to have had a key role in Van Heemskerck’s composition of the fantasia appearing in catalog number 73. The articulation of the vaulting beneath the arch receives its echo in what appears to be that imagined ruin’s convex coffering.

Cat. No. 36 Maarten van Heemskerck View South from within the Forum Boarium with Arco Argentari and San Giorgio in Velabro’s Portico Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 45r 209 × 318 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Brown ink mark in center of sheet. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 29; Stritt (2004), 70; Bartsch (2012), 27; Veldman (2012): 18

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In a stunning, high finish, Van Heemskerck has portrayed the Forum Boarium with yet another composition emphasizing dramatic recession from foreground to background. In the left foreground, the remains of the ancient Arco Argentari attached as a portico to San Giorgio in Velabro occupies most of Van Heemskerck’s attention. The Palatine’s western side provides a graceful sloping backdrop, which offsets and complements the strict angularity of the foregrounded portico.12 The Baths of Caracalla – and further on, the Septizonium – appear in minimal outline in the distant right background. As in so many examples, Van Heemskerck has sprinkled staffage figures sparingly through his composition, this time, at the apex of an arced form in the distant ruins of the Palatine. The church of St. Anastasia should appear in the middle ground from this vantage point, but it does not.13 Van Heemskerck has rendered the Arco Argentari in what is mostly a single layer of precisely applied ink hatches. Only the shadows beneath the portico and some layers of the cornice receive a second layer of hatches. The technique is most comparable to that of the more famous drawing of the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 26], which is also on a sheet comparable in size to this. The hatching at the base acts as a series of orthogonal lines. He has gone to the trouble to vary the direction of the hatching on the inside of the arch to show us the different pilasters, despite their dramatic foreshortening. The vanishing point leads directly to the ruins on the west side of the Palatine, which we view through the portico. We see these same ruins from a vantage point that is further south and facing east in catalog number 13. No post-Roman designs are directly relatable to the motifs in this drawing. Several prints, however, contain porticoes designed like the one on the front of San Giorgio in Velabro, seen here in foreshortening, to the left of the ancient portico in the foreground.14 The foreshortening of the columns and lintel in the town gate at far right in Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22] appears to be the nearest to a verbatim quote from this among Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman fantasie.15

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Piazza del Popolo

Cat. No. 37 Maarten van Heemskerck Muro Torto with Santa Maria del Popolo / Porta del Popolo with Santa Maria del Popolo Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 7v 128 × 199 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: Asterisk and arrowheads top half (of Briquet number 6289) Red Chalk marks in lower left corner. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 7. Van Heemskerck drew the around the Porta del Popolo, from inside and outside the gate.16 These are the earliest known drawings of the Muro Torto and the Porta del Popolo. Later, they became popular subjects, especially the latter.17 As the point of entry to the Eternal City for northern pilgrims, the gate and its surroundings may have held special significance for Van Heemskerck. Moreover, his visit fell just after major events in its century-long revitalization.18 For the view in the upper register, Van Heemskerck stood about 200 yards north of the city’s north wall on a small hill that is now in the Borghese gardens. At far left is an unidentifiable gate.19 Left

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of center, the Muro Torto bursts forth in a cacophony of vegetation, reticulated brickwork, and skewed angles, much as it appears today. Behind and to the right of the craggy wall are the domes of Santa Maria del Popolo’s apse and Raphael’s Chigi Chapel. The rough bastions of the Porta del Popolo bracket the composition at far right. For the lower half of this sheet, Van Heemskerck stood in the Piazza del Popolo’s southwestern corner near the entrance to Leo X’s via di Ripetta. At center is the rusticated arch of the Porta del Popolo as it looked before Vignola executed Michelangelo’s alterations in the early 1560s. The low-slung gate appears in need of digging out, but all of Santa Maria del Popolo’s steps appear.20 As was frequently his custom, Van Heemskerck has drawn silhouetted figures walking through the gate. Neither of the drawing on this sheet is of refined technique. However, their apparent lack of painstaking care makes the subtle tonal variations and complete lack of pentimenti especially impressive. In the upper half drawing, Van Heemskerck has executed passages of subtle contrast out of the Muro Torto’s varied textures. Beyond the foregrounded Muro, Santa Maria del Popolo appears via a tighter, thinner hatch, while bolder lines announce the gate beyond. The lower half drawing is particularly notable for its angle of view, which presents the church and the gate in a picturesque manner.

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Pantheon

Cat. No. 38 Maarten van Heemskerck Close view looking east at Pantheon Portico Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 39r 205 × 239 mm Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: “Agnus Dei” (Briquet no. 50) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 27; Veldman, 1987, 374–379; Filippi, 99. Van Heemskerck has drawn the western side of the Pantheon’s portico while looking east. This enables a view of the portico’s ruined west cornice, an aspect of this view that has occupied more of Van Heemskerck’s attention than the capitals. However, his biggest concern here is his vantage point, which he has selected to show us as many columns in full view as possible. The pilasters to the right of the composition show more fluting than in other examples [e.g., cat. no. 22], but less than others [e.g., cat. no. 3] and do not extend the length of the pilaster. Figures occupying the foreground indicate

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scale. The infill between the portico’s west columns (nearest the picture plane) is higher than the figures standing before it. Between the two left columns is a structure with a window. Van Heemskerck’s technique here is in a medium finish. Passages to the right are incomplete as are some passages in the cornice. He has not applied the multiple layers of hatching used to show columns in half-light that we find in drawings of high finish [e.g., cat. no. 62]. However, he has applied multiple layers of ink to the shadows in the ceiling in a manner that is closely comparable to the hatching on the interior of the Palazzo Colonna’s loggia [cat. no. 28]. The result is a high contrast, which is natural given the vantage point. This drawing may have served as a point of reference for Van Heemskerck’s postRoman designs showing columnated interiors and porticoes.21 The receding pilasters at right in this drawing may have served as a reference for the preparatory sketch of Van Heemskerck’s print of Mary Magdalen, in his Exemplary Women series of prints.22

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Banchi and Borgo

Cat. No. 39 Maarten van Heemskerck Right half of the Elevation of Palazzo Branconio dell’Acquila Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 55v 122 × 201 mm Red Chalk Water Mark: none Van Heemskerck’s signature appears in the left column on the first floor. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 31; Filippi, 104–105. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_019

In and Around the Vatican

Cat. No. 40 Maarten van Heemskerck Half Elevation of Banco di Santo Spirito / Half Elevation of Unidentified Palace in Borgo1 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 68r 135 × 210 mm. Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: none

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Notes: The elevation on the right appears to be slightly raised, as if the artist folded this sheet. There are Vertical red chalk traces on right third.2 Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 35; Filippi, pp. 104. These are the only two sheets among Van Heemskerck’s Roman sketches containing architectural elevations.3 There has been speculation that the half-elevations of the Banco di Santo Spirito and the unidentified palace in Borgo [cat. no. 40] are copies.4 As for catalog number 39, if Van Heemskerck did not render the long-destroyed Palazzo Branconio dell’Acquila on site, no drawing presents itself as the unquestioned source for his copy. An unlikely but not impossible candidate is Parmigianino’s drawing of the palace, also elevation in chalk. While Parmigianino was not in Rome after the Sack, an artist from his Roman circle may have possessed his elevation of Raphael’s palace and shown it to Van Heemskerck.5 If Van Heemskerck copied Parmigianino’s drawing, he departed from the Italian source by rendering the palace in more elegant, attenuated proportions and by placing sculpture in the piano nobile’s second and third niches from the right.6 Van Heemskerck’s undetailed rendering of the piano nobile’s decorations might resemble the swirling gestures in Parmigianino’s drawing more closely than it resembles the palace’s reliefs. However, without the built example for verification and only one other less detailed drawing to consult, no safe conclusion is at hand.7 Both drawings are of a much lower level of craftsmanship than is usual for Van Heemskerck. The dearth of plans and elevations among his drawings and the poor technique suggest his lack of interest in the scientific methods of rendering buildings emerging among the architects he may have met in Rome. The lesser technique on these sheets could also indicate that Van Heemskerck copied from a technically inferior source. On both sheets, Van Heemskerck has abandoned his customary hatches. Raphael’s richly sculpted façade may have prompted him to draw with red chalk, a medium he usually reserved for detailed studies of sculpture, decorative elements, or capitals at close range.8 Van Heemskerck has completed the outline of all the building’s parts. But this drawing is nonetheless unfinished. Many outlines are faint and a minimum of shading pervades. Only the capital of the first floor’s left column and the bases the piano nobile’s middle colonnettes hint at the level of finish Van Heemskerck might have achieved had he

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continued to work this sheet. However, even these passages lack the sharpness of Van Heemskerck’s other red chalk studies. Catalog number 40 is one of only a few containing brown ink-wash instead of hatching. These half-elevations appear via imprecise lines. This is especially true of the silhouette of the rustication of the palace at right. We also see an unconvincing, tentative beginning to a perspective rendering of the Banco’s cornice. Only fleeting passages – the pilasters and the arched pediment of the palace at right – remind us of Van Heemskerck’s sure hand. The smudge in the Banco’s entrance, which spills into the voussoirs above it, is also rare among Van Heemskerck’s sketches, which are mostly meticulous in their neatness. Finding no verbatim quotation in Van Heemskerck’s postRoman oeuvre, these drawings apparently had no afterlife in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre.

St. Peter’s

Cat. No. 41 Maarten van Heemskerck Piazza San Pietro Vienna, Albertina Inv. no. 49.897 276 (L), 263 (R), × 623 mm Pen and brown ink Water Mark: not visible due to mounting

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Literature: Egger, 1911, Taf. 17; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 68–73, Taf. 130; Dunbar, 195–204. This virtuosic medium-view panorama of Piazza San Pietro in high finish is the largest of all known drawings traditionally attributed to Van Heemskerck. It is one of four known drawings executed in the mid-1530s portraying the piazza and the Vatican Palace from the east. All are thought to be products of the circle of artists associated with Van Heemskerck.9 This one by the artist himself is the only drawing to show the entrance façade of Old St. Peter’s unadorned, without decorations for Charles V’s Triumphal Entry on April 6, 1536.10 Van Heemskerck’s vantage point is carefully chosen to show St. Peter’s entrance façade and campanile parallel to the picture plane. To the left of the Old St. Peter’s Benediction Loggia, Bramante’s vaulting of the unfinished new St. Peter’s peeks over the pediment of the old church’s nave. To the right, the roof of the Sistine Chapel emerges above the Vatican entrance and behind the Vatican palace, which recedes subtly to the right. The ancient Roman walls run from the center of the composition to the right, slightly foreshortened to advance towards the picture plane. On either side of the path leading to the Vatican’s entrance at right, soldiers stand in formation as a figure on horseback – perhaps the Pope – rides in procession towards Borgo, followed by an orderly retinue on foot.11 In the lower right foreground, a figure dips his hands in the piazza’s fountain, which Van Heemskerck has taken the trouble to render with what appears to be flowing water. While this drawing’s overall composition featuring a series of buildings and walls at mid-range from the picture plane did not find its way into Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman art, specific motifs did. The Fall of Babylon [fig. 8.9], “Man Finding Salvation in the Church of Christ,” and “thou Shalt not Commit Adultery: Bathsheba Receiving the Message from David,” contain campanile bearing bifora windows like the ones we see here, belonging to the old St. Peter’s.12 A piazza bearing architectural elements comparable to those we see here appears in the distant background of Van Heemskerck’s “Ahasuerus Consulting Haman.”13 The two-story palace-like structure at middle ground left in Isaiah’s Prophesy Over Jerusalem is suggestive of elements we see here, albeit in a recombined form, in the papal apartments at right, and the benediction loggia at left.14

In and Around the Vatican

Cat. No. 42 Maarten van Heemskerck New St. Peter’s South Transept and Santa Maria della Febbre with unfinished south Transept Arm in Foreground. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 54r 170 × 312 mm Pen and Brown ink with some ink wash Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 34; Thoenes, 142–43; Veldman, 1987, 370–72; Filippi, 103. Among the larger sheets in Berlin’s second album, this drawing’s attribution to Van Heemskerck was once questioned. But it has since been returned to him as autograph.15 Van Heemskerck’s vantage point, south of the new St. Peter’s unfinished crossing, reveals the new church’s complex spaces around a de-centered vanishing point. More than a mere drawing of a building, this rendering communicates the sheer physicality of the massive, sprawling disarray of Bramante’s “immeasurable concetto.”16 In a supremely masterful rendering of pictorial space, the curvature of the transept’s south arm advances towards intimacy with the viewer only to recede dramatically to the apse at left and Santa Maria della Febbre to the right.17 Van Heemskerck has given us an unhindered view of Santa Maria della Febbre’s conic roof and two of its bays. The top of the Vatican

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Obelisk punctuates this passage. The nave of the Old St. Peter’s appears above and behind the circular church. At left, the crossing’s unfinished south vault looms large despite its apparent distance from the picture plane, making its massive scale all the more apparent. The vault’s coffered underside marks the drawing’s point of deepest shadow. The mixture of curves and straight lines in the vault’s arch, voussoirs, coffering, and apex combine to provide a transition from the circular passages at center and right to the relatively angular apse at left. The church’s unfinished east and west walls appear mostly in shadow, as opposed to the sheer side of the vault, which must be illumined by the afternoon sun. The foreground remains unfinished; there, the beginnings of a composite capital appear. Among Van Heemskerck’s drawings on larger sheets, this one ranks as one his most technically masterful. Lines vary from thick and bold to delicate. Van Heemskerck inked with extreme precision nearly everywhere. Few pentimenti are visible, despite no apparent use of a straight edge. His virtuosic command of St. Peter’s shape, proportion, and situation in space hides his shorthand approach to detail. This drawing may have been helpful to Van Heemskerck when he designed the ruins in the backdrop of the Drapers Altarpiece’s Annunciation panel (fig. 0.2).18 Prints for “Judah” and “Solomon Building the Temple” also show unfinished vaulted structures like this.19 The latter print also shows a semicircular arched niche supporting a wall with retaining arches resembling the exposed wall facing the picture plane in this drawing’s left middle ground. Ruined walls with attenuated retaining arches like these also appear in the left backdrop of Van Heemskerck’s enigmatic design for the “Adoration of the Magi” from the Clades Judaeae Gentis series.20 Van Heemskerck may have consulted the passage at right with Santa Maria della Febbre and the Vatican in several prints. It appears in reverse in the backdrop of “Tobit Blinded by Sparrow’s Droppings” and “St. Peter Preaching in Jerusalem”.21 This same passage receives more liberal variations in “The Third Excuse: The Man who Married A Wife” from the series The Parable of the King who Prepared a Wedding, “The Flagellation of Christ” from the Seven Bleedings series, and “St. Mark” from the Four Evangelists series, all of which feature circular temples next to obelisks or other vertical, attenuated structures.22 Vaults parallel to the picture plane like the ones appearing here appear in altered form in the backdrops of several prints by Van Heemskerck.23

In and Around the Vatican

Cat. No. 43 Maarten van Heemskerck Bramante’s Vaults for the New St. Peter’s Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 13r 135 × 210 mm. Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: Crossed Arrows (Lower half of Briquet 6289) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 8–9; Filippi, 102; Thoenes, 121; DiFuria (2012): 160–161. In this exceptional specimen among Van Heemskerck’s drawings, he has chosen an angle that will show three of the crossing vaults. We peer through the south vault, which rises above a ruined wall with two occuli. The Vatican Obelisk and Santa Maria della Febbre appear in left background. The vantage point, north of the vaults and west of the Belvedere, is comparable to the one chosen by ‘Anonymous B’ and the author of a drawing from Hieronymus Cock’s 1561 series of vedute.24 However, Van Heemskerck stood closer to the structure and has made the slight, but significant choice to render the building from slightly further east, so that his viewer may see a foreshortened glimpse of the eastern vault. Van Heemskerck has departed from his conventional hatching technique, presenting a masterful ink wash rendering of shadows

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and texture. He has only hatched to show retaining masonry and voussoirs. Ink wash and short pen strokes combine to effectively describe the rough texture of the walls on the south side of the unfinished structure, particularly the wall facing south on the east pier of the vault. Vegetation springs from the west pier of the south vault as well as the cornice on the north side of the apse. We see the ruins of a column from Old St. Peter’s. The distant backgrounds of Van Heemskerck’s prints portraying the Sack of Rome and the captivity of Clement VII (figs. 23 and 24) show St. Peter’s in an unfinished state, as in this drawing.25

In and Around the Vatican

Cat. No. 44 Maarten van Heemskerck Vatican Obelisk and Santa Maria della Febbre Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 22v 285 × 209 mm Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 18; Filippi, 103.

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The Vatican Obelisk stands nearly at the center of this composition, and Santa Maria della Febbre is behind. On the far right, we see the south vault of the crossing of the New St. Peter’s. Two figures appear in the foreground, one to the far left, and one to the far right, in an arched doorway leading into the southern wing of the old Vatican complex. The seemingly awkward vantage point, in which the Vatican obelisk appears to block Santa Maria della Febbre, is a common one, from which ‘Anonymous B’ and Giovan Antonio Dosio also drew.26 A print after Dosio’s drawing appeared in 1569, perhaps published by Dosio himself in collaboration with Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri. Dosio’s views are from further back, and show a wall to the south that may have prevented a more strategic vantage point. This drawing is in a low finish, a technique closely resembling Van Heemskerck’s portrayal of the Trofei di Mario [cat. no. 31].27 It is thus notable for the precision and economy with which Van Heemskerck has achieved a convincing portrayal of his vista. The obelisk’s right side appears via the thinnest of lines, one of the few in all of his drawings that he rendered with a straight edge. We only find pentimenti in the zones below and above the finished ink of the obelisk’s orb. Van Heemskerck used thick lines sparingly for contours, where edges meet with shadows (as in the far-right buttress of Santa Maria della Febbre), or where an object is silhouetted against the sky (as in the distant left buttress of Santa Maria della Febbre). Even where the window of Santa Maria della Febbre merges with the shadowed side of the obelisk, Van Heemskerck has altered the direction of his hatching instead of using a thick line to differentiate between them. Yet he manages to achieve contrast by using cross hatching selectively, only in the darkest shadows. The structure of Santa Maria della Febbre, particularly its exterior buttresses with windows between them, may have inspired the appearance of some circular buildings in his post-Roman designs.28

In and Around the Vatican



Belvedere

Cat. No. 45 Maarten van Heemskerck Landscape with Belvedere Exterior from the Monte Mario Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 36r 269 × 408 mm Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: none. Notes: Contains an “MVHK” monogram, possibly added later. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 25–26; Filippi, 104. We stand on the ancient via Triumphalis (the modern Strada di Monte Mario) and gaze south.29 This sheet records the northern portion of the Vatican complex before Paul III and Pius IV built their walls. The tower to the right is a vestige of the medieval walls, parts of which were demolished in order to build the Vatican palace under Nicolas V. The building to the right of the tower is unidentified.30 A monogram like the one in the lower right-hand corner of Van Heemskerck’s small view of the Palazzo Madama sculpture collection [cat. no. 62] and the now de-attributed drawing of the interior of the unfinished new St. Peter’s at its crossing [cat. no. 81] appears

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in this drawing’s lower right corner. Like those marks, this one is of different ink; the hand of a connoisseur likely added it later.31 This is either autograph or a copy after a Van Heemskerck original.32 Watermarks do not provide conclusive evidence.33 This sheet is also bigger than the large sheets in Berlin’s album II containing autograph Van Heemskercks. Some technical aspects argue against Van Heemskerck’s hand. There is no hatching anywhere on this sheet. The artist uses an ink wash to describe all shadows. Only five sheets traditionally attributed to Van Heemskerck contain ink wash instead of hatching.34 In those, ink wash appears within outlines. On this sheet, however, some objects are defined entirely by ink wash that is free of any outlines. The present volume gives the drawing to Van Heemskerck, however. The technique here bears passages resembling most closely the technique on view in Van Heemskerck’s drawing of San Giovanni in Laterano [cat. no. 49], almost its equal in nuanced tonal variety and high contrast. The present sheet only lacks tonal subtlety in the foreground vegetation, which resembles closely the vegetal motif that appears on many autograph Van Heemskercks in a pure pen and ink hatching technique [e.g., cat. no. 1]. As was Van Heemskerck’s method in other ink wash drawings [e.g. cat. no. 43], he has here applied an extra layer of ink to indicate deeper shadows.35 Some of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman designs are relatable to this drawing. Structures resembling the buildings at the north end of the Belvedere appear in some of Van Heemskerck’s prints.36

In and Around the Vatican

Cat. No. 46 Maarten van Heemskerck Unfinished elevation of Cortile del Belvedere Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 36v 404 × 257 mm. Pen and Brown Ink and Red Chalk Water Mark: Two Crossed Arrows (Briquet 6292) Literature: Michaelis, vol. 1, 160; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 26. Aside from the broad-view of the Belvedere cortile interior in the so-called de Vos Sketchbook, which might be a copy of a lost Van

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Heemskerck [cat. no. 75], this is the only drawing suggesting Van Heemskerck’s exploration of the area. It is so unfinished that it is difficult to say with certainty if it is truly an elevation of the Cortile del Belvedere. It may be a palace facade.37 One should view this drawing by making the recto’s top side the right side. Then we see the right side of what appears to be a facade elevation, in red chalk. Hülsen and Egger must surmise that this is an elevation of Bramante’s Cortile because of Van Heemskerck’s depiction of the Belvedere from the Monte Mario on the recto side of this sheet, though they do not state this explicitly. At the lowest level we see pilasters next to the end of the composition. A horizontal flaw (vertical on the recto side) – where the paper maker has conjoined two smaller sheets and where the watermark occurs – interrupts the second floor, and the artist has articulated no bays here. In the top region of the vertical sheet, the artist has rendered the base of a pilaster in pen. It may be the beginnings of the third floor of the building (in which case we are not looking at an elevation of Bramante’s Cortile). But if it is, then it is entirely out of proportion with – much bigger than – the first floor.

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Baths of Caracalla

Cat. No. 47 Maarten van Heemskerck Baths of Caracalla and Santo Stefano Rotondo.1 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 58r 130 × 200 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 32; Stritt (2004), 73; DiFuria (2010a), 97–98. This drawing is yet another example of Van Heemskerck’s careful choice of angle of view for the purposes of constructing a composition that shows us a view straight through the Terme’s vaulting, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_020

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while opening up onto a distant background at right.2 Rising above and to the left of the baths is a fragmented pier whose vaults spring to incompletion. To its right are fragmented walls. The composition then gives way onto a vista that gives a distant view of Santo Stefano Rotondo. Hieronymus Cock published a view of the Baths like this one, but with a greater emphasis on foreground’s natural topography. Santo Stefano Rotondo does not appear in the background of Cock’s vedute, either.3 The foreground pier and vault with vegetal onset appears in reverse in the second pier of a ruined row of Colosseum-like piers in reverse in a print of “Mary, Mother of Christ”, from Van Heemskerck’s 1560 series of Exemplary Women from the Old and New Testament.4 Van Heemskerck may have turned to this sheet for a similar motif in the backdrop of “The Burial of Samson” and “Jehu Adoring the golden Calf” from his Clades Judaeae Gentis series of 1569.5

Cat. No. 48 Maarten van Heemskerck? Baths of Caracalla Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Reserve B-12 (4)-Boite ECU 172 × 325 mm Literature: Nesselrath (1996).

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Here, we see massive ruins closely resembling Caracalla’s baths, but portrayed with some pictorial liberties. Separate from the Berlin albums, this is one of three drawings in Paris that Arnold Nesselrath brought to light in his essay of 1996. Unlike the drawing of the Casa dei Crescenzi, also living in Paris and published by Nesselrath, this drawing perhaps comes from Van Heemskerck’s hand. The chosen angle of view and the drawing’s diagonal foreshortening are characteristic of Van Heemskerck. Providing the composition’s pictorial axis, in the distance at center, is a series of three arched vaults that are parallel to the picture plane. Ruined vaults radiate on diagonal axes towards the picture plane at left and right. Vaulting exits the frame at right, while giving way to more distant vegetation and ruined vaults at far left. Nesselrath hypothesized that Van Heemskerck drew this from the Tepidarium while looking north.6 This vantage point appears likely. However, from there, the artist of this drawing would not have been able to see distant ruins to his left and hills beyond them, as he has drawn them here; the site is walled in from that vantage point. Several technical aspects also argue for Van Heemskerck’s hand. The broad, undulating hatches describing the foreground’s natural topography find a near identical match among the sheets we here give to Van Heemskerck with confidence. More broadly, upon close examination, the drawing’s apparent display of carefully applied hatches gives way to surprisingly hasty inking. Such a stunning display of sprezzatura is comparable to the handling of ink we see in several ably handled sheets of low finish [e.g. cat. no. 12]. The vegetal onset is also typical of Van Heemskerck’s drawings, as is the lighter stroke at far left, establishing second and third layers from the picture plane. However, strokes articulating coffering differ from Van Heemskerck’s handling of similar motifs at St. Peter’s [e.g. cat. no. 42]. The angled and shadowed vaulting at right, the foreshortened coffered arch at left of center, and the ruins in the distant backdrop are reminiscent of the ruinous backdrop of Habakuk Bringing Food to Daniel in the Lion’s Den [fig. 6.13] in reverse. The discrepancies in their designs render it impossible for this drawing to have served in any way as a preparatory drawing for that print. However, the drawing’s retrospectively added date, “1556,” is the same as that print’s date of publication, suggesting some connoisseurial awareness of a relationship between the two images.

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San Giovanni in Laterano

Cat. No. 49 Maarten van Heemskerck View with San Giovanni in Laterano, Remains of Lateran Palace, and Equestrian of Marcus Aurelius Left: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 71r 127 × 208 mm. Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: Asterisk (Upper Half of Briquet 6289)7 Right: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 12v 136 × 210 mm. Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: Crossed arrows (Lower Half of Briquet 6289) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 8 and 36–39; Fehl, 362–367; Filippi, 100; Bartsch (2008), 145. We look south at the San Giovanni in Laterano complex of buildings, on two sketchbook sheets. As with other medium-view panoramas [e.g., cat. nos. 1], Van Heemskerck has chosen a vantage point that shows buildings at various angles from the picture plane, as if set up for optimal display. The spot he has chosen also shows the statue of Marcus Aurelius in silhouette against a blank sky in an iconic, near profile view.8 The ink wash technique on display here is of the

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highest order, comparable to catalog numbers 2 and 43: sharp pen lines articulate contours and ink wash describes shadows and texture convincingly. In addition to being a display of technical virtuosity this drawing provides a valuable document of the Lateran’s appearance before its renovations.9 The topography it portrays, however, has no afterlife in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre.

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Cat. No. 50 Maarten van Heemskerck Bench with Lion’s feet and volutes / Column with grotteschi / Interior of S. Giovanni in Laterano Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 70v 125 × 201 mm. Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk traces on the left edge10 Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 36; Malmstrom, 247–251. Hülsen and Egger originally identified the interior shown here as Santo Stefano Rotondo. However, in 1973, Ronald Malmstrom convincingly argued that it shows a view from Nicholas IV’s ambulatory of San Giovanni in Laterano, looking across the basilica’s transept towards the entries of its north side aisles.11 Van Heemskerck has not provided much detail, but the plausible treatment of light is extraordinary for such a quickly executed sketch. His articulation of the sudden transition from the darkness of the ambulatory to the brightness of the transept’s interior is convincing.

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Temple of Minerva Medica

Cat. No. 51 Maarten van Heemskerck Landscape with the Nymphaeum known as the Temple of Minerva Medica Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 49v 202 × 275 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 30; Bartsch (2012), 28. In this view, the left half of a medium view panorama with the drawing of the Porta Maggior [cat. no. 52], Van Heemskerck shows the nymphaeum from the open side, and with a view through the central arch, looking towards the same line of aqueducts that he drew in his view of the Porta Maggiore [cat. no. 52]. In the far distance, to the right, one sees the silhouette of Mt. Testaccio. Van Heemskerck’s signature shorthand vegetation is on display here even as it appears in the most refined drawings [e.g., cat. no. 1]. A later drawing of the same vista from a further vantage point by Jakob Franckaert the Elder

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suggests that this one by Van Heemskerck contains revisions of the landscape, possible exclusions of vernacular domestic architecture and additions of ruins.12 Similarly, an etching in the Rijksmuseum by Willem van Nieulandt shows what appears to be a modern gated retaining wall nestled against an embankment perhaps not visible from Van Heemskerck’s angle of view.13 As is the case with so many of Van Heemskerck’s drawings [e.g., cat. no. 12], the technique here is not aggressive in its pursuit of precision or detail, but somehow manages to convey the appearance of it; Van Heemskerck has drawn the objects on view with bravura, while still maintaining convincing shape, proportion, shadows the placement of objects in spatial relation to one another. Circular temples with openings onto interiors appear in some Van Heemskerck prints, but none match this drawing precisely.14 Van Heemskerck’s painting Venus and Cupid (1545) contains a ruined structure that appears at least partially indebted to this drawing.15

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Porta Maggiore

Cat. No. 52 Maarten van Heemskerck View looking north with Porta Maggiore with Aurelian wall Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 40r 208 × 277 mm Pen and Brown ink Water Mark: Crossed Arrows (bottom half of Briquet no. 6292) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 27–28; Stritt (2004), 75; Veldman (2012), 18. Again, Van Heemskerck has chosen a picturesque angle of view, rather than drawing a structure with its façade parallel to the picture plane. The right half of a medium view panorama along with Van Heemskerck’s view of the temple known as the temple of Minerva Medica [cat. no. 51], this sheet portrays the Porta Maggiore to the right, foreshortened, leading us to a backdrop of the Aurelian wall with what might be a ruined circular building attached.16 The inside of the Aurelian wall is to the left in the distance, and closer towards the Porta, is an aqueduct, which is part of the wall. Van Heemskerck uses a pure pen and ink technique but brings this drawing to a low

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finish. Although it is much less exacting in its rendering of both line and shadow, with hatching appear further apart and with wider strokes, Van Heemskerck maintains proportional and perspectival relationships, and gives us the sensation we are see more detail than is actually present. Ruins like the one in the background of this drawing appear in the upper left background of Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1] and several of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman designs.17

Pyramid of Cestius

Cat. No. 53 Maarten van Heemskerck Top: Looking East at Pyramid of Cestius with Aurelian Walls Bottom: Panorama looking west from Aventine with Pyramid of Cestius in left foreground, Aurelian (?) walls in background, and Mt. Testaccio to the right. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 54v 150 × 300 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none

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Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 34. In two incomplete drawings in low finish, Van Heemskerck shows us the east and west sides of the Pyramid of Cestius on the same sheet.18 In the top composition, Van Heemskerck has summarized the pyramid’s inscription rather than showing it completely: top line, “C C E S I E I V M I O D R …”, and bottom line, “O T R M V N V M”.19 A figure stands at the North base of the pyramid, which is in shadow. In the bottom drawing, Van Heemskerck foregrounds the pyramid against the heavily foreshortened receding wall. The tiniest arches in the distance continue to describe the wall convincingly, while two figures stand in stark silhouette on a line meant to represent Mount Testaccio. This is the only view Van Heemskerck drew of the Pyramid of Cestius from close range, comparable to the view in the Codex Escurialensis.20 The pyramid appears in Van Heemskerck’s panorama from the Janiculum [cat. no. 57]. Pyramids appear in several of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman designs.21

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Tivoli

Cat. No. 54 Maarten van Heemskerck Close view of Temple of “Vesta” (Tivoli), in perspective. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 21r 266 × 208 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_021

Further Afield: Otium

Remnants of underdrawing in red chalk at lower left of rusticated base, vegetation, and capital of the left column engaged by concrete infill. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 16–17; Filippi, 99. Van Heemskerck has chosen a vantage point from below that allows us to see the temple’s most complete side and as many of its parts as possible, including the coffering above the ambulatory. To the left is a freestanding column that was originally a part of the temple. The columns on the left of the complete portion of the temple are engaged by concrete infill. To their left, Van Heemskerck gives us a glimpse of the temple’s interior, which we can see because of the temple’s ruined state. Figures appear next to the temple at right, and on its base. The technique here is summary and of low finish. Contours and hatching are in a thick stroke, at wide intervals. In some places, such as in the column furthest to the right, the hatching does not describe the shape of the column. In the central column, closest to the picture plane, Van Heemskerck has shown us the beginnings of its fluting, just as he has in his worm’s eye view of the Arch of Constantine [cat. no. 22]. Tholos-plan temples appear in several of Van Heemskerck’s designs for paintings and prints. We find three in Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1] and one Van Heemskerck’s Triumph of Bacchus [fig. 3.4] and a print after the Bacchus painting.1 Other prints contain similar inventions displayed less prominently in their backdrops.2

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Further Afield: Otium



Villa Madama

Cat. No. 55 Maarten van Heemskerck Eastern Half of the Southern Loggia of the Villa Madama Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 9v 122 × 201 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, ix, 7. To the left, we view the interior stairway leading to the Villa Madama’s Southern Loggia. To the right, we view the unfinished loggia and the Tiber beyond. Van Heemskerck abandoned this drawing after completing his outlines. He may have intended to shade this drawing with the same technique as in his sketch of the Cortile of casa Maffei all’ Arco di Ciambella, with an ink wash [cat. no. 61]. The lines of both have a similar unfinished, imprecise quality. This abandoned drawing did not have much of an afterlife in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman oeuvre. But composing a drawing that is split between interior and exterior spaces may have been instructive for Van Heemskerck. Many print designs showing multiple narrative episodes in different rooms or inside and outside of palaces utilize similar compositional schemes.3

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Broad-View Panoramas

Cat. No. 56 Maarten van Heemskerck Panoramic View of the Ripa Grande Looking North from Aventine Left Sheet: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 18r 123 × 204 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Right Sheet: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 55r 135 × 208 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk traces above the Aventine, as well as a faint black chalk letter ‘A’. Literature: Michaelis, vol. 1, 149, 154; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 10– 11; Stritt (2004), 71–72; DiFuria (2017), 411–412. We gaze north, from a point high on the Aventine hill.1 Van Heemskerck drew the left sheet with greater care and detail than the right. The left sheet therefore also contains more identifiable

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_022

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monuments and could even function as an independent drawing. In the drawing’s left foreground we see the Ripa Grande. On the Tiber’s east bank we see the circular Temple of Hercules Victor and the Temple perhaps dedicated to Portunus; with the latter, Van Heemskerck has taken care to hatch the temple’s rear horizontally, perhaps to mark or record its infill and engaged columns. As we travel up river towards the drawing’s middle ground, we see the Ponte Fabricio spanning the Tiber. Beyond, is the Ponte Rotto. At extreme left is the summit of the Janiculum Hill. Beyond, the campanile of the Old St. Peter’s – still intact during the time of Van Heemskerck’s visit – peeks over the horizon. The Pantheon dominates the horizon line at this sheet’s center, forming its major focal point. Directly to the Pantheon’s left are the dome and campanile of Sant Agostino. To the Pantheon’s right is the Column of Marcus Aurelius.2 The treacherous southwestern side of the Capitoline Hill, where the Tarpeian Rock was once the site of Rome’s most humiliating form of public execution, forms a sparse mound that Van Heemskerck has split between both sheets. It thus sits in the central middle ground of the two-sheet composition. In the middle-ground we see the Septizonium and to its right, the substructures of the Palatine. To the left and behind the Palatine stand several of the monuments on the east side of the Forum Romanum and the Torre dei Milizie. The Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine stands between them. Even a panoramic view like this shows Van Heemskerck’s keen attention to architecture’s situation within its landscape. Though he does not portray any buildings with exceptional sharpness, he does maintain his usual attention to the proportions of buildings and their spatial relationships to one another. Of all of the extant panoramas in Van Heemskerck sketched in Rome, this may have been the one that was of most use to him in composing Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1].3 Also composed from a bird’s eye view, the large canvas’ imaginary Rome-derived city centers on a snaking river spanned by an arcaded bridge very much like the Ponte Fabricio as it appears in this drawing. The panoramic prints Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22] and the Fall of Babylon [fig. 8.9] also appear to be indebted to this drawing for the same topographical feature.4 The view of the Tiber in this drawing may have also influenced the disposition of the river that wends its way through the panoramic backdrop of the composition for Van Heemskerck’s print of “Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd” [fig. 6.12] from the Story of Jonah series of 1566.5

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Cat. No. 57 Maarten van Heemskerck Panorama Looking East from Janiculum Left Sheet: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 72v 132 × 209 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Right Sheet: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 18v 134 × 209 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 40–41; Stritt (2004), 71; Veldman (2012), 18. Van Heemskerck must have taken in this view, on two sheets of the small book of drawings he carried with him through Rome, from the Porta San Pancrazio, the highest point on the Janiculum Hill. From there, he would have been able to see the remains of the Aurelian wall, just as they appear on this sheet, foreshortened at lower left. In the far-left distance, Van Heemskerck has rendered the Apennine Mountains east of the Eternal City in atmospheric perspective with lines so faint – dotted, thin, and applied with the lightest touch – that they nearly evaporate. At left before the Apennines, we recognize the Colosseum, which Van Heemskerck summarized with a few deft, quickly applied strokes. Various monuments in the area of

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the Forum Romanum and the Palatine are also identifiable; exploration of the middle ground in front of the Colosseum reveals the little circular church of San Teodoro. Scanning towards the drawing’s right middle ground, we see the ruins of the Palace of Septimius Severus sitting atop the Palatine. Next to them is the Septizonium. Tucked behind the Palatine and the Septizonium is the Caelian Hill, where we notice the circular roof of Santo Stefano Rotondo, barely visible in the distance. In the drawing’s central middle ground is the Aventine Hill, its northern side mostly in shadow. Aside from the tower of the Savelli stronghold, which appears at the Aventine’s apex, no buildings on that hill appear clearly enough for positive identification.6 To the right of the Aventine are the Pyramid of Cestius and Monte Testaccio. The pediment of San Francesco a Ripa is visible in the foreground.7 The city’s south walls snake from right foreground all the way past the Aventine and beyond the Celian in the distance. Along with Van Heemskerck’s view of the Ripa Grande from the Aventine [cat. no. 56], this broad-view panorama was integral to his conceptualization of panoramic views in his finished works. Van Heemskerck was especially dependent on this drawing for the overall compositional scheme of Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], from its distant mountainous horizon line to the use of a shadowed hill in the painting’s central middle ground and the looping of the ancient walls to the far right in both compositions.8

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Cat. No. 58 Maarten van Heemskerck Panorama Looking East from Old St. Peter’s Campanile (with Capital and Lion’s head) Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 58v 123 × 193 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk traces in the shape of torso fragments. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 32; Thoenes, 146. Drawing from a point of view looking east, perhaps after having surmounted the campanile of Old St. Peter’s, Van Heemskerck composed this panoramic vedute using the Via Alessandrina, which cut west through the neighborhood known as Borgo, for his central orthogonal.9 Borgo and the old city serve as a backdrop for an almost completely empty middle ground and a heavily foregrounded composite capital and lion’s head.10 Many of Rome’s notable urban topographical elements appear throughout this view. At left we see Rome’s old wall running east-west from the Vatican, which houses the “Passetto di Borgo.” This is the wall that provided Clement VII

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Medici’s escape from the Vatican to the Castel Sant ‘Angelo during the opening moments of the Sack of Rome in May of 1527. The Ponte Sant ‘Angelo crosses the Tiber at center. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, the church of Sant Agostino’s campanile, the Pantheon, and the Column of Trajan lead us from distant center to far right. As Hermann Egger has pointed out, we see the unmistakable silhouette of the recently installed statue of St. Peter on the Tiber’s East bank.11 The Ospedale di Santo Spirito appears in the right foreground. Among panoramas of Rome made during the sixteenth century, this is a unique specimen for its chosen vantage point.

Cat. No. 59 Maarten van Heemskerck Panorama looking south from Monte Mario Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 16r 126 × 207 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Notes: Slight red chalk traces above horizon line above campanile on far left. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 10.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

To make this panorama, Van Heemskerck probably stood about halfway up the southern slope of the Monte Mario, near the villa Madama and gazed south. The Codex Escurialensis contains a view from a comparable vantage point on two sheets.12 Van Heemskerck’s panorama brings together locations as distant from one another as the Column of Marcus Aurelius (the second vertical on the left) and the Janiculum Hill (far right). From left, the major monuments we can identify are the campanile of Sant Agostino, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the Mausoleum of Augustus, and the tower of the Palazzo dei Senatori.13 The Castel Sant ‘Angelo anchors the composition at center. Viewers might expect to see San Giovanni dei Fiorentini to the Castel’s immediate right. However, the Florentine church was not yet finished.14 A series of thick jagged vertical strokes in the horizon line may describe construction of the Florentine church’s nave. Further right, in shadow, is the campanile of San Pietro in Montorio. Closer to the picture plane are the Ospedale di Santo Spirito and the Vatican Hill.

Cat. No. 60 Maarten van Heemskerck Unidentified Panoramic View Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 40v 195 × 266 mm.

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Pen and Brown ink Water Mark: Crossed Arrows (bottom half of Briquet no. 6292) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 28. Van Heemskerck reoriented this sheet, making the top of the recto the bottom of this side. Perhaps he did not want the heavy marks on the recto side to interfere with this drawing. We might be looking at a sketch of the view south beyond the Porta Maggior, but it is ultimately impossible to say. It is as if the generic, formulaic, but signature way in which Van Heemskerck customarily rendered nature in so many other drawings has overtaken an entire large sheet.15 This hasty landscape is his only known attempt at a “pure” landscape. It evinces his relative lack of interest in vistas containing primarily natural topography, especially when compared to artists whom Van Mander praised for their interest in landscape as a venue for the portrayal of nature, such as Pieter Brueghel or Herri Met de Bles.16

Sculpture Collections, Gardens, and Cortile

Cat. No. 61 Maarten van Heemskerck Cortile of Casa Maffei all’Arco della Ciambella Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 3v 125 × 207 mm Pen and Ink Wash

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 3–4; Filippi, 97; Bartsch (2008), 148; Christian (2012), 129; Veldman (2012), 18. Here, Van Heemskerck shows us the antiquities in the small courtyard of a house belonging to Benedetto Maffei (and then his nephew, Girolamo) in the Rione Pigna near the Arco della Ciambella and next to SS. Quaranta de Calcarario. Both Benedetto and Girolamo traveled in papal circles, but not much else is known about them.17 Surely, their sculpture collection is what attracted Van Heemskerck to their house. However, we have no remaining drawings by Van Heemskerck showing detailed studies of any of the sculptures on display here.18 This drawing shows a greater interest in the space and the light than the sculpture. It is clear that Van Heemskerck has chosen an optimal angle of view for describing the space. He has chosen a point of view that does not allow for the rendering of the sculptures in detail. He renders torsos quickly, and reliefs summarily. The cortile’s arches, extremely close to the picture plane, extend to the left and right edge of the sheet, framing our gaze. The rigid diagonals of the stairway are complemented by the graceful arcs of its supporting vaults, providing a backdrop that leads us from lower left to upper right. Van Heemskerck applied outlines with a free hand, as usual, but with precision, showing a masterful grasp of spatial relationships. Contours thus could have served as the framework for one of his many hatching essays. However, he has used ink wash to describe the behavior of light in the cortile. Along with ink wash drawings of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 2] and the unfinished St. Peter’s [cat. no. 43], this may be one of Van Heemskerck’s most deliberate applications of ink wash to articulate shadows. He gives equal attention to the subtle gradations of shadow in the vaults, walls, columns, ceiling, and the floors. A drawing in the so-called de Vos Sketchbook [in the lower left corner of folio IX verso, cat. no. 75] is of the same room from a different angle, suggesting that Van Heemskerck drew this cortile twice. Neither drawing received any verbatim quotations in any of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman works. However, this drawing and the copy on the “de Vos Sketchbook’s” folio IX, combine to form a precious document of the Maffei sculpture collection not long before it would be dismantled. Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) wrote that he visited the Casa in 1550 to find that few antiquities remained.19

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Cat. No. 62 Maarten van Heemskerck Looking west at sculpture collection in Garden of Palazzo Medici (called Palazzo Madama after 1540)20 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 5r 179 × 213 mm Pen and brown ink Water Mark: Circle enclosing a shield with three crescents. Notes: Contains an “MVHK” monogram, possibly added later. Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 4–5; Filippi, 97–98; DiFuria (2010b), 41; Christian (2012), 133, 136; Veldman (2012), 18.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Cat. No. 63 Maarten van Heemskerck Looking northwest at sculpture collection in Palazzo Medici (called Palazzo Madama after 1540) Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 48r 214 × 293 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk traces in upper right quadrant Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 29–30; Filippi, 98; DiFuria (2010b), 42; Christian (2012), 135; Veldman (2012), 18. Van Heemskerck drew two views of the Medici family’s Palazzo Madama garden court, home to an impressive sculpture collection that would shortly be subsumed into the Vatican’s more voluminous holdings. Our first view is found on a smaller sheet in the portable book of drawings now in Berlin’s album I. For this view, Van Heemskerck chose a vantage point from which the eastern most column of the cortile’s loggia is nearest to the picture plane, splitting our gaze. In the middle ground of the left third of the composition, we see the fountain of the Palazzo Madama’s cortile, and a backdrop of ancient and medieval buildings. Hülsen and Egger identify the structure in the left background as the Torre dei Crescenzi and the nearby ruins as the hot springs of Agrippa.21 To the right of the column, we peer

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down the Palazzo’s groin vaulted loggia which houses a collection of various all’antica sculpture fragments. Billowing sail vaults and ionic columns advance dramatically towards the picture plane, reflecting Van Heemskerck’s penchant for extreme foreshortenings. With a most precise version of his pure pen and ink technique, Van Heemskerck describes the shadows and the contours of the forms. He has lavished his most detailed attention on the smooth, rounded surfaces of the loggia’s columns and vaults, and the fountain in the left middle ground. This is a rare example of Van Heemskerck’s rendering of the shaded side of the columns with diagonal and horizontal hatches. The sculptures are a considerable distance from the picture plane, and Van Heemskerck has not rendered any of them with as much detail.22 At far right, within the cortile’s loggia, Van Heemskerck shows a figure amidst the sculpture. While Torre dei Crescenzi and the Agrippa’s hot spring baths receive the lightest of lines due to their distance from the picture plane, Van Heemskerck has paid diligent attention to their proportions, and the rough texture of the Torre’s decaying exterior. Here, Van Heemskerck’s pen has produced a subtle descriptive stroke that communicates their distance and the ravages of time; vegetal onset mingles with their cracked stone. As in the smaller drawing, the larger drawing’s dominant motif is the loggia. Our human figure has moved to the vantage point beneath the loggia, from where Van Heemskerck rendered the smaller drawing. He again blends in with the sculptures surrounding him. In the distant right background, he confronts the fragmented figural remains of the ancient past. This is the most detailed figure to appear amongst his Roman sketches; Van Heemskerck shows him wearing a waist length overcoat, boots, and a hat. Figures also appear atop the loggia, though not in as much detail. Hülsen’s and Egger’s assessed this drawing as displaying “a strong artistic individuality in every respect.” By and large, close examination bears them out. The fountain, foregrounded at left, appears in hatchings so thick and dark that the ink has nearly compromised the paper. By contrast, Van Heemskerck has rendered the sculptures in the same carefully hatched thin lines as the columns of the loggia. Technically speaking, its technique is not as sure handed as it is in the smaller drawing. The column 3rd from left shows double lines on either side. Van Heemskerck has foreshortened only the ionic volutes of the first two capitals. The others receive a quick, flat rendering. The fountain at left has a much thicker outline than we are used to from Van Heemskerck. We are able to see a red chalk under drawing in the capital and vaults furthest to the right.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Cat. No. 64 Maarten van Heemskerck Villa Madama Garden Terrace with Sculpture in Niches Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 24r 136 × 211 mm. Water Mark: none Notes: Red chalk fingerprint in lower right quadrant Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 13–14; Filippi, 107; DiFuria (2010b), 31. Van Heemskerck has chosen his composition in order to leave an emptied right side and thus it is as if he is creating a backdrop, or a scene, before which figures could act out a narrative. The primary focus is in the left foreground, where a Jupiter sculpture fragment sits before a richly textured architectural backdrop and niche. Van Heemskerck has chosen his vantage point so that the arches of two sculptural niches behind the Jupiter spring from each of his shoulders, leaving his head framed by them. This is one of Van Heemskerck’s most finely rendered drawings. At left, neither the sculptures nor the architecture behind them has received more attention or finish. The whole composition – the relation of the sculpture to the architecture and the disposition of the entire space – is the point of this pictorial exercise. While close examination reveals an unusually light hatching technique, even on middle ground objects, Van Heemskerck has rendered the

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cornice above the Jupiter statue with what appears at first glance to be straight-edged precision. However, close examination reveals slight divergences in the lines result from a steady free hand. Van Heemskerck has not described the vertical edges of the pilasters with a prominent line, but by creating the illusion of a line by bringing horizontal hatches to a lightly drawn vertical line. Moreover, we find inconsistencies in the orthogonal direction of the bases of the pilasters and walls at middle ground left as they recede, indicating that Van Heemskerck did not use a systematic perspectival system, but relied on his free hand and eye to construct the space. Jupiter’s drapery shows subtle attention to light and shadow, Once again, Van Heemskerck portrays staffage in the drawing’s background, useful for indicating scale. As in catalog numbers 1 (left sheet), 39, and 43, figures appear beneath arches or doorways. The backdrops for Van Heemskerck’s prints of “The Elders Trying to Seduce Susannah” [fig. 6.5] and “The Three Holy Women at the Sepulchre” [fig. 6.6] are indebted this drawing.23

Cat. No. 65 Maarten van Heemskerck Palazzo Cesi in Borgo Sculpture Garden Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 25r 134 × 208 mm Pen and brown ink Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 14; Filippi, 107; Stritt (2004), 82; DiFuria (2010b), 37; Christian (2012), 152; Veldman (2012), 18.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Van Heemskerck has composed this sketch the same way he composed his drawing of the sculpture garden at the Villa Madama [cat. no. 64]. The left side advances towards the foreground while the right side is empty. The contrast here is high, and the hatching technique is the usual one. The architectural backdrop is rustic, and minimally rendered. Behind the statues in the left foreground, no wall appears.

Cat. No. 66 Maarten van Heemskerck Courtyard of Old Palazzo della Valle Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 20r 164 × 226 mm. Pen and brown ink with some brown ink wash Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 15–16; Filippi, 108; Christian (2003), 847; Christian (2008), 33–65; DiFuria (2010b), 37; Christian (2012), 138–141; Veldman (2012), 18. We see the loggia in the Palazzo della Valle’s cortile parallel to the picture plane. The rendering of the frieze of the cornice is unfinished. In the foreground is a colossal mascherone. Van Heemskerck’s handling of the pen in this example is surprisingly loose and imprecise, even compared to his drawings of low finish. Lines lack subtlety and

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sure-handedness. Ink wash is not applied with the precision that we find in Van Heemskerck’s other Roman drawings bearing primarily ink wash [e.g. cat. nos. 2 and 43]. Hatches beneath the arches struggle to articulate their foreshortening. The artist has neglected to erase the merging lines of the piers, which are visible through the sarcophagus.24 Nevertheless, Van Heemskerck has handled the perspective of the vaulting behind the piers rather ably. While the sloppy, thicklined handling of the relief sculpture on the sarcophagi in the right middle ground may seem rare among Van Heemskerck’s sketches, even drawings in Van Heemskerck’s more virtuosic technique [e.g., cat. no. 26] contain this kind of treatment of relief sculpture when it appears at some distance from the picture plane. Moreover, the mascherone on the floor in the foreground is present in altered form in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman painting of St. Luke [fig. 6.18].25 His print of “Tamar and Abnon” also contains floor decorations before a loggia in a cortile.26 Van Heemskerck has used the cloven-hoofed atlantae on each pier for the piers in the left backdrop of his Triumph of Bacchus painting [fig. 3.4].27 The sarcophagus at right in this drawing is relatable to the one in Van Heemskerck’s print of “Susannah” of 1563.28 Though Van Heemskerck’s preparatory sketch shows the sarcophagus in the opposite position, they are at the same angle and distance from the picture plane. Both contain similar wave pattern designs on their long sides. Therefore, if this drawing is not an autograph Van Heemskerck, it is very likely that he possessed it and referred to it when making new designs.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Cat. no. 67 Maarten van Heemskerck? Della Valle Sculpture Collection Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Reserve B-12 (3)-Boite Fol 284 × 425 mm Pen and brown ink Literature: Nesselrath, 1996; Veldman, 1977; DiFuria, 2010; Christian, 2012. This drawing, discovered in Paris in 1996 by Arnold Nesselrath, documents Van Heemskerck’s study of Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s (1463–1534) sculpture garden. If it is by Van Heemskerck, it is a preparatory drawing for a print. Its hatching does not resemble that in his Roman drawings. The della Valle collection portrayed here was dispersed by mid-century. Van Heemskerck’s decision to draw it is thus fortuitous as it and the print engraved after it and published by Hieronymus Cock in 1553 [fig. 3.5] provide our only record of the collection at its peak. As a self-consciously organized space with an orderly display and inscriptions addressed to visitors, the della Valle collection was ahead of its time in its anticipation of modes of display embraced in the modern museum. Compare this space, for example, with the more spontaneous and even ramshackle

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arrangement of sculptures in either the Casa Maffei [cat. no. 61] or the Palazzo Medici cortile [cat. nos. 62 and 63]. Francesco de Hollanda produced a drawing of the collection’s east wall in elevation that is even more emphatic in its conveyance of the collection’s selfconscious conception and orderly appearance. It portrays inscriptions on the walls of della Valle’s collection proclaiming its status as an “aid to poets and painters … dedicated to the memory of ancestors for emulation by descendants.” Rendering the space from a central position dictating the drawing’s single-point perspective, Van Heemskerck has made what at first glance appears to be an uncharacteristically pedestrian choice of vantage point. However, in so doing, he has most effectively captured the tantalizing experience of gazing upon the garden before entering, beholding and anticipating before consuming, as it were. Several recognizable antiquities are on view, most notably the Torment of Marsyas at far right, which now belongs to the Louvre. The careful hatching on display here is crucial to our understanding of the drawing’s function and perhaps for Van Heemskerck’s intentions for his highly finished drawings; it has long been remarked that many of his more carefully worked drawings could easily have functioned as preparatory drawings for prints.29 And as we have seen, that is the case here.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Cat. No. 68 Copy After Maarten van Heemskerck Casa Sassi Sculpture Collection Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett inv. no. 2783 230 × 215 mm Pen and Brown Ink Wash Water Mark; none Notes: Contains an “MVHK” monogram, signed “Heemskerck,” and dated “1555” in darker ink probably added later Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 43–45; Dacos (1995), cat. no. 117. The present drawing, which portrays Egidio and Fabio Sassi’s collection of antiquities, provides a puzzle we have not yet satisfactorily resolved. It is likeliest a copy of a lost Van Heemskerck original. Bearing a technique containing few of the characteristics we find in the

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drawings the present volume gives to him, it does not appear to have come from Van Heemskerck’s hand. It is much less sure handed than drawings by most of the known artists of the mid-sixteenth century. This drawing portrays the Sassi collection in the opposite direction from a print that Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert engraved for publication in 1553 [fig. 6.19]. That the Sassi family sold the collection to the Farnese family in 1546 may have occasioned the making of the print for commemorative purposes. Van Heemskerck modeled the backdrop of his second St. Luke [fig. 6.18] on the collection’s back wall as it appears in the print. However, the St. Luke, which may also date from after the collection’s dismantling, also portrays the space in same direction as the print, not this drawing. While it is tempting to suggest that this could indicate the present drawing’s function as the preparatory drawing for the print while bearing an incorrect date, physical aspects bar us from such conclusions. In height, the drawing is 145 mm. smaller than the print. And no extant autograph Van Heemskerck preparatory drawings for prints are in ink wash. They all bear a hatching technique that resembles his Roman drawings of high finish in their display of precisely applied hatches. Thus, we arrive at the likeliest scenario; Van Heemskerck drew the Casa Sassi collection while in Rome and made extensive use of his drawing for figures in his post-Roman paintings.30 He and Coornhert then collaborated on a print of the collection. Then, either a lesser known draftsman close to them copied the print’s preparatory sketch for his own corpus of drawings, or someone more distant from them, perhaps an enterprising sort, reversed the print in order to provide a method for making a new plate should the need arise. Suffice it to say conclusively that Coornhert’s certain involvement puts Van Heemskerck in close proximity to this drawing, as does his portrayal of figures resembling the Casa Sassi Apollo, such as the second St. Luke’s Virgin Mary and the main figure in the Caritas Triptych [fig. 8.2]. In the unlikeliest scenario, this drawing has nothing to do with Van Heemskerck and the later presence of his name on it is an error. However, even in this scenario, his name appeared on the drawing resulted from the perception of his importance for such imagery.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia



Architectural Fragments

Cat. No. 69 Maarten van Heemskerck Three Composite Capitals31 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 12r 127 × 205 mm. Pen and brown ink wash and red chalk highlights Water Mark: Crossed Arrows (Briquet 6289) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 8; DiFuria (2012), 165.

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Cat. No. 70 Maarten van Heemskerck Architectural details from the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 22r 134 × 211 mm. Pen and brown ink Red chalk traces over entire right third Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 13; DiFuria (2012), 160.

Cat. No. 71 Maarten van Heemskerck Decorative Details from the Temple of Mars Ultor, Forum Augusta

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 21v 128 × 197 mm. Red Chalk Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 12–13.

Cat. No. 72 Maarten van Heemskerck Base of the Southeast Corner of Trajan’s Column Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 17r 136 × 211 mm. Pen and brown ink wash Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 10. Van Heemskerck’s interest in rendering architectural fragments and their decorative motifs in close views was minimal at best. Only four such drawings remain.32 However, they reveal a variety of pictorial approaches and use of media. These drawings also figured in Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman designs. His drawing of three composite capitals [cat. no. 69] and details from Augusta’s forum [cat. no. 71] are as close as he came to executing capital studies.33 In his most pictorial effort at portraying fragments of architectural ornamentation [cat. no. 69], Van Heemskerck shows

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a cornice frieze with a griffin, candelabra, and other more generic decorative motifs from the Temple of Faustina lying on a hill. In the upper left corner of the composition, the temple peeks up from behind the objects in the extreme foreground.34 Van Heemskerck also drew the base of Trajan’s column [cat. no. 72], foreshortened and encroaching the picture plane. At the top of this sheet, we see the wreath at the base of the column. Though the he did not achieve a high level of finish in his drawing of the base of Trajan’s column, close examination of the drawing reveals a great variation between areas of finish and detail (the cornice, the festooning of the south plinth), and a quick, summary handling in both line and wash (the wreath at the base of the column). The right side of the composition is less finished, but Van Heemskerck has applied the ink wash to this side is just as heavily. The festoon on the east plinth contains ink wash details without the support of lines. Only one of Van Heemskerck’s drawings of architectural fragments is in his preferred pure pen and ink technique: his drawing of the broken fragments foregrounded before the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina [cat. no. 70]. His pen and ink drawing of three composite capitals [cat. no. 69] and his unfinished drawing of the base of Trajan’s column [cat. no. 72] contain ink wash in the shadows. Technically speaking, these drawings evince Van Heemskerck’s considerable range. Van Heemskerck applied red chalk to the parts of the three composite capitals in catalog number 69, where there is no brown ink, perhaps in order to heighten its coloristic effect. Van Heemskerck used only red chalk to depict cornice ornaments, half of a frequently rendered capital, and a faintly drawn, unfinished column base [cat. no. 71].35 He pays greater attention to the minutiae of the object on view than usual in this drawing. Given the customary use of red chalk for a precise portrayal of the smooth contours in drawings of sculpture, his choice of the medium to depict the nooks and crags of cornice and capital fragments is a surprising, yet effective one. Though Van Heemskerck’s drawings of architectural fragments or details are few in number, his post-Roman oeuvre suggests that he looked to them frequently.36 The angle of view and the hint of a wreath near the top border of Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the base of Trajan’s column served as the basis for the structure at the center of Van Heemskerck’s Frontispiece to the Clades Judaeae Gentis [fig. 8.4].37 The base and column behind the figures to the right in Momus Criticizing the World of the Gods is a variation of the base of Trajan’s column as it appears in catalog number 72.38 The three composite capitals in catalog number 69 are like the one Van Heemskerck juxtaposes with the Colosseum in catalog number 17 and may have provided source material for that drawing.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia



Fantasia

Cat. No. 73 Maarten van Heemskerck Ruin Fantasia Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Inv. No. 12306 173 × 218 mm Pen and brown ink Literature Dacos (1995), cat. no. 114; Dacos (2004), 74; Stritt (2004), 88. This is one of the most mysterious drawings in Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre because of its unidentifiable subject matter. Yet, it is also one of the most important for its possible relation to the architectural fantasie that populate the backdrops of the artist’s prints. This sheet does not contain a specific Roman ruin that Van Heemskerck observed and drew. And we know of no other Van Heemskerck drawing that is not a drawing of a Roman ruin, or preparatory sketch for a print that also contains fantasia. While this ruin does not at first glance appear to be an invention, the drawing contains several telltale signs that it is. Alleging its authenticity as an actual Roman ruin is its apparent seamlessness; it is not of the pieced together variety that we see in some of his prints. For example, the ruin in the background of Van Heemskerck’s Ruin Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan [fig. 7.12] is a hodge-podge non-functioning hodgepodge of columns and arches that broadcasts its status as a product of Van Heemskerck’s imagination.39 But the ruin in the present

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drawing is a combination of the vaulting of Severan Palatial ruins on the Palatine [cat. no. 14] and the Janus Quadrifrons as it appears in catalog numbers 34 and 35.40 Likewise, the coffering on the ruined vault’s interior is reminiscent of that in the drawing of the new St. Peter’s construction [cat. no. 42]. In both, Van Heemskerck uses a variety of strokes, from dark and thick to light, thin, and delicate. Further, the convex shape of this imagined ruin’s coffering seemingly combines the coffering of the Janus Quadrifronss as it appears in catalog numbers 34 and 35 with the coffering in Van Heemskerck’s drawings of St. Peter’s. The hanging pilaster structure on the exterior of the arch’s left wall is strongly reminiscent of the Forum Nervae’s colonnacce as it appears in catalog number 26 and so many of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman compositions for prints. Further afield, the winding series of aqueduct-like arches in the right middle ground resemble those found in several of Van Heemskerck’s drawings, paintings, and prints. For example, we find such structures in his panorama of the Ripa Grande from the Aventine, Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22], and The Fall of Babylon [fig. 8.9]. Finally, the landscape in the background appears in thin, delicate, mostly horizontal strokes and does not appear to show Roman topography, but peaks more jagged, more akin to those found in the Alps. Small, but observable details of ambiguity throughout the drawing further promote its status as an invention. In the background edifice at far left, for example, we find a questionable construction: a pedimented niche before a wall receding from the picture plane, and a loggia whose second column appears cut off abruptly; combined, they suggest improvisation rather than observation. Minutiae in the vegetation in the main ruin’s left spandrel also suggest improvisation. There, Van Heemskerck has provided no lines indicating the edge of the architecture, only the start of the vegetation. Moreover, above the right spandrel we see a braided motif that connects the top of the arch to the vertical wall. Its hatching suggest neither nature nor architecture, but a pictorial means of connecting the arch’s apex to its adjacent vertical element. A herm-like silhouette beneath one of these arches may be an archeological explorer. It occupies the space beneath the arch in the same manner as do countless figures among Van Heemskerck’s drawings, as if they are there for compositional purposes. Technically speaking, this drawing’s variety of strokes and multiple layers bears comparison to the technique we observe in the

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smaller drawing in the Palazzo Medici cortile [cat. no. 62]. However, the present drawing does not contain that example’s sense of order. The Palazzo Medici drawing’s matrix of free hand spontaneity and flaw is anchored to an underlying sense of the straight edge, resulting in its conveyance of the artist’s earnestness in recording something manifest, physical, tangible before him. The present drawing contains no such suggestion. A structure in the backdrop of the right panel (closed) of Van Heemskerck’s Annunciation from the Drapers Altarpiece [fig. 0.2] is a near verbatim quotation of the structure in this drawing. However, this drawing’s ruin does find a verbatim quotation in the backdrop of Van Heemskerck’s print of Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulchre [fig. 6.3].41

Single Sheets with Multiple Copies after Maarten van Heemskerck: The so-called De Vos Sketchbook

Cat. No. 74 Copies After Maarten van Heemskerck (and perhaps others) Ruins in Rome and Fantasie Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1935-43-9(R) 153 × 225 mm Pen, Brown Ink, and Chalk

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Cat. No. 75 Copies After Maarten van Heemskerck (and perhaps others) Ruins and Buildings in Rome and Antwerp Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1935-43-9(V) 153 × 22.3 mm Pen, Brown Ink, and Red Chalk

Cat. No. 76 Copies After Maarten van Heemskerck (and perhaps others) Architectural Studies and Fantasie Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1935-43-10(R) 153 × 223 mm Pen, Brown Ink, and Red Chalk

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

Cat. No. 77 Copies After Maarten van Heemskerck (and perhaps others) Ruins in Rome and Fantasie Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1935-43-10(V) 153 × 223 mm Pen, Brown Ink, and Red Chalk Literature: Bol. These four sheets, containing several drawings on both sides of each, executed sometime in the third quarter of the sixteenth century (once thought to be by Maarten de Vos), are notable for several reasons. That one of them, folio IX verso [cat. no. 75], contains a verifiable copy of a motif in an extant drawing by Van Heemskerck [cat. no. 42], suggests that the other motifs they contain could be copies of autograph van Heemskerck drawings that are now lost. Catalog numbers 74, 76, and 77 also contain compositions resembling portions of the left and central middle grounds of Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1]. More broadly speaking, their containment of several verifiable copies of motifs after Van Heemskerck comprises a clear indication of the circulation of his drawings, either of his own initiative during his lifetime, or posthumously. The verso side of Folio IX [cat. no. 75] bears some of the most tantalizing suggestions of lost Van Heemskerck drawings. From among

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his Roman corpus, his masterful view of the lapsed construction of the new St. Peter’s as seen from the southern arm of the transept [cat. no. 42] must have impressed the unknown artist who executed these sheets; a copy of the drawing of the unfinished church appears in the upper left quadrant of folio IX’s verso side. Also closely related to Van Heemskerck’s Roman oeuvre is the rendering at bottom left of this sheet’s verso side, we see the cortile of the Casa Maffei all’Arco della Ciambella. While this is view of the cortile resembles the one Van Heemskerck drew in catalog number 61, it shows the cortile from a vantage point further to the right, thus suggesting that Van Heemskerck drew the cortile twice. Other identifiable Roman monuments finding no match among Van Heemskerck’s extant oeuvre include the clutter in the lower right corner of folio IX verso, which we recognize as the ruins of the Frontespizio Nerone by the broken pediment at upper right. At middle left we see a drawing of the Vatican’s Cortile del Belvedere, looking north. Given Van Heemskerck’s documented interest in the Vatican complex over several sheets, and given the grand vista created by the Belvedere, it is not surprising that he would want to draw such a view. If this is a copy of a lost Van Heemskerck, then his interest in portraying a panoramic view of the space predates the famous painting by Hendrick van Cleve of 1589.42 A small rendering at upper right of folio IX resembles ruins on the Palatine, but it is too summary to identify specific buildings. At middle right of folio IX is an elevation of the left half of Antwerp’s town gate. If this is a copy of a lost Van Heemskerck, it is one of only a few that witnesses him drawing in elevation [cat. nos. 41 and 42] and the only known drawing by the Haarlem artist of a building that is not in Rome. The verso side of folio X (cat. no. 77) shows the Theater of Marcellus, foreshortened from a challenging vantage point and thus very characteristic of Van Heemskerck. The center of that sheet also shows substructures of the Palatine, a favorite subject of Van Heemskerck’s. The proliferation of fantasie among these sheets may suggest Van Heemskerck’s creative process, mediating between the raw material of his Roman drawings on one hand, and finished prints and paintings on the other. A small motif in the center of folio IX’s verso side appears to be a landscape fantasia that is too small and lacking in detail to be conclusively relatable to any motifs among Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman works. However, its appearance in the “de Vos Sketchbook” on the verso of a sheet whose recto side [cat. no. 74] bears two other motifs relatable to Van Heemskerck’s Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1]

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suggests that it may also be a copy of a lost Van Heemskerck. The lower left corner of catalog number 74 contains a drawing that perhaps copies another that documented Van Heemskerck’s deliberations over the composition of the monumental Roman canvas. The composition consists of an inlet not unlike the one that defines the Helen’s topography at right middle ground. It also shows a colossal sculpture and a spiral tower, reminiscent of the Helen’s Colossus of Rhodes and Lighthouse of Alexandria. Circular temples in this composition’s middle ground should remind viewers of the two circular temples in the Helen’s central middle ground. Strikingly similar to the Helen’s Temple of Venus is this drawing’s small circular temple at left. At far left of the central zone of folio IX’s recto [cat. no. 74] side is an elaborated view of the Forum Romanum from a vantage point close to the one forming the basis for Van Heemskerck’s famous view of the Forum from the northern foot of the Palatine Hill [cat. no. 1]. However, this view differs from Van Heemskerck’s by virtue of its inclusion of more medieval buildings than its more renowned counterpart. The barrel vault at upper right, though summarily rendered, resembles Hieronymus Cock’s publication of 1561 [fig. 0.1]. It also resembles the structure articulating the setting for Van Heemskerck’s print “The Prodigal Son Squandering his Inheritance on Harlots.”43 The architectural studies on the recto side of folio X are mostly generic. However, the circular temple at top center is of a creative variety, comparable to the more fanciful invention in Van Heemskerck’s prints, Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd [fig. 6.12] and Balaam and the Angel [fig. 6.11].44 But it bears a most notable similarity to the circular buildings in the distant backdrop of Isaiah’s Prophesy Over Jerusalem, “Dinah Going out and Seduced by Shechted,” and especially his “Unmerciful Servant Delivered to the Tormentors.”45 And at far right, we see a small spiral structure that is as reminiscent of Jan van Scorel’s tower of Babel [fig. 2.10] as it is of Van Heemskerck’s spiral towers.

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Deattributions

Deattributions from Maarten Van Heemskerck

In the interim between Hülsen and Egger’s publication and the present volume, scholars have brought to light drawings away from Berlin that they have published as Van Heemskerck’s. In some examples, such as two of the three drawings in Paris that Arnold Nesselrath published [cat. nos. 48, and 67] and the sheets now in Amsterdam (cat. nos. 10 and 11), the technique on display matches that on the sheets given unquestionably to Van Heemskerck. Other examples such as the Colosseum Interior in Darmstadt [cat. no. 78] are less convincing. In this section I remove Van Heemskerck’s authorship from some of these drawings and cast doubt on his authorship of others due to their departures from his technique and overall pictorial approach.

Cat. No. 78 Circle of Maarten van Heemskerck North and West Quadrants of the Forum Romanum from Atop the Palatine Fritz Lugt Collection, Paris Nederlands Tekeningen, Album I, f. 6111 r

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_023

Deattributions

Pen and brown ink (with some black ink) Water Mark: Six pointed star above fragment of hunting horn (?) in a circle, only half of which appears on the sheet. Bottom of recto. Notes: Oval Monogram in lower right corner, “JD”; the figure of Homerus on the verso has been cut, but this is not of consequence because this would be at the top of the Forum drawing, not the left, right, or bottom. Literature: Hasselt and Blankert, 48; Garms, cat. no. C30; Boon, 119–50. One should only give this fine drawing to Van Heemskerck with extreme hesitation. Its uncharacteristically disadvantageous angle of view, lack of contrast, and the attenuated proportions of the buildings on view all recommend against autograph status. The artist has set out a difficult task for himself. For this composition, he surmounted the Palatine to draw from a point of view that is higher and further north than in the panoramic composition we see in its more famous counterpart [cat no. 1]. From this vantage point, the gaze towards the northeast makes for a difficult composition. The Temple of Castor’s three remaining columns, which stand almost directly before the Roman Senate house, which in turn partially obscures the column of Trajan, form this drawing’s main vertical axis. Moving towards the left, in the middle ground, we see the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Column of Phocas, Ss. Sergio e Bacco, and the remains of the Temples of Saturn and Vespasian. The southern end of Santa Maria in Aracoeli and the Capitoline obelisk, and the eastern portions of the Tabularium and the Palazzo dei Senatori form the backdrop. To the right we see the monuments on the Quirinal including the column of Marcus Aurelius, the column of Trajan, and the Torre delle Milizie. In the deeper distance, we are able to see the Frontespizio di Nerone and the Trofei di Mario. We must entertain the possibility that this is one sheet of a lost two-sheet composition. Almost all lines on the left continue to the edge of the sheet without fading. The lone exception is the highest horizontal line, which describes the roof of the Tabularium. The topography to the left, the north and northwest of what appears here would have provided rich fodder for further drawing; the artist could have completed the Tabularium, the Palazzo dei Senatori, and the Tarpean rock. Most lines at the right edge of the sheet do also continue to the edge, but become fainter. Moreover, the paper here is bunched, suggesting that it may have been bound at one time. However, the artist would have found the topography to the right of this

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view, due east, no less compelling had he continued to draw in this direction. Much of the topography beyond the right frame appears in the right sheet of the more famous double-sheeted composition Van Heemskerck drew from a lower angle, at the northern foot of the Palatine [cat. no. 1]; further beyond the right border of both drawings are the remains of Maxentius’s basilica. The uniform hatching technique produces a monotone that is uncharacteristic of drawings traditionally given to Van Heemskerck with no hesitation. There is little difference in the width of the thickest strokes, appearing on the capitals and cornice of the Temple of Faustina and the pediment of the Senate house, and the thinnest strokes appearing in the distant background of the Quirinal Hill. Such hatching is unusual for Van Heemskerck on a sheet so big. For example, the comparably sized view towards the Colosseum from the Palace of Septimius Severus [cat. no. 9] portrays objects at a similar distance from the picture plane, but contains much bolder strokes in the foreground and even in the middle ground. Carlos van Hasselt and Albert Blankert gave this sheet to Van Heemskerck in 1966.1 While the characteristics identified above suggest another hand, other features support their attribution. The hatching appears as orderly and applied with precision, as in Van Heemskerck’s carefully worked drawings [e.g., cat. nos. 9, 17, and 64]. Where there are thicker lines atop thinner ones, as on the columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, they combine to give the impression of a straight edge. The small figures that dot the composition are quintessential among Van Heemskerck’s staffage, especially those in [cat. no. 1]. As in that drawing, the artist of this one has included a figure at lower right who appears to be in the act of swinging a pickaxe. Remaining figures also behave as they do in Van Heemskerck’s other compositions: figures behind the Temple of Faustina look skyward. The articulation of only the top portion of the fluting on the columns of the temple of Faustina is also a veritable signature Van Heemskerck motif. This drawing’s relative lack of pictorial clarity, its high finish, and its separation from the bulk of Van Heemskerck’s drawings suggest that if he drew it, he did not mind parting with it, but that it was suitable as a gift to a fellow artist or collector.

Deattributions

Cat. No. 79 Circle of Maarten van Heemskerck (by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus?) Colosseum Interior Landesmuseum, Darmstadt Inv. No. AE 1415 corpus Gernsheim 24 191. 186 × 278 mm Water Mark: 1965 In the middle of the sheet. Lily im Kreise darüber Stern Abb. S. 201 Bezeichnet (in brown ink that is very close to the color of the ink “Raphaello da Urbino f. part del coliseo in Roma 1510” (Hand des 17 Jahrhunderts) Literature: Hülsen, 1927; Bergsträsser, cat. no. 10. While the chosen angle of view and the resulting bifurcated composition are somewhat characteristic of Van Heemskerck’s compositional tendencies, the technique on display in this fine drawing bears characteristics that are not associated with the core of his Roman drawings oeuvre. Attribution of this sheet to Van Heemskerck is highly doubtful and would be dependent upon the unlikelihood that he decided to alter fundamental aspects of his technique for this and the drawing of the Casa dei Crescenzi below [cat. no. 80]. Although the present volume argues for variety in his technique, the stroke on display in this drawing in Darmstadt does not appear in

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the drawings here given to Van Heemskerck.2 Its shared upper-leftto-lower-right composition suggests that the artist of this sheet may be the same as the one who composed the British Museum’s drawing of Vulcan’s Forge (see ch. 6, n. 4). From within the Colosseum’s ground floor interior, we gaze through a series of barrel and groin vaults that either rim the amphitheater’s perimeter or radiate from its performance space to the exterior. The artist has devised a two-part composition; just right of center, a hulking foreshortened substructural pier springs to incompletion and divides the drawing between left and right. At the drawing’s left frame, a massive broken wall, closer to the picture plane than any other object portrayed, encroaches viewing space. Moving towards the center are two coffered barrel vaults with decorated lintels, foreshortened at a three quarters angle in relation to the picture plane. On the story above, a diagonal series of barrel vaults, higher at left, and lower at right, leads down to the composition’s central broken pier. Beyond the barrel vaults on the floor from which the artist draws, we see a series of piers. The right side of the composition is comprised of a barrel vault leading into a dark passageway, containing what appears to be both architectural and natural topography. To the right of this vault, is a coffered one, almost completely broken, running parallel to the picture plane. A remarkable passage appears in the distance between these two structures: a classicizing portico with festoons, which resembles the fantasia usually found in ancient Roman wall paintings. In the foreground is vegetation and rocks, one of which runs in a prominent diagonal of the same direction as the architecture. Continuous, looped hatches are uncharacteristic of Van Heemskerck, unique to two other drawings associated with him [cat. nos. 15 and 80]. The hatching in the deepest shadows is multilayered, arced, and running primarily at a diagonal that is nearly vertical. In places throughout this sheet, the hatching is continuous. This is to say, where one hatch ends, the pen does not lift from the paper, but instead dips and loops to create the next stroke. This type of stroke is most visible, for example, at the tip of the foregrounded rock and in the contour of the coffering; the pen has articulated a series of medium length strokes without lifting from the paper. Likewise, an ambiguous passage of vertical hatches found at nearly the exact center of the sheet, just above the tip of the foregrounded rock and between two coffered passages displays the same technique. These particular hatches, moreover, do not seem to describe anything, no legible form. Rather, they fill an ambiguously articulated space between the coffering at left, which appears to follow the form of the

Deattributions

vault, and the coffering at right, which adheres to the formal characteristics of the wall. The continuous loop stroke also appears in the highest shadows of the broken vaults of the second story, and again in the darkest shadow of the vault at right of center, the arched niche that leads to what appears to be both natural and ruined topography. Here, we find a network of hatches that are unprecedented among drawings traditionally given to Van Heemskerck in their quantity of angles and curvatures. Thus, if Van Heemskerck made this drawing, its hatching is a singular effect across his entire extant oeuvre. An anomalous passage suggesting a second hand on this sheet appears in the foreshortened coffering of the passages at left, just below the relief sculpture on the lintels: here, we find an alternative approach to foreshortening and shading. The continuous, looping stroke describing the contours and shadows of the coffering elsewhere has given way to pedestrian, unsure, straight lines. The handling of perspective here is poor, unrehearsed, and displays a lack of feel for how to replicate in a drawing the recession of objects away from the picture plane. It is comparable to the poor handling of perspective in the sheet showing the New St. Peter’s from the Janiculum given to “Anonymous C” in this volume, although I do not give this drawing to Anonymous C. This passage also appears to be with a different pen that is less sharp. We leave open the slim possibility of his authorship of this drawing. The approach the artist used to achieve this drawing’s hatching effect is not entirely unique among drawings traditionally given to Van Heemskerck. The handling of the relief sculpture above the arches at the left contains figures that are reminiscent of Van Heemskerck’s staffage, and is generally reminiscent of his handling of the relief sculpture in sheets such as the virtuosic Forum Nervae sheet [cat. no. 26], and the less carefully worked Cortile of the Palazzo Delle Valle [cat. no. 67], where we see a sarcophagus at right. Chapter 5’s analysis of Van Heemskerck’s technique reveals his frequent use of multilayered hatches to describe the curvature of the things on view [e.g., cat. no. 62].3 The hatching technique we see here might simply be the result of his responsiveness to the complex nature of the forms before him, his attempt to bend his technique to suit a difficult passage, one he did not encounter frequently. After all, he displays extreme sensitivity to the characteristics of the vistas before him in every case. As an image of the interior of the Colosseum, this drawing is comparable to prints of the Colosseum published by Hieronymus Cock in 1551.4 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus drew a similar set of vaults and arches from a more foreshortened angle [fig. 4.7].

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Cat. No. 80 Circle of Maarten van Heemskerck (by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus?) Casa dei Crescenzi Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Reserve B-12 (4)-Boite ECU Pen and brown ink 241 × 322 mm Literature: Nesselrath (1996); Folin and Preti, 89–90. Arnold Nesselrath brought this drawing to light in 1996, attributing it to Van Heemskerck. I deattribute it, however, based on particular aspects of the drawing’s technique that are uncharacteristic of Van Heemskerck’s traditionally attributed oeuvre. A magnificent rendering of Nicola dei Crescenzi’s eleventh century house, this drawing has perhaps escaped sustained scholarly scrutiny because it is not in Berlin and it portrays a medieval subject. The choice to draw eleventh century domestic architecture is uncharacteristic of Van Heemskerck; it is also surprising given the prevailing antiquarian interests of the day. However, the artist’s decision to gaze east from the banks of the Tiber and draw the Casa dei Crescenzi from its western side goes part way towards explaining a

Deattributions

Netherlandish antiquarian artist’s interest in the structure. As the drawing plainly shows, the Casa’s labyrinthine interior of vaulted compartments would have appealed to such interests. Moreover, the interior and the house’s south façade – on view at right – is not without its antiquarian charms. It bears ample signs of Crescenzi’s intent for his house to revive “the dignity of Rome,” as one of its inscriptions declares. A row of allegedly spoliated columns decorates the exterior and elaborately worked cornices appear throughout. This artist’s generous technique also evinces his interest in the house and recommends a deattribution from Van Heemskerck. The pen has lingered unsteadily over every jagged contour, transitioning seamlessly to confident gracefulness where smooth vaults appear. Throughout the shadowed interior, the artist of this drawing has applied at least two layers of hatches, one diagonal and one horizontal. In deeper shadows, a third layer of hatches provides contrast while articulating the contours of vaults, the spaces between dentils, and shadowed passageways. While none of these characteristics separate the drawing from the ones this volume confidently gives to Van Heemskerck, the pervasive presence of the same looped hatches appearing in examples in Berlin and Darmstadt do [cat. nos. 17 and 79, respectively], suggesting that the same hand executed both. Close examination of the Crescenzi sheet reveals the pervasiveness of hatches applied without lifting the pen throughout the Casa’s interior. Compare, for example, the looping ends of the hatches appearing at the upper edges of the drawing’s darkest passage with the same looping strokes appearing in the upper registers of the Darmstadt sheet. That this hooked stroke is nearly impossible to find at all, let alone in such quantities, among sheets traditionally given to Van Heemskerck suggests that this and the Darmstadt drawing are not his.

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Cat. No. 81 Circle of Maarten van Heemskerck Transept of St. Peter’s National Museum, Stockholm NMH Anck 637 Pen and Ink Wash 200 × 277 mm Notes: Contains an “MVHK” monogram, possibly added later. Literature: Thoenes, 1998; Millon, cat. no. 345; Carpiceci, 78. Unlike the views of the unfinished St. Peter’s from within the nave, presently in Berlin and England, this drawing contains no architectural evidence that would date it to a stage of St. Peter’s construction that is later than Van Heemskerck’s Roman stay. However, the similarity of the technique on display in this example to the Berlin drawing, which is not by Van Heemskerck, suggests that this is not by him either. Rather, this drawing appears to also be a drawing derived from an artist with an interest in St. Peter’s interior. The Berlin sheet is conclusively deattributable from Van Heemskerck because of its portrayal of the “Muro Divisoro.” However, because no architectural evidence dates the image to after Van Heemskerck’s Roman stay, the possibility that this is autograph is still an open one. Other features argue for Van Heemskerck’s hand as well. The heavily foregrounded column and lintel construction forming the basis of the composition is akin to Van Heemskerck’s

Deattributions

tendency to contrast foreground with background. Moreover, the backdrop of an autograph preparatory sketch for a print of Susanna and the Elders now in Chatsworth contains a column and lintel construction like the one appearing in this drawing.5 Cat. No. 82 Follower of Maarten van Heemskerck Castel Sant’Angelo Private Collection Literature: Burg, 1944. Burg noted that the sheet in question contains the initials JPM (Jean Paul Mariette) and is mounted in the same manner as the drawings in Berlin’s Album I. On this basis, he suggests that it is a Van Heemskerck that “once belonged to volume I.” However, the sheet in question is roughly 40 mm’s shorter on its long side than those belonging to the portable book of drawings Van Heemskerck carried with him in Rome. Moreover, the drawing contains a larger, looser, more spontaneous stroke, of the variety we are used to seeing from Northern European artists in the Seventeenth century. It is therefore not surprising that this drawing (and the drawing on its verso containing an unidentified landscape with ruins and a church) were originally thought to be by Claude Lorrain. However, the technique is closer to Lucas Valkenborch’s than Claude’s.6 Therefore, while the drawing probably belonged to Mariette and he may have included it in the collection that became Berlin’s Album I, its size shows that it was not a part of Van Heemskerck’s sketchbook and the technique also suggests it was not by him.

A Deattributed Group of Drawings in Berlin: ‘Anonymous C’

I propose the addition of ‘Anonymous C’ to the list of hands found in the Berlin Albums. Three sheets in Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 16, 50, and 51 contain drawings with common characteristics that separate them from drawings traditionally attributed to Van Heemskerck, ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus, and ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast. Drawings by ‘Anonymous C’ contain problems with foreshortening and perspective of a fundamental nature, which do not

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Deattributions

appear in most sheets traditionally attributed to Van Heemskerck, or those by the other unknown hands listed above. ‘Anonymous C’ also produced consistently longer hatches than Van Heemskerck, in either a sharp diagonal, up and to the right as in the drawing of the ruins in the Forum Nervae [cat. no. 83] or long horizontal hatches as in the drawing of Santa Maria in Aracoeli [cat. no. 85]. Also distinct from the drawings belonging to Van Heemskerck are Anonymous C’s uniformly thin strokes, which do not achieve the level of contrast we find in drawings attributed to Van Heemskerck. In trying to determine who besides Van Heemskerck may have authored these drawings, there are candidates, albeit unsatisfactory ones. Michiel Coxcie, Jan Cornelis Vermeyen, Lambert Lombard, and Cornelis Bos were in Rome during the 1530s. However, none of the drawings traditionally attributed to them are close matches to this hand.

Cat. No. 83 Anonymous C Forum Nervae, Temple of Minerva in perspective Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 50r 210 × 282 mm Pen and brown ink

Deattributions

Water Mark; Crescent (similar to Briquet 5202) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 31; Dacos (2004), 74. As with the other drawings in the ‘Anonymous C’ group, we find a stroke lacking confidence and an overall approach showing less contrast between light and shadow than in drawings by Van Heemskerck. Mistakes in proportion and perspective are apparent in the three columns in the right foreground. The capital of the middle column shows awkward foreshortening, which reveals the artist’s problems with showing how this group of columns recedes from the picture plane. The bases of the three capitals do not follow a common orthogonal.

Cat. No. 84 Anonymous C Panorama looking North at Old and New St. Peter’s Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 51r 258 × 407 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: Lily Branch (not in Briquet) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 31–32; Thoenes, 140; Veldman, 1987; Carpiceci, 89; Filippi.

431

432

Deattributions

Given to ‘Anonymous C’ for exceptionally its poor, unpracticed handling of perspective and foreshortening in the Benediction Loggia, the pediment of Old St. Peter’s, and the New St. Peter’s transept arm. The thin hatching and lack of contrast characteristic of ‘Anonymous C’ are present in this example, making Bramante’s vaulting virtually illegible and uncharacteristic of Van Heemskerck.

Cat. No. 85 Anonymous C Santa Maria Aracoeli with Capitoline Obelisk Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 16r 186 × 266 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 13; Filippi, 100. The vantage point does not offer the compositional dynamism for which Van Heemskerck strove in so many sheets securely attributed to him. While hatches throughout this sheet are horizontal, like Van Heemskerck’s, they are also uncharacteristically long, thin, and at

Deattributions

closer intervals resulting a pervasive lack of contrast that is uncharacteristic of traditionally attributed drawings by Van Heemskerck. Moreover, the drawing on the verso of this sheet contains the thin, nearly vertical hatching common to the other sheets in this group. Also uncharacteristic of Van Heemskerck – but common to the other drawings I give to ‘Anonymous C’ – is an unsure handling of shape; the western façade appears to teeter awkwardly to the left, the nave is bent midway, and the left column of the monastery’s loggia tilts to the right. ‘Anonymous C’ handles details in ways that are not found in Van Heemskerck’s drawings; the church’s western façade contains summarily rendered windows and an ambiguous vertical line. Clerestory windows appear via coarse vertical hatches and single outlines. Shadowed windows on the transept appear with even less articulation, through hatches of inconsistent lengths. Pentimenti appear at the top of the stairs, where a horizontal line confuses the top stair with the top of the right railing. ‘C’ is also guilty of poor planning, also unusual for Van Heemskerck; the figures interrupt the completion of lines describing the second transept buttress. Also arguing against Van Heemskerck’s hand in particular, this drawing had no afterlife in his post-Roman oeuvre. While medieval churches occasionally appear in the backdrops of his prints, they are based on observation of northern Gothic churches; none resemble Santa Maria in Aracoeli, and their parts do not appear to have resulted from consulting this sheet.7

433

434

Deattributions

Cat. No. 86 Anonymous C View looking southeast from Capitoline over Forum Romanum Towards the Colosseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 50v 198 × 272 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: Crescent on bottom edge of sheet (not in Briquet) Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 31. Scholars have never questioned the traditional attribution of this drawing from Berlin’s second album to Van Heemskerck, but it appears to be a poor copy after the drawing of the same vista in catalog number 6. Hülsen says that Van Heemskerck’s point of view is “a little higher” here than in that drawing, but the difference is minute. The obelisk is closer to the picture plane and more of the Colosseum’s east side is visible, perhaps suggesting a vantage point further

Deattributions

east as well. However, the drawing of the bottom half of Santa Francesca Romana’s campanile at right is unfinished just as it is in catalog number 6, suggesting that the sheet was not executed from direct observation, but by looking at the other drawing. Moreover, the present sheet contains too much ambiguous topographical information to confirm that its artist drew it from either a higher vantage point, or a copied catalog number 6; the retaining wall is missing, as is the smaller drawing’s circular fragment next to the obelisk; in the middle ground, the arch next to Santa Francesca Romana is too close to the picture plane to be the Arch of Titus, but no other arched structure in that area of the forum that presents itself as a possible alternative; a passage of vegetation appears to be behind the Colosseum on its first and second level, but on the third level, the same vegetation appears to be in front of the Colosseum and behind the Basilica of Maxentius. Buildings of questionable identification appear next to Santa Francesca Romana’s campanile.

A Brief Explanation and List of Previous Deattributions

The deattributions above are merely the latest refinements to Van Heemskerck’s corpus of Roman drawings. Since Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger titled their facsimile publication of the Berlin albums misleadingly, to suggest that all of the drawings contained therein belonged to Van Heemskerck, confusion has reigned. Throughout the 20th century, several publications of art and architectural history have reproduced drawings that Hülsen and Egger gave to ‘Anonymous A’ as if they belonged to Van Heemskerck. That they did so without arguing for reattributions to Van Heemskerck indicates their lack of attention to Hülsen and Egger’s text, despite the explicit nature of their distinction between Van Heemskerck, ‘Anonymous A,’ and others.8 Scholars have also issued some convincing deattributions of the drawings in the Berlin albums and elsewhere. Unfortunately, subsequent scholars have continued to miss these developments, especially the deattributions, while sustaining the practice of reproducing drawings no longer belonging to Van Heemskerck as his. Long before the sheets listed below as by ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast received deattribution from Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre, Hülsen and Egger had already noted that they were not part of the original book of drawings that he had with him in Rome; they bear no physical evidence of ever having been bound therein. While this alone

435

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Deattributions

did not mandate that the drawings on those sheets were not by Van Heemskerck, more evidence has accrued suggesting deattribution. Wolfgang Metternich observed that the St. Peter’s “muro divisorio,” not built until 1538, appears in Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 15r, below. Van Heemskerck is securely documented as having returned north by 1537. Thus, the drawing could not have been his. Metternich’s findings prompted further analysis from Ilja Veldman.9 She observed among the Berlin sheets a group of drawings sharing common stylistic characteristics with the drawing of St. Peter’s: a tighter, less spontaneous, more cautious stroke than Van Heemskerck’s, and staffage rendered in much greater detail than any found in drawings traditionally attributed to him. Finding no suitable candidate for attribution, Veldman followed the tradition established by Hülsen and Egger and named the artist “Anonymous B.” Nicole Dacos later gave Anonymous B’s drawings to Michiel Gast, of Van Heemskerck’s extended circle.10 The same year Veldman’s deattributions appeared Alberto Carpiceci published a study of the construction stages of St. Peter’s based on the drawings in Berlin. While he unwittingly continued their misattribution to Van Heemskerck, captioning them with the year “1538,” he brought to light.11 This section clarifies deattributions from Van Heemskerck since Hülsen and Egger’s facsimile of the Berlin albums appeared in the early 20th century. It provides a concise aid in explaining the absence from this book’s analysis and catalog of some drawings readers might have expected to see here given their frequent appearance as drawings belonging to Van Heemskerck. Drawings here are alphabetized by their main subject matter (e.g., “St. Peter’s Nave”). Their locations via institution and inventory number follow (e.g., “Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett; 79D2a, II 52r”). Finally, bibliography and brief notes follow. ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast Pantheon Facade Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 10r 133 × 200 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 7; Veldman (1987); Filippi, 98. Notes: For a comparable view, see Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 43v.

Deattributions

‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast Pantheon Portico Interior looking Southeast Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 2r 134 × 197 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 3–4; Veldman (1987); Filippi, 98. ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast Santa Maria della Febbre, Vatican Obelisk, and New St. Peter’s Transept Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 7r 128 × 201 mm. Pen and Brown Ink Water Mark: none Literature: Egger (1911), 30; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 7; Veldman (1987); Carpiceci, 88; Filippi, 102–103; Bartsch (2008), 139. Notes: Comparable to Van Heemskerck’s drawing of Santa Maria della Febbre and the Vatican Obelisk at close range [cat. no. 44], this drawing was the source for Pieter Saenredam’s Church of Santa Maria della Febbre.12 ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast Nave of Old St. Peter’s and transept of New St. Peters Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 15r 128 × 200 mm. Pen and brown ink Water Mark: Bottom half of a shield (not in Briquet). Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 9; Veldman (1987); Carpiceci, 81; Filippi, 102. Notes: This is the drawing showing the “muro divisorio.” It is comparable to a vedute published by Hieronymus Cock in 1561 from nearly the same vantage point (see Riggs, cat. no. 109), suggesting

437

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Deattributions

this drawing’s entry into the collection of drawings that would become Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 (album I) during Van Heemskerck’s lifetime. ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast New St. Peter’s from Beneath South side-aisle arch Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 8r 134 × 208 mm Pen and brown ink Water Mark: none Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 6; Veldman (1987); Carpiceci, 80; Filippi, 102; Thoenes, 146; Bartsch (2008), 145. ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast Piazza San Pietro Duke of Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 68–73; Shaw, 41; Veldman, 378–80; Dunbar, 195–204. Shows the entrance of St. Peter’s with decorations for Charles V’s Triumphal Entry into Rome on April 6, 1536. Therefore, scholars who doubt that Van Heemskerck remained in Rome through the beginning of 1536 do not give this drawing to Van Heemskerck. In light of the discovery of Van Heemskerck’s signature and the date “1536” on Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], a painting with a provenance traceable to old Roman collections, James Bryan Shaw attributed the drawing to Van Heemskerck.13 Veldman later gave this to ‘Anonymous B.’ While Burton Dunbar’s observation of this drawing’s “somewhat freer handling of line” argues against her attribution, close examination of this drawing’s stroke reveals its similarity to the drawings given to ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast. Unknown Nave interior of Old St. Peter’s and Vaulting of New St. Peter’s Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 52r 222 × 272 mm. Pen and brown ink wash. Water Mark: none

Deattributions

Literature: Egger (1911), 28; Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1 32–33; Veldman (1987); Carpiceci, 77; Filippi, 103; Thoenes, 147. This drawing and one like it in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, were once believed to be copies of a lost original by Van Heemskerck. The present sheet was believed to be by Hermannus Posthumus. This sheet’s technique is comparable to Posthumus’s copy – also in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett – of Van Heemskerck’s large ink wash drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 2]. The artist of this view stood in the center of the nave of Old St. Peter’s and drew Bramante’s vaults head on. Such a vantage point gives us the earliest known glimpse of the interior of the St. Peter’s complex during its transition into the present-day basilica. Unknown Interior of the Nave of Old St. Peters and Crossing of New St. Peter’s Margaret Chinnery Album, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London Literature: Egger (1911); Hülsen and Egger, vol. 2, 32–33. This was thought by Egger (1911) to be an autograph Van Heemskerck that was the source for the drawing of the same view in Berlin.14 However, Hülsen and Egger (1913–16) describe both as copies of a lost original by Van Heemskerck. Ink wash is applied more carefully than its Berlin replica, but also with more care than in traditionally attributed Van Heemskerck drawings using ink wash for shadows [cat. nos. 2 and 43].

439

Notes

Introduction

1 Van Heemskerck could not have left the Netherlands before 23 May, 1532. That is the date inscribed on the cartellino of the first of his two St. Luke paintings [fig. 2.5 in the present volume], marking its completion. For the St. Luke of 1532, see Rainhald Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck: Die Gemälde (Berlin: Boettcher, 1980), 109–116 and Jefferson Harrison, “The Paintings of Maerten van Heemskerck: A Catalogue Raisonée” (PhD. diss., University of Virginia, 1987), 250–262. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, et architetti, Gaetano Milanese, ed., vol. 5, 582, says that while he was working for Ippolito de’ Medici, he met “Martino Hemskerck, buon maestro di figure e paese.” According to a letter Vasari wrote to Paolo Giovio, he worked for Ippolito from December of 1531 to mid-July 1532. Therefore, Van Heemskerck and Vasari thus must have met in either June or the first half of July, 1532. For the timing of Van Heemskerck’s arrival in Rome, see also Ilja Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Michael Hoyle (Amsterdam: Gary Schwartz, 1977), 12. 2 The albums in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett are inventory numbers 79D2 and 79D2a, respectively. For their facsimile, see Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger, Die Römischen Skizzenbücher von Marten van Heemskerck in Könighlichen Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, 2 vols. (Berlin: Bard, 1913–1916, facsimile edition, Soest: Davaco, 1975). For a review of the 1975 republication, see Ilja Veldman, review of Die Römischen Skizzenbücher von Marten van Heemskerck in Könighlichen Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, by Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger, Simiolus 9 (1977): 106–113. 3 See this book’s bibliography for my work on various aspects of Van Heemskerck’s drawings and their relation to his post-Roman art. For the recent thinking on Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings also see the essays in Tatjana Bartsch and Peter Seiler, eds. Röm Zeichnen. Maarten van

Heemskerck 1532–1536/37 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2012). 4 The definitive works on Van Heemskerck’s painted oeuvre are Grosshans, Die Gemälde and Harrison, “Catalog Raisonné.” 5 Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5. 6 For Jan van Scorel see Molly Faries, “Jan Van Scorel: His Style and its Historical Context” (PhD. diss, Bryn Mawr College, 1972) and Idem., “Jan van Scorel’s Jerusalem Landscapes,” in Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998): 113–134. 7 Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem: 1604), f. 245r13–18. “Ian Schoorel seer gheruchtich was / hebbend een onghemeen schoonder nieuw manier van wercken uyt Italien ghebracht / die yeghelijck bysonder Marten well bevallen heft / dede soo veel / dat hy te Haerlem by desen Meester is gheraeckt” (Jan van Scorel was very famous and had brought with him from Italy an unusual and much more beautiful, novel manner of working which appealed to everyone, and especially to Marten, [who] managed to get to this master in Haarlem). All quoted passages from van Mander in this book are my translations unless I cite the authority of Hessel Miedema, trans. and ed., Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 6 vols. (Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers, 1994). 8 For the Clades Judaeae Gentis see Ilja Veldman, comp., Ger Luijten, ed., The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts 1450–1700: Maarten van Heemskerck, 2 vols. (Roosendaal – Amsterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive, 1994), nos. 238–259. 9 I agree with Tatjana Bartsch, who, in personal communication in Berlin during the summer of 2009 also criticized the rote and misleading use of the word “sketchbook” as inadequate for describing the small book of drawings Van Heemskerck carried with him in Rome. For the

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442 traditional nomenclature, see also Ilja Veldman, “The ‘Roman Sketchbooks’ in Berlin and Maarten van Heemskerck’s Travel Sketchbook,” in Röm Zeichnen, 11–24, who uses the words “sketch” and “sketchbook” liberally to describe Van Heemskerck’s drawing activities in Rome, and stated earlier, in “Review,” 110 that the drawings in Berlin are “sketch-like” compared to his preliminary drawings for prints. 10 Veldman, New Hollstein no. 301, from the series The Fall and Salvation of Mankind Through the Life and Passion of Christ, 1548, British Museum, London, Inv. No. 1949.0709.34. 11 Veldman, New Hollstein no. 219, from the series The Story of Susanna, 1563, British Museum, London, Inv. No. 1949,0709.141. 12 For concentrated articulations of this idea, see Arthur J. DiFuria, “Maerten van Heemskerck’s Collection Imagery in the Netherlandish Pictorial Memory,” Intellectual History Review 20, no. 1 (2010): 27–51 and Idem, “The Eternal Eye: Memory, Vision and Topography in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Roman Ruin ‘Vedute,’” in Röm Zeichnen, 157–170. 13 For this widely held opinion, see also Veldman, “Review,” 110. In the precision of their hatches, Van Heemskerck’s preparatory drawings for prints bear a comparable technique to the one on display in album I’s drawings of high finish [e.g. cat. no. 17]. However, his preparatory drawings are generally more monochromatic, lacking the dramatic contrast typical of the Roman drawings. See for example, Maarten van Heemskerck, “Nebuchednezzar in Wonder at the Presence of the Three Jewish Youths in the Fiery Furnace,” The Story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego, 1564, Object number RP-T-1910-6, ink on paper, 198 × 253 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the head of Laocoön (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 39r), did serve as the basis for a print, but more loosely than the traditionally strict guide for the burin that most intended preparatory drawings provided in sixteenth-century practice. Also see Van Heemskerck’s view from the Palatine [cat. no. 9] and Hieronymus Cock’s print after it [fig. no. 7.15], discussed in the present volume, 13. 14 Ilja Veldman, “Heemskerck’s Romeinse tekeningen en ‘Anonymous B,’” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 38 (1987),

notes to Introduction 369–382 identified drawings on Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 8r, 10r, and 15r as being by “Anonymous B.” These are also sheets close in size to those in the bound volume but bearing no physical traces of ever having been bound. In various publications, Nicole Dacos has suggested that “Anonymous B” is Michiel Gast, e.g., Roma Quanta Fuit: Ou L’Invention du Paysage de Ruines (Paris: Somogy, 2004), 96–97. 15 Veldman, “‘Anonymous B,’” 370. Veldman’s deattribution is accepted among Van Heemskerck scholars, but it has not reached a wider audience. Therefore, the drawings she gives to “Anonymous B” have continued to appear in publications as Van Heemskerck’s drawings. 16 Irregularly sized sheets in 79D2 are ff. 5 (179 × 213 mm), 62 (284 × 207 mm), 76 (151 × 163 mm), 77 (141 × 161 mm), and 78 (113 × 115 mm). 17 For a discussion of “Anonymous A” that includes a list of the drawings in the second album that are attributed to him, see Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, XIII–IXX. A chart appears in Ibid., 74. There, Hülsen and Egger additionally identify unknown hands on ff. 1, 41, 43, 46, 60, 62, 66, 69, 70, 76, 77, 78 and attribute f. 44 to Giancarli and ff. 67, 68, 74, and 75 to Sabatini. For “Anonymous A’ as Hermannus Posthumus, see Nicole Dacos, “L’anonyme A de Berlin: Hermannus Posthumus,” in: Antikenzeichnung und Antikenstudium in Renaissance und Fruhbarock (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1989), 61–81. In addition to being by hands other than Van Heemskerck’s, many of the drawings in 79D2a do not depict antiquities in Rome, but decorative elements from palace interiors in Mantua. First hand examination of all of the drawings in both albums suggests the impossibility of giving to a single hand all of those that Hülsen and Egger gave to “Anonymous A.” While Dacos argues convincingly that some of the “Anonymous A” drawings are Posthumus’s, she leaves many others unaddressed. Thus, although Dacos’s deliverance of “Anonymous A” from the realm of the unknown is attractive for its simplicity, it is not fully convincing. I therefore refer to the artist of these sheets as “‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus” unless discussing a work or an act of certain attribution to Posthumus. For example, discussions of Posthumus’s Tempus Edax Rerum [fig. no. 3.7] refer to Hermannus Posthumus.

notes to Introduction Likewise, mentions of Posthumus’s time in Rome do not refer to ‘Anonymous A,’ since we are aware that Posthumus was in Rome with Van Heemskerck and Lambert Sustris. Little is known of Posthumus, whose name Dacos has brought to light in several studies. Despite Hülsen’s and Egger’s expressed awareness of multiple hands in the Berlin albums, the republication of their facsimile in 1975 repeated the use of the original title. 18 The drawings in album II, Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a that appear to be by “Anonymous B” are on ff. 2r and 7r. 19 See this book’s catalog, “A Deattributed Group of Drawings in Berlin: ‘Anonymous C,’” 564–570. 20 For the drawings that are not in Berlin that this book gives to Van Heemskerck, see catalog numbers 10, 11, 24, 25, 28, 29, 35, 41, and 48. 21 For drawings in Darmstadt, Paris, and Stockholm that I take from Van Heemskerck, see catalog numbers 79–81. 22 Van Mander, Schilder-Boek, f. 245v38–39. 23 For Perrenot and Van Heemskerck, see Arthur J. DiFuria, “Remembering the Eternal in 1553: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Self Portrait Before the Colosseum,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 59 (2010): 99–103. 24 Netto Bol, The So-called Maarten de Vos Sketchbook of Drawings After the Antique (The Hague: Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Recreation and Social Welfare, 1976). 25 Ibid., 7–8. 26 For the posthumous movements of Van Heemskerck’s drawings see Tatjana Bartsch, “Transformierte Transformation. Zur fortuna der Antikenstudien Maarten van Heemskercks im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Wissensästhetik: Wissen über die Antike in ästhetischer Vermittlung, Ernst Osterkamp, ed. (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): 113–160. 27 Abraham Bredius, Kunstler Inventar 7 (The Hague: Nachträge, 1921), 83 n. 212: “Het treffelyck getekent boeckie van Mr. Maertyn Heemskerck nae alle de fraiste antique van Roma.” 28 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 22v. 29 Cornelis van Haarlem, Massacre of the Innocents, 1591, oil on canvas, 268 × 257 cm., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Inv. No. osI-49. For Van Heemskerck’s shutters, see Grosshans, Die

443 Gemälde, no. 55 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 67. 30 Pieter Saenredam, Church of Santa Maria della Febbre, Rome, 1629, Inventory number 1961.9.34, oil on panel, 37.8 × 70.5 cm., National Gallery, Washington, D.C. and Idem, View of the Forum from the Capitoline Hill, Rome, 1633, oil on panel, 26.5 × 47.5 cm., Musée des Beaux Arts, Orléans. For Saenredam’s paintings after Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, see J. Q. van Regteren Altena, “Saenredam als Archeoloog,” Oud Holland, 48 no. 1 (1938): 113 and Maria E. Houtzager, P. T. A. Swillens, and Iojannes Q. van Regteren Altena, Catalogue Raisonné of the works by Pieter Jansz. Saenredam (Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 1961), nos. 111–114. See also Bartsch, “Transformierte Transformation,” 139–140. 31 Veldman, “‘Anonymous B,’” 373–376. 32 J. G. van Gelder, Jan de Bisschop and his Icones and Paradigmata: classical antiquities and Italian drawings for artistic instruction in seventeenth century Holland (Soest: Davaco, 1985). For an example of Jan de Bisschop’s interest in ruins, see his ink wash drawing, Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, 1648–71, Object number RP-T-1898-A-3721, ink on paper, 244 × 270 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 33 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, iii. 34 For Hülsen and Egger’s proposed reconstruction of the booklet’s sequence, see Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 5–10. 35 For Hieronymus Cock see Timothy Riggs, Hieronymus Cock: Printmaker and Publisher (New York: Garland Press, 1977) and Joris van Grieken, ed., Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 36 Martin Stritt, “Kolumbus der Ruinenlandschaft?” 173–75, has ventured into this conceptual territory. See also my comparisons of Van Heemskerck’s compositional schemes to those in much later drawings in “Van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Berlin Sketchbooks” (PhD. diss, University of Delaware, 2008), 74–80. 37 For a definitive collection of Roman vedute, see Jorg Garms, Vedute di Roma Dal Medioevo all’Ottocento: Atlante iconografico, topografico, architettonico, 2 vols. (Naples: Electa, 1995).

444 38 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, f246v40, says that Haarlem’s rederijkers performed a farce at Van Heemskerck’s wedding, a sure sign of Van Heemskerck’s status as one of them. See Ilja Veldman “Maarten van Heemskerck and the Rhetoricians of Haarlem,” Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art (Hafnia: University of Copenhagan, Institute of Art History, 1976): 96–112 and Idem, Dutch Humanism, 93, n. 125. Shelley Perlove, “Narrative, Ornament, and Politics in Maerten van Heemskerck’s Story of Esther (1564),” in The Primacy of the Image in Northern European Art, 1400–1700: Essays in Honor of Larry Silver, eds. Debra Taylor Cashion, Henry Luttikhuizen, and Ashley West (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2017): 433–446, highlights the wit in Van Heemskerck’s prints Story of Esther. It is the type of high-minded humor on moralizing matters that likely would have appealed to his network of rederijker viewers. 39 For recent case studies of Van Heemskerck’s painting facture, see Anne Woolett et. al., eds., Drama and Devotion: Heemskerck’s Ecce Homo Altarpiece from Warsaw (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012). For a study of the poetics in Van Heemskerck’s revision of the Van Eyckian mode, see Arthur J. DiFuria, “Maarten van Heemskerck’s Caritas: Personifying Virtue, Animating Stone with Paint, Imaging the Image Debate,” in Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion, Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers, eds. (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2016): 518–543. 40 To date, we have no study bringing together Van Heemskerck’s monumental landscapes. The Helen canvas has received the most attention. For bibliography on the Helen, see chapter 6, n. 6. 41 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 247r12. 42 Veldman, Dutch Humanism is the only source that focuses on each of the major humanist exponents in Van Heemskerck’s circle, including Coornhert, Junius and the Haarlem Chamber of rhetoric. 43 Martin Stritt, Die schöne Helena in de Romruinen. Uberlegungen zu einem Gemälde Maarten van Heemskercks, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld, 2004). 44 Koenraad Jonckheere, Review of Röm Zeichnen, Maarten van Heemskerck 1532–1536/37, eds. Tatjana Bartsch and Peter Seiler, Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews 30 no. 2 (2013): 39.

notes to Introduction 45 For Van Mander’s biography of Van Heemskerck, see Schilder-Boeck, ff. 244v–247r. 46 Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 11. 47 Walter Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xix. 48 For Van Mander’s artistic response to Rome, see Marjolein Leesberg, “Karel van Mander as a Painter,” Simiolus 22 no. 1–2 (1993–1994): 5–57. 49 Melion, Netherlandish Canon, 38–59. 50 Ibid., 118. 51 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, ff. 244v–247r; for Van Mander’s effect on modern discourse, see Melion, Netherlandish Canon, xviii–xix, who elaborates the general notion that “van Mander continues to exert control over the modern study of Netherlandish art” and that “his anecdotes are read as if they were topoi simply, lacking in critical value because they seem unverifiable as documentary evidence.” 52 For the entire exchange, see Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck f. 246r12, “Doe dit hem van een van zijn Jongers worde gheseyt / datmen seyde / dat hy eerst op zijn Schoorels beter dede / als naderhandt doe hy van Room quain / antwoorde hy: Soon / doe en wist ick niet wat ick maechte”; Miedema, Lives, I, 242, translates Van Heemskerck’s response as, “Son, I did not know what I was doing then.” 53 For the so-called Drapers Altarpiece, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 55; Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonée,” cat. no. 67. 54 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, f. 246r21–23. 55 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, 246r15–16 … 21–24, “twee rijcklicke Historien / met veel wreck … In dit werck sietmen / hoe goet Mester Hemskerck is gheweest / en hoe gheneycht to ciereren / teghen t’ghemeen Spreckwoort / dat hy veel in de mondt hadde: Een yeder Schilder die wil bedijen / Vermijde cieraten en metselrijen.” 56 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, 246v12–16. 57 Miedema, Lives, vol. 2, 533–537, thinks Van Mander follows Vasari and articulates a place for landscape that is below figuration; Melion, Netherlandish Canon, 95–98, however, is the first to identify Van Mander’s sustained and pervasive articulation of alternatives to Vasari’s figure-based disegno throughout the SchilderBoeck. Melion’s interpretation has raised objections, e.g., Nina Eugenia Serebrennikov,

notes to Introduction Review of Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, by Walter S. Melion, Art Bulletin 74 no. 4 (1992): 685, disputes Melion’s claim, describing it as “injudiciously forced.” While she notes that Melion takes passages from Van Mander out of context, she does not acknowledge that Melion is pointing to the sum of Van Mander’s comments on landscape, which, in my estimation, is tantamount to a consistent elevation of the pictorial category on myriad specific terms. 58 Hessel Miedema, Karel van Mander: Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, vol. 2 (Haentjens: Dekker & Gumbert, 1973), 583. 59 Veldman, Hollstein, no. 455. Konrad Oberhuber, Zwischen Renaissance und Baroque: Das Zeitalter von Bruegel und Bellange, exh. cat. (New York: Arno, 1967), no. 107, 94, was the first to publish comments observing the indebtedness of the Cornelis-Goltzius Disgracers imagery to Van Heemskerck’s Human Ambition print. See also, Anne W. Lowenthal, “The Disgracers: four Sinners in One Act,” in Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert Haverkam Begemann on His Sixtieth Birthday (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1983): 148–53. 60 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 247r32–33. The full passage says “Hy hadde een seer aerdige manier van metter Pen te teyckenen / en seer suyver in’t artseren / met een lichte fraey handelinge.” Miedema, Lives, 246, omits the English near-cognate of “fraey,” in his translation, opting for the word “deft,” instead. “He had a very subtle manner in drawing with the pen, and was very precise in shading, with a deft, light way of handling.” 61 Melion, Netherlandish Canon, 123. 62 Ibid. 98. 63 Only one sheet contains a view of a natural landscape. See the present volume’s cat. no. 60. 64 Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 17–18. Early authors Ampzing (1628), Schrevelius (1648), Sandrart (1675) used van Mander’s text liberally and with few significant revisions. 65 Thomas Kerrich, Catalogue of the prints which have been engraved after Martin Heemskerck (Cambridge, England: J. Rowell Publishers, 1828); Jaro Springer, “Ein Skizzenbuch von Marten Heemskerck,” Jahrbuch der Königlichen Preussischen Kunstsammlungen no. 5 (1884), 327– 333; Idem, “Ein zweites Skizzenbuch von Marten van Heemskerck,” Ibid. no. 12, 1891, 117–124; Adolf

445 Michaelis, “Römische Skizzenbucher: Marten van Heemskercks und anderer Nordischer Kunstler des XVI Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts no. 6 (1891), 125–76, 219–238; Ibid. no. 7 (1892), 83–100; Leon Preibisz, Martin van Heemskerck: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Romanismus in der Niederlandischen Malerei des XVI Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1911). 66 Melion, Netherlandish Canon, xviii–xix. 67 Max J. Friedlaender, Early Netherlandish Painting, v. 13 (Leyden: Springer, 1937, trans. Heinz Norden, 1975), 40–46, subjugates Van Heemskerck to Van Scorel and devalues his post-Roman work by placing him in a sequence before a section on the “Masters of the 1540s,” even though before the 1540s, Van Heemskerck had yet to produce the bulk of his oeuvre. Friedlaender’s opening comments on Van Heemskerck describe the need for “distinguishing Heemskerck from Scorel – or rather seeking such a distinction.” In the remainder of the chapter, to the last paragraph, Friedlaender contrasts the aspects of Van Heemskerck’s art that “differ most markedly from van Scorel.” Van Heemskerck’s only postRoman work that garners Friedlaender’s praise is the Entombment (1538, Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique), which he deems praiseworthy due to its display of Van Heemskerck’s return Scorel’s manner. He concludes his chapter on Van Heemskerck by endorsing Van Mander’s view that Van Heemskerck’s best work was in Van Scorel’s manner. 68 Ibid., 43. 69 Ibid., 42. 70 For the early bibliography (before 1960) on this problem, see Miedema, Lives, 72, n. 52. 71 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, takes cat. nos. 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, and 13 from Scorel and gives them to Van Heemskerck; Harrison, “The Detroit Christ on Calvary and the Cologne Lamentation of Christ: two Early Haarlem Paintings by Maarten van Heemskerck,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek no. 37 (1986), 174–194; Idem, “Catalogue Raisonée,” 17–18, offers a list of paintings he attributes to Van Scorel c. 1525–30 and paintings he attributes to Van Heemskerck during the Haarlem period, 21–22. 72 Molly Faries, “Attributing the Layers of Heemskerck’s Cologne Lamentation of Christ,”

446 in Les Dessin sous-jacent dans le processus de creation (Louvain-la-Neuve: 1995): 133–141; Idem., Christa Steinbüchel, and J. R. J. van Asperen de Boer, “Maarten van Heemskerck and Jan van Scorel’s Haarlem Workshop,” in Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice: reprints of a Symposium, University of Leiden, the Netherlands 26–29, June 1995 (n. p. 1995), 135–139. 73 See also Josua Bruyn, “Over Betekenis van het Werk van Jan van Scorel Omstreeks 1530 voor Oudere en Jongere Tijdgenoten,” Oud Holland 97 no. 3 (1983): 117–124 and no. 4, 217–223 for a study that argues for Van Scorel’s influence on Van Heemskerck and others. 74 Grosshans, Die Gemälde 33–35 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonée,” 2–34 and cat. nos. 1–16. 75 Goffredo Hoogewerff, “L’ispirazione Romana di Martino van Heemskerck,” Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Mario Salmi (Rome: De Luca, 1963): 163–167; Veldman, “Maarten van Heemskerck en Italië,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 44 (1993): 125–142; Elena Filippi, Maarten van Heemskerck, Inventio Urbis (Milan: Electa, 1990), 9–10, discusses Van Heemskerck in Van Scorel’s workshop and in Rome, but draws no relation between the two phases of his career; Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 63, mentions the presence of Van Heemskerck and others in Scorel’s workshop, 193–205. 76 Hülsen and Egger offer no thoughts on the matter in their prefaces to either facsimile of the Berlin albums. See also the passage from Veldman, “Review,” in the present volume, 67 and ch. 2, n. 14. 77 Ilja Veldman, “Review,” 110, describes the difficulties in determining the function of van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. Idem, “Maarten van Heemskerck’s Travel Sketchbook,” 19, suggests that Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings contributed to the perfection of his memory for composing later works. 78 For a recent theorization on the relation of memory to time and the notion of supratemporality in relation to objective content, see Jordi Fernandez, “Memory and Time,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 141 no. 3 (December, 2008): 337–340. 79 For a full translation of the inscriptions on the frontispiece to the Clades Judaeae Gentis, see the present volume, ch. 8, n. 88.

notes to Introduction 80 While the paintings of Van Scorel and his circle provide compelling visual evidence for a stimulating humanist environment, concrete evidence of the precise nature of the intellectual environment Van Scorel created in his workshop is hard to come by. Van Mander, Het SchilderBoeck, f. 236v4–5 characterizes Van Scorel as a musician and an author of poems and various forms of rederijker dramas including spelen van sinne. However, Van Mander offers no details. Molly Faries has imparted to me in conversation (Boston, summer, 2015) that none of the literary efforts that Van Mander alleges are extant. Idem, et al., “Van Heemskerck and Jan van Scorel’s Haarlem Workshop,” offers no commentary on the intellectual aspect of Van Scorel’s Haarlem workshop. DiFuria, “Berlin Sketchbooks,” 36–43 speculates on the drawing as a locus for intellection in the Van Scorel circle; Kathleen Christian, “Collections in Rome,” in Röm Zeichnen, 129–156 describes Van Heemskerck’s Roman milieu via his drawings of collections as an indication of his network of patrons. Veldman, Dutch Humanism is still the definitive study of Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman humanist milieu, with analyses of his relationships with Hadrianus Junius, Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, and Haarlem’s Wijngartdranken chamber of rederijkers. 81 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, (London: Random House, 1966); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 82 Yates, Art of Memory, 20–21, 83–84, and 90–97, is particularly thorough on the theme of prudence as the art of memory’s goal. 83 Ibid., 82–105; Carruthers, Book of Memory, 47–60, 221–257. 84 Maria Fabricius Hansen, “Out of Time. Ruins as Places of Remembering in Italian Painting c. 1500,” in Memory and Oblivion, Wessel Reinink, ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999): 795–802. 85 Ibid. 799–800. 86 Davis Rosand, “Remembered Lines,” in Memory and Oblivion, 811–816 and Idem., Drawing Acts. Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88–97. 87 In addition to the notions of pictorial memory that Rosand articulates, notions of cultural

notes to Introduction memory also broaden our scope beyond mnemotechnics. The seminal works are by Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und Kulturell Identität,” in Jan Assman and Tonio Holscher, eds. Kultur und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19 and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The bibliography on the relation of space, objects and images to cultural memory is vast. Seminal works are Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: 1957) and Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 132–151. 88 Yates, Art of Memory, 126–127. 89 Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 90 For the seminal notion that the Renaissance perceived itself at a historical remove from antiquity see Erwin Panofsky “Renaissance and Renascences,” Kenyon Review 6 (1944): 228. 91 Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 92–93. 92 Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 93 Ibid., 314. 94 Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione, “The Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione,” in Palladio’s Rome: A Translation of Andrea Palladio’s Two Guidebooks to Rome, eds. Vaughn Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 179. 95 Ibid. 181. 96 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 68–69; for a detailed analysis of Aristotle’s relating of the memory to the self, also see Julia Annas, “Aristotle on Memory and the Self,” in Nussbaum, Martha C./Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, eds., Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 297–312. 97 Francesco Petrarca, Rerum Familiarum vol. 1–3, trans. A. S. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975–85), 113. 98 Cristoforo Landino, “Xandra,” in Carminia Omnia, Alessandro Perosa ed. (Florence: Leon S. Olschki, 1939), 81–82: “Quin etiam Augusto Stygias remeare paludes / Si licet et vita rurus in orbe frui, / Inquirens totam quamvis percursitet urbem, / Nulla videre sui iam

447 monumenta queta (Even if Augustus returned from the waters of the Styx, allowed to come back to earth and live again, and search through the entire city, he would no longer to be able to see any of his monuments).” Translation mine. 99 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 100 Giuliano da Sangallo, Christian Hülsen, Il Libro di Giuliano da Sangallo: Codice Vaticano Bareberniano Latino 4424 (Lipsia: 1910). 101 E.g., Ibid., ff. 4v, 12v, 34v, 75r. 102 Hermann Egger, Codex Escurialensis: Ein skizzenbuch aus der werkstatt Domenico Ghirlandaios (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1906). 103 Competing theories regarding the authorship of the Codex have been put forth. Hermann Egger, Codex Escurialensis, attributes the drawings to the Ghirlandaio workshop. Margarita Fernandez Gomez, “El autor del Codex Escurialensis,” Academia 74 (1992): 123–161 supports Egger’s hypothesis. Arnold Nesselrath, “Il Codice Escurialense,” in: Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1449– 1494: atti del convegno internazionale, Firenze, 16–18 Ottobre, 1994 (Florence: Centro di, 1994), 175–198, notes several hands. 104 For the single most complete presentation of drawings by Peruzzi, see Heinrich Wurm, Baldassarre Peruzzi: Architekturzeichnungen: Tafelband (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth, 1984). 105 For Peruzzi’s interest in scenography, see Richard Krautheimer, “The Tragic and Comic Scene of the Renaissance,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, 90 (1948): 328–346 and Marco Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna eds., Baldassare Peruzzi: Pittura scena e architettura nel Cinquecento (Rome: Istituto del Enciclopidio, 1987). For Peruzzi at the interstices of architecture, painting, and theatricality see Anne Huppert, Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Badassarre Peruzzi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 101–105. 106 Vasari, Le Vite, vol. 7, 653–654. 107 With its backdrop bearing a bulky, rusticated arch, an exception is Jan Gossart, The Mocking of Christ, ca. 1525, Object number RP-P-1972-198, ink on paper, 200 × 149 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

448

notes to Chapter 1

108 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 74 give 42 drawings to the unknown artist they call ‘Anonymous A.’ 109 Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 33–42. See also Idem, Voyage à Rome: Les artistes européens au XVIe siècle (Paris: Fonds Mercator, 2012). 110 Exceptions, with no ink wash, are Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 47r and v, which are copies after lost drawings by Van Heemskerck, and 79D2a 82v. 111 For this painting, see Ruth Olitsky-Rubinstein, “‘Tempus edax rerum’: A newly Discovered Painting By Hermannus Posthumus,” The Burlington Magazine 127, no. 988 (1985): 425–430, Dacos, ed., Fiamminghi a Roma, 17–23, and Idem, Voyage à Rome, 7. 112 For Cock in Rome, see Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 29. 113 For Thiry, see Nicole Dacos, “Léonard Thiry de Belges, peintre excellent: De Bruxelles à Fontainebleau en passant par Rome,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 127 no. 1528–29 (May–June 1996): 199–212 and 128 no. 1530–31 (July–August, 1996): 21–36. 1

The Possibility of a pre-Roman Maarten van Heemskerck

1 Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmi Roterdami Adagiorum Chiliades Tres, Ac Centuriae Fere Totidem (Venice: In Aedibus Aldi, 1508). 2 Editions of the Adages appeared in 1508, 1510, 1517–18, 1520, 1523, 1526, and 1528. See William Barker, ed., The Adages of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2001), xlvii – xlix. 3 The touchstone work for the Europe-wide establishment of the Eyckian mode and its late 15th and early 16th century afterlife is TillHolger Borchert, ed. The Age of Van Eyck: the Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting, 1430–1530 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 4 Gossart’s figuration all’antica, his mythological nudes in particular, has drawn attention since the advent of early modern art writing. Karel van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, f. 225v04–07, who offers a synchronic assessment of Gossart’s achievements, saying he “is well een van de eerste / die uyt Italien in Flaender bracht de reechte wijse van te ordineré / en te maken

Historien vol naeckte beelden / en alderley Poeterijen / t’welck voor zijnen tijt in onse Landen so niet in gebruyck en was” (“at least one of the first who brought from Italy to Flanders the right manner of composing and constructing stories with naked figures and all kinds of allegorical representations”). For this passage, Van Mander apparently reused either Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Antwerp: 1567 (Eng. ed., London, 1953)), “the first to bring from Italy to [the Netherlands] the art of painting historical and poetical subjects with nude figures,” or Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite 7, 584, “Mabuse was almost the first to bring to Flanders from Italy the true method of making scenes full of nude figures and poetical fancy.” See Stephanie Schrader, “Gossart’s Mythological Nudes and the Shaping of Philip of Burgundy’s Erotic Identity,” in Maryan Ainsworth, ed., Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) 45–55; Marisa Anne Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 3 sees the “canonizing [of] Gossart’s alleged debt to the south,” the emphasis on Italy’s importance for his figuration, as initiating a “profound misunderstanding of his engagement with antiquity,” and frames her book as an antidote to the historiographic conditions it has elicited. 5 See, for example, Duncan Bull, “Jan Gossaert and Jacopo Ripanda on the Capitoline,” Simiolus 35 (2010): 93, who says that castle program’s “classicizing tendency can be judged from the only surviving painting that was made for it: the large panel in Berlin showing a life size nude Neptune embracing a nude Amphitrite.” 6 Bass, Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, 46–73. 7 Gai Suetoni Tranquilli, De Vita Caesarum, Libri II–VI: Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, intro. Joseph B. Pike (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1908), 46. Brittenburg has recently received renewed attention as an important historical locus for Netherlandish antiquarianism’s growth in the early and mid 16th century. See, e.g., Martin Stritt, Helena in de Romruinen, 59–60, Bass, Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, 71–73, and Stephanie Porras, Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016), 22–23.

notes to Chapter 1 8 Jan Gossart, Spinario c. 1509, pen and brown ink on paper, 26.3 × 20.5 cm., Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden. See J. R. Judson, “Jan Gossart and the New Aesthetic,” in J. O. Hand, et. al., eds., The Age of Bruegel: Netherlandish Drawings in the Sixteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery, 1986): 13–14 and cat. no. 62. 9 Gerardus Geldenhauer, Viti Clarissimi Principis Phillip a Burgundià (Strasbourg: 1529), reprinted in J. Prinsen, Collectanea van Gerardus Geldenhauer Noviomagus Kroniet van het historisch Genootschap te Utrecht, series 3, no. 16 (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1901), 233. 10 For Gossart’s engagement with Dürer’s figural compositions, see Ainsworth, Man, Myth, Sensual Pleasure, 80, 92, and 93. Bass, Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, 51, is convincing in her refutation of the traditionally held belief that the painting may have been a collaboration with Jacopo, or influenced by Jacopo’s Mars and Venus print. 11 Mensger, Jan Gossaert: die Niederlandische Kunst zu Beginn der Neuzeit (Berlin: Reimber Verlag GmbH, 2002), 81–83, identifies ff. 34a, 36b, 37a and 37b of Fra Giocondo’s illustrated edition of De Architectura (1511) as the sources for the painted architecture of Neptune and Amphitrite. 12 Jan Gossart, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, 1520–22, Inventory number 894, oil on panel, 109.5 × 82 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldagalerie, Vienna. 13 On the Bruges Madonna, in the Low Countries by 1506, and its impact on Netherlandish art, see Dan Ewing, “The Influence of Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna,” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 47 (1978): 77–105. 14 The most thorough and up-to-date assessment of a paragon of the tapestry industry in the Netherlands of the 1520s concerns Pieter Coecke van Aelst. For Coecke van Aelst’s tapestry designs, see Stijn Alsteens, “Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s Drawings for Tapestries,” in Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, Elizabeth Cleland, ed. (New Haven / New York: Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art), 112–123. See also Genviève Souchal et. al., Masterpieces of Tapestry from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973), and Thomas P. Campbell, ed. Tapestry

449 in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (New Haven / New York: Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002). 15 Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Renaissance Gothic in the Netherlands: The Uses of Ornament,” The Art Bulletin 82 no. 2 (2000): 241–42. Idem., “Gossart as Architect,” in Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, 31, “those adept at the newer antique manner liberally applied grotesque and arabesque motifs to their rudimentary pilasters and entablatures.” 16 See ch. 2 n. 26. 17 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, f. 235v19–21; “practiseerde conterfeytende nar alle antijcke dinghen so beelden ruwijnen als de constige schilderijen van Raphael, en Michael Agnolo.” 18 For Gossart’s indebtedness to and interest in Jan van Eyck, see Mensger, Neuzeit, 33–54 and Ainsworth, “Observations Concerning Gossart’s Working Methods,” in Man, Myth, Sensual Pleasures, 82–83. Bass, Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, 14–15, and 124, characterizes Gossart’s interest in Van Eyck as a revival. However, a continuum of artists between Van Eyck and Gossart, including the Memling circle and Gossart’s master and collaborator, Gerard David (1460–1523), carried Van Eyck’s technique and style unbroken into the sixteenth century. 19 Due to its finish, the drawing has been thought to have had a display function at Phillip of Burgundy’s court. See Geldenhauer in Collectanea, 209. 20 Aside from analyses of Gossart’s Colosseum drawing, there is no literature outlining Gossart’s interest in ruins. Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Gossart as Architect” 31–32, frames his study by emphasizing instead the theoretical and architectural nature of Gossart’s topography all’antica. While it would be a stretch to call Van Heemskerck the inventor of the ruinscape, we cannot doubt his inventiveness within that pictorial category during its nascent phase. See Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 69–88. Moreover, it appears certain that his response to Rome’s collections was to invent rather than emulate a nearby example, as there appear to have been scant few. See DiFuria, “Collection Imagery” 32–35. 21 André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 73.

450 22 Bass, Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, 50 and 161 n. 14. Geldenhouwer, Collectanea, 233. 23 Jan Gossart, Adoration of the Kings, 1510–15, Inventory number NG 2790, oil on wood, 177.2 × 161.8 cm., National Gallery, London. See Ainsworth, ed., Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, cat. no. 8. 24 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 134–37. 25 See Introduction, n. 107 and Ainsworth, ed., Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures, figs. 104 and 115. 26 K. G. Boon, Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (The Hague: Government Public Office, 1978), cat. no. 336. 27 See Jan Saenredam’s print in the same direction as the drawing in the British Museum, number 1873,0809.823. 28 Ilja Veldman, “Review,” 110, describes the Roman journey as “still unusual” for Netherlandish painters of Van Heemskerck’s generation. Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 20–21, describes the Roman journey as an “obligation within [artistic] training” far earlier than it actually became obligatory: “Die Reise nach Italien und der damit verbundene Besuch Roms hatte in den Niederlanden eine lange Tradition. Im 15. Jahrhundert war dies durch die engen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen Italien und Burgund eingeleitet worden. Für Künstler des 16. Jahrhunderts war die Italienreise zu einer Verpflichtung innerhalb der Ausbildung geworden.” Larry Silver, “Review of Rainhald Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck: die Gemälde,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 47 no. 2 (1984): 271, points out Grosshans’s anachronism. 29 For Gossart in Rome see J. G. van Gelder, “Jan Gossart in Rome, 1508–09” Oud-Holland 59 (1942): 1–11. For recent nuanced analyses of Gossart in Rome and the city’s impact on his own art, status, and Netherlandish visual culture, see Mensger, Neuzeit, 73–104; Stephanie Schrader, “Drawing for Diplomacy: Gossart’s Sojourn in Rome,” and “Gossart’s Mythological Nudes and the Shaping of Philip of Burgundy’s Erotic Identity,” in Ainsworth, ed., Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, 45–68; Bass, Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, 49–51.

notes to Chapter 1 30 For Philip as patron and his key role in the growth of Netherlandish antiquarianism, see J. Sterk, Philips von Bourgondië (1465–1524), bischop van Utrecht, als protagonist van de renaissance. Zijn leven en mecenaat (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1980). Stephanie Schrader, “Gossart’s Mythological Nudes,” argues for Philip’s desire to enhance the perception of his erotic prowess through his patronage of art after the antique. Bass argues throughout Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity for Gossart’s and Philip’s propagation of antiquity – the mythological nude in particular – as an element in a localized historical agenda to reclaim Zeeland’s antique past. 31 Gossart scholarship has tended to focus on the roots of his antiquarianism and its impact on his own art rather than detailing his impact on his contemporaries and successors. Exceptions are Jacqueline Folie, “Les Dessins de Jean Gossart dit Mabuse,” Gazette dex Beaux Arts 38 no. 1 (1960): 77–98, which argues for the importance of Gossart’s preparatory sketches for the rise of the Renaissance in the Low Countries; Larry Silver, “‘Figure, nude, historie, e poesie’: Gossart and the Renaissance Nude in the Netherlands,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 37 (1986): 1–40; Judson, “New Aesthetic,” 13–24. On Gossart’s fame and the propagation of his name, see Ainsworth, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures,” 3–8. On Gossart’s interest in the print medium and the circulation of prints after his designs, see Orenstein “Gossart and Printmaking,” in Ibid., 105–113. 32 For Gerardus Geldenhouwer’s description of the delegation’s time in Rome, see Vita Clarissimi in Collectanea, 18–19, 129, 209, and 233. 33 Mensger, Neuzeit, 13–17 argues that after Gossart acquired knowledge of antiquity in Rome, he also continued to work in a more traditional Gothic manner, according to patronal demands and preferences. 34 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, f. 225v08. 35 Ibid., 244v46. 36 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 33–34; for Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman oeuvre, see Ibid., nn. 36–39. 37 Maarten van Heemskerck, Man of Sorrows, 1532, Inventory number S.53, oil on wood, 85 × 72.5 cm.,

notes to Chapter 1 Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten; Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 34 and cat. no. 16 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 13. 38 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 35 and cat. nos. 3 and 4. Harrison “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. nos. 2 and 3. 39 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonée,” 7–8, hypothesizes that during his Delft period, Van Heemskerck used motifs by the Delft Master of the Virgo Inter Virgines. See also Ibid., 21–25 for a more general account of the pre-Roman Van Heemskerck’s powers of assimilation. 40 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 35 and cat. no. 5. Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 4. 41 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 235r08–v29, provides a detailed account of Van Scorel’s travels. See also Faries, “Jan Van Scorel,” 12–21. The rambling and extensive nature of Scorel’s movements suggests that he conceived of his journey south as an open-ended artistic exploration on the one hand, and a spiritual pilgrimage on the other. Van Scorel’s route to Italy through Germany was unusual, suggesting that he may have chosen to go through Germany specifically to visit Dürer. Van Mander says that Van Scorel went to Cologne, Speyer, Strasbourg, Basel, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Steyr, and by 1519, was in Carinthia, where he turned down a comfortable patronage situation. In Carinthia, Van Scorel painted the Holy Kinship altarpiece, signed and dated 1519. While no record of an encounter with Dürer exists, the Holy Kinship may contain some influence by Dürer. Van Scorel reached Venice in late 1519, where he met painters from Antwerp and joined with a group of Dutch pilgrims. Before visiting Bethlehem and Jerusalem in the summer of 1520, Van Scorel and his fellow pilgrims went to Malta, Rhodes, and Cyprus. He returned to Italy in 1521 and visited several places again, including Venice, before being called to Rome by Adrian VI. 42 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 234v14; Ibid., f. 244v42; Josua Bruyn, “De Abdij van Egmond also opdrachtgeefster van Kunstwerken in het Begin van de Zestiende eeuw,” Oud-Holland 81 (1966): 202; Faries, “Jan van Scorel” 14–19; Miedema, Lives, vol. 6, 273; Harrison, Catalogue Raisonée, 5 and n. 8. Scholars have been unable to securely attribute paintings to Willemszoon.

451 43 Harrison, Catalogue Raisonné, 6, thinks Van Heemskerck apprenticed with Willemszoon during the early 1510s, but not for the customary three years mentioned in Van Mander’s biography of Van Scorel due to Van Heemskerck’s impatient father, who, according to Van Mander, cut Van Heemskerck’s training under Willemszoon short; Ibid., n. 7, discounts the notion that Van Heemskerck and Van Scorel could have trained under Willemszoon at the same time. 44 Miedema, Lives, 70, hypothesizes that one of Willemszoon’s sons is the “Luca d’Olanda” who worked in Ferrara c. 1545–4, was perhaps dean of the Haarlem guild of St. Luke in 1559, and designer of the altar of the Christmas guild in Haarlem’s St. Bavokerk. 45 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 34, entertains the notion that between 1517 and 23, when Gossart was in Wijk, near Utrecht, Van Heemskerck visited him. With no supporting or refuting evidence, such a claim must remain in the realm of speculation. 46 Miedema, Lives, p. 72; Faries, “Jan van Scorel: Additional Documents from the Chruch Records of Utrecht,” Oud-Holland 35 (1970): 4–5, has pinpointed the dates of Scorel’s tenure in Haarlem: after April 29, 1527 to September, 1530. 47 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonée,” 9–10, gives a concise reading of Van Heemskerck’s status in Scorel’s workshop. 48 Van Mander, f.245r09–12, suggests Van Heemskerck’s maturity where he describes the interim between Willsemszoon and Scorel, under the completely unknown Jan Lucas in Delft, “daer hy hem weder voeghde aen de Const by eenen Ian Lucas, doende aldaer met teekenen en schilderen so grooten vlijt / dat hy binnen corten tijt in de Const seer heest toghenomen.” 49 Van Mander, f. 245v21–22. 50 Ibid., f. 227v28r, also says Jan Swart visited Rome in the 1520s and that Swart “reysde in Italien; heest eenighen tijt ghewoont te Venetien / en bracht gelick also Schoorel ook een ander manier van wercken hier te Lande / afghescheyden van de oncierlijcke modern / meer treckende nae d’Italiensche.” 51 Van Heemskerck was not alone in making the decision to work under Van Scorel. Van Mander,

452

notes to Chapter 2 f. 230v, also names Antonis Mor as an artist who worked under him. Also perhaps in Van Scorel’s workshop before going on to Rome were Hermannus Posthumus and Lambert Sustris.

2

The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel’s Workshop

1 One possible exception to the statement that we have no Roman drawings by Scorel is a drawing of the New St. Peter’s under construction, currently in the Vatican collection (Ashby, inv. number 329), which Dacos gives to Pieter Coecke van Aelst (an attribution that has not enjoyed acceptance) in Fiamminghi a Roma, cat. no. 66. 2 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 1980, cat. nos. 1–19, gives nineteen paintings to Van Heemskerck before his journey to Rome, and only one (cat. no. 1) securely to the period before he worked under Van Scorel. Jefferson Harrison “Catalogue Raisonné” gives no paintings to Van Heemskerck before his entry into Van Scorel’s workshop. 3 Van Mander, Het Schilder – Boeck, f. 245r13–18. “Ian Schoorel seer gheruchtich was / hebbend een onghemeen schoonder nieuw manier van wercken uyt Italien ghebracht / die yeghelijck bysonder Marten well bevallen heft / dede soo veel / dat hy te Haerlem by desen Meester is gheraeckt.” 4 Ibid., f. 245r18–19. “Hier heeft hy zijn ghewoon neersticheyt van nieuws weder so gheoeffent / dat hy ten lesten den voorloopenden Meester in de Const achterhaelde / datmen hun werck qualijck con onderscheyden: soo eyghentlick de selve manier aenghenomen hebbende.” Van Mander does not refer to specific paintings. 5 Ibid., 19–20. “Den Meester foghende zijn erre verminderen mocht (soo eenige meenen) heft zijnen Discipel als uyt afjonsticheyt van hem laten gaen.” Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 11, cites Van Mander’s use of phrases like “as I have heard him relate” as evidence that the events he describes are “fairly reliable” because they came from one of Van Heemskerck’s close associates, either Van Heemskerck’s nephew Jacques van der Heck or his pupil Jacob Rauwaert. Miedema, Lives, vol. 4, 72, hypothesizes that Van Mander’s “serious allegation … must have crept in through coloured accounts from [Van Heemskerck’s] own

mouth” and suggests that “van Mander therefore distances himself from the assertion by adding ‘some say.’” 6 Neither painting, nor their relation to one another, has received enough scholarly attention. For Van Scorel’s Magdalen, see Matthias Ubl’s entry in 1100–1600: Rijksmuseum, eds. Frits Scholten and Reinier Baarsen (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2015), 187, cat. no. 69. The most recent technical analysis of the painting addresses its copy: Molly Faries, “Jan van Scorel’s Mary Magdalene: original and copy,” in La dessin sous-jacent et la technologie dans la peinture, Colloque XV: La peinture ancienne et ses proceeds, copies, repiques, pastiches, eds. Hélène Verougstraete and Jacqueline Couvert (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2006): 150–158. For Van Heemskerck’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 47–48 and 96–97, cat. no. 8 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 6. Craig Harbison and Molly Faries, Kunst voor de beeldenstorm: NoordNederlandse kunst 1525–1580, Jan Piet Filedt Kok, ed. (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1986), 190–191, note Van Heemskerck’s indebtedness to Van Scorel Magdalen for the shape of the Virgin Mary’s head, which they note also appears in Van Heemskerck’s St. Luke Painting the Virgin [fig. 2.5]. However, while the physiognomies of both the Van Scorel and the Van Heemskerck figures are generally similar, shape of the Van Heemskerck’s virgin’s head in both of his paintings is more angular and lacks the double chin so prominently on display in the Van Scorel painting. 7 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 2, William Granger Ryan, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 374–380. 8 For the Magdalen panel’s early provenance see Truus van Bueren, Tot Lof van Haarlem: Het beleid van de stad Haarlem ten aanzien van de kunstwerken uit de geconfisqueerde geestelijke instellingen (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993), 351. 9 For the notion that the direction of a figure’s glance generates reception by directing viewing – sacred vision – in an early modern Netherlandish painting, see Larry Silver, “God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s),” The Art Bulletin 83 no. 4 (2001): 626–650.

notes to Chapter 2 10 Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 11 Hans Belting H, Likeness and Presence, E. Jephcott trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 12 Gerard David, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1510, Inventory number 1937.1.43, oil on panel, 41.9 × 42.2 cm., National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Joachim Patinir, Rest on the Flight Into Egypt, 1518–1520, Inventory number P01611, oil on panel, 121 × 177 cm., Museo del Prado, Madrid. 13 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 245r. 14 Ilja Veldman, “Review,” 110. The full passage asks “what, in fact, could be more natural than that a painter who followed the example of Jan Gossart and Jan van Scorel and traveled to Rome … should occupy himself in sketching the monuments and interesting details he found in the city in order to provide himself with a pictorial record of his trip.” 15 For Van Scorel and the Vatican collection see Faries, “Jan Van Scorel: His Style and its Historical Context,” 21–22 and 62–64. 16 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 245r13–18. 17 Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 235v19–2. It is telling that despite van Mander’s claim, he does not connect specific Roman ruin drawings to particular paintings by Scorel. 18 Van Scorel’s famous drawing of Bethlehem is the single travel drawing whose attribution to Van Scorel scholars have never doubted. Five drawings attributed to Van Scorel or his circle, are scattered throughout Europe and America. The most recent study to put forth attributions of Van Scorel’s drawings is still Jan van Scorel, exh. cat., for., M. Elizabeth Houtzager, intro. G. J. Hoogewerff (Utrecht: 1955), which presents eight 16th century drawings that appear to have been executed during the Italian portion of his wanderjahr. Houtzager and Hoogewerff attribute three to Van Scorel (cat. nos. 112, 117, 120), award questionable attribution of one to him (cat. no. 116) and give one to his circle (cat. no. 109). Two drawings in Amsterdam (cat. nos. 100 and 104), and one in Cologne (cat. no. 110) are attributed to Van Heemskerck. A drawing of Jerusalem (cat. no. 98) in a “particular American Collection” is left unattributed. All of these drawings require further investigation to secure either

453 attribution, or date, or both; Molly Faries, in oral communication (Padova, 2007), believes that the British Museum’s drawing of Bethlehem is the only extant wanderjahr drawing from Van Scorel’s hand; while the Bethlehem drawing demonstrates Van Scorel’s interest in ruins in situ, some have overlooked it. E.g., Martin Stritt, “Helen in Rome: Maarten van Heemskerck’s Ruin Landscape,” FMR (January, 2000): 118, says “[Van Heemskerck was] the first artist to explore the phenomenon of the ruins as landscape”; Faries, “Jerusalem Landscapes,” 120, suggests that Van Heemskerck had access to Van Scorel’s sketchbook. 19 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné” 303, notes the “vaguely classical-looking buildings in Scorel’s pictures.” 20 There are four extant workshop iterations of the Adoration (1530–35) composition. Versions appear in Dublin, Utrecht (where there are two), and a private collection in the Rhineland. 21 See also Jan van Scorel, Portrait of a Pilgrim, 1530–40, Accession number 73.5, 64.1 × 43.5 cm., oil on arched masonite panel (transferred from wood), Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, donation from Mr. And Mrs. James A. Beresfored. 22 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 30–34. 23 Ernst Gombrich’s seminal essay, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” in Norm and Form: Gombrich on the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966): 107–121, asserts the very idea we see in practice here: the Italian admiration for the northerner’s facility with landscape stoked Van Scorel’s awareness of its utility as well as its poetic capacity. Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes (Philadelphia, 2006), 26–35, identifies Antwerp as a hub for the emerging taste for landscape in the Low Countries in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but a keen interest in picturing the vista is an earmark of Van Scorel’s Haarlem period and later Van Heemskerck’s post-Roman phase, making Haarlem an important center for the category’s development as well. 24 For Van Scorel’s interest in landscape and its possible influence on Van Heemskerck, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 45–50. 25 Arnold Nesselrath, “Raphael’s Gift to Dürer,” Master Drawings 331 no. 4 (1993): 376–389. 26 Van Scorel stayed in Rome after Adrian’s death and work on the Sala di Costantino

454 had recommenced. That he was there until September of 1524 when the Sala was completed led Molly Faries “Jan van Scorel: His Style and its Historical Context,” 62–63 to acknowledge the possibility that Van Scorel could have seen and absorbed the Sala’s motifs. Bert Meijer, “An unknown landscape Drawing by Polidoro da Caravaggio and a note on Jan van Scorel in Italy,” Paragone 291 (1974): 62–73, speculated that Van Scorel participated in the final stages of the work. 27 For the Marchiennes Polyptych, see Françoise Baligand et. al., La renaissance de Jan van Scorel: Les retables de Marchiennes (Paris: Fondation Custodia, 2011), especially Molly Faries’ essay, “Les retables de Marchiennes dans l’oeuvre de Jan van Scorel,” 17–36. 28 Van Mander, f. 234r23–28 and 38–45, “T’is kennlijck / dat vorrmael t’hooft der Stedé / het alder schoonste Room / bloeyende in voorstpoet / en volck-rijck wesende / placht in ghelijck ghetal van Menschen t’overvoeyen / en verciert te wesen van constighe uytnemende beelden / oft om better segghen Marmoren / en Coperen / die door hooge vernuftheyt natuerlijck in uytghekosen alder schoonste Menschen lichamen / in Dieren lijven waren verandert … d’Italianen dus verlicht wesende / hebben vrogher ghetroffen den rechten aerdt en westand der beelden / als we ons Nederlanders / die soo op een secker aenghewende wijse van wercken / met onvolcomen kennis / tot beter en beter doen sradigh en blijtigh hebben ghetracht / hun selben veel met t’gemeen leven te volghen vernoegende / saten (ghelijck of men segghen sounde) ghenoech doncker / oft met weynigh lichts / tot Joan van Schoorel, hun uyt Italien het wesen van de beste wijse oft ghestalt onser Consten bracht / voor ooghen stelde.” 29 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonée,” 28, observes Scorel’s interest in Italian paintings over and above the sculptural antiquities he encountered in Rome and hypothesizes that this may have been due to Adrian VI’s disdain for them as pagan artifacts. 30 The Fire of Troy, c. 1524–1530, Inventory number 2374, oil on wood, 43.5 × 31.2 cm., Utrecht, Centraal Museum. 31 Faries, “Jerusalem Landscapes,” 123, points out that “it is quite likely that Scorel would have seen

notes to chapter 2 Roman ruins on his journey to the Holy Land even before he saw them in Rome.” 32 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 235r39–46. The entire passage says that Van Scorel drew “Landschappen / ghelichten / Stedekens / Casteelen / en geberghté nae t’leven / seer aerdigh om sien. Tot Hierusalem wesend maeckte kengis met den Guardiaen van t’Clooster tot Sion / die aldaer by den Joden Turcken in grooten aensien is: met desen Guardiaen reysde hy door al dat omligghende Landt / oock op de Jordaen / conterfeytende met der Pen nae t’leven t’Landtschap en de gheleghentheyt der selver: en maeckte in Nederlandt gecomen wesende / nae dit betreck een schoon Schilderije van Olverwe / hoe Iosua de kinderen Israels dar droogh voets door leyde.” 33 Ibid., f. 235v34–48, “des bleef hy t’Utrecht by een Deken van Oudemunster / geheeten Lochorst, een Hoofs Heer / en groot Const-beminder. Voor desen maeckte hy verscheydé stucken van Water en Oly-verwe: onder ander / daer vosr van verhaelt is / eenen Palmsondagh / te weten / daer Christus op den Esel rijdt nae Jerusalem: hier was de Stadt in nae t’leven: dar waren kinderen en Joden / die boomtacken en cleederen spreyden / en anderen omstandt.” 34 Ibid., f. 235v45, may be describing this painting where he writes of a Baptism that Scorel made in Haarlem for Simon Sael, “een groot beminder der Const-naers.” 35 Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 193. 36 See Friedlaender, Early Netherlandish Painting, n. 33 and plate 168. 37 Maarten van Heemskerck, Madonna and Child Before a Landscape, 1530, oil on wood, 90 × 70 cm., whereabouts unknown, Provenance, Dr. R. Clavel Collection up to 1969. See Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 9. Maarten van Heemskerck, Judah and Tamar, 1532, Inventory number G.K.I 2008, oil on canvas, 138 × 163 cm., Berlin Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten, Jagdschloß Grunewald, also contains the same type of topographical motifs all’antica in its backdrop. Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 194, makes a similar observation regarding the all’antica topography Lambert Sustris’s Holy Family with a Parrot (private collection, her fig. 67).

notes to Chapter 3

3

Drawing Ruins in Post-Sack Rome

1 For the Sack of Rome, see Ludovico Guicciardini, Sacco di Roma del MDXXVII: Narrazioni di Contemporanei, Carlo Milanesi, comp. (Florence: G. Barbèra Editore, 1867); Chastel, Sack of Rome; Manfredo Tafuri, “Il Sacco di Roma. 1527: fratture e continuità,” in Roma nel Rinascimento (Milan: Electa, 1985): 21–35; Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1998); Anna Esposito and Manuel Vacquero Pineiro, “Rome During the Sack: Chronicles and Testimonies from an Occupied City,” in The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture, 125–142. 2 Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 322–23. says that the Sack reduced Rome’s population of 54,000 by 20,000 with 10,000 dying and 10,000 fleeing. 3 The debate on the date of Van Heemskerck’s departure from Rome has been considerable. Some early scholars followed Karel van Mander, Het Schilder – Boeck, f. 245v36–38, who said that Van Heemskerck was in Rome for three years, e.g., Hermann Egger, “Zur Dauer von Martens van Heemskerck Aufenthalt in Rom,” 121–123 and Friedlaender, Early Netherlandish Painting, 40. Michaelis, “Skizzenbucher,” VI, 130–31, extended Van Heemskerck’s stay by a year with his suggestion that his drawing of the forum [the present volume’s cat. no. 1] shows it in a state of preparation for Charles V’s procession in April of that year. The discovery by E. S. King, “A New Heemskerck,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery (1945) 61–73, of the dates “1535” and “1536” on a Van Heemskerck painting with a Roman provenance, Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1], provides nearly unequivocal evidence that Van Heemskerck stayed in Rome until at least the beginning of 1536. Rainald Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck: Die Gemälde, 22, and Jefferson Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 39, note that Van Heemskerck could have stayed in Rome as late as the spring of 1537 since he is earliest recorded as working in the Netherlands in November of that year. 4 For Cesi in captivity during the Sack, see Chastel, Sack of Rome, 99. For Cesi’s collection

455 during the sack, see Katherine Bentz, “Cardinal Cesi and his Garden: Antiquities, Landscape and Social Identity in Early Modern Rome” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2003), 55. For Cesi’s use of inscriptions linking his family name to ancient Roman family names, see William Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of Late Renaissance Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 58 no. 2 (2005): 400. 5 Helmut Puff, “Self-Portrait with Ruins: Maerten van Heemskerck, 1553,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 86 no. 4 (2011): 262–276, offers the most important attempt to date to link Van Heemskerck’s self-portrait to the impact that the Sack of Rome had on his postRoman career. 6 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 524–535. The series’ title page, not numbered in Hollstein, appearing on page 201, tells us that Van Heemskerck’s frequent publisher Hieronymus Cock received a privilege of six years from Charles V to publish the series. For analyses of the Victories series, see Bart Rosier, “The Victories of Charles V: A Series of Prints by Maarten van Heemskerck, 1555–56,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 20, no. 1 (1990–1991): 24–38, and Arthur J. DiFuria, “The Concettismo of Triumph: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V and Remembering Spanish Omnipotence in a Late Sixteenth Century Writing Cabinet,” in Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space, eds. Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward Wouk (London: Ashgate / Routledge, 2016): 158–183. 7 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 526–27, respectively. 8 The print contains the same text in Latin, Spanish, and French. The full Latin text states: BORBONE OCCISO, ROMANA IN MOENIA MILES CÆSAREVS RVIT, ET MISERANDAM DIRIPIT VRBEM. 9 Christoph Thoenes, “San Pietro come rovina. Note su alcune vedute di Maerten van Heemskerck,” in Sostegno e Adornamento, intro. James S. Ackerman (Milan: Electa, 1998): esp. 137–140. 10 Victor Plahte Tschudi, “Peruzzi, St. Peter’s, and Babylon,” Source 19, no. 3 (2000): 9. 11 Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 10 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899–1908), 189 and 326.

456 12 Gregory Aldrete, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 122. 13 Two markers record the flood. One is on the exterior of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and the other is in Piazza del Popolo. The latter’s inscription reads: SEPTIMVS AVRATV CLEMENS GESTABAT HETRVSCVS / SORTE PEDVM HVC SALET QVOM VAGVS VSQ TIBER/ QVIPPE MEMOR CAPI QVENO OLVERE PRIORES. / AMNIBVS EPOTIS IN NOVA TEXTA RVIT VTO FORET SPACI IMPLACABILIS VLTOR ADEPTI. / ET CERERVM BACCHVM SVSTVLIT ATQ LARES. / RESTAGNAVIT VIII ID OCTOB AN. / M.D.XXX. 14 Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 10, 323. 15 For the contrast between Clementine Rome before and after the Sack, see Chastel, Sack of Rome, 149–179. 16 Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 10, 324. 17 Ibid., 327–328. 18 For the election of Paul III Farnese, see Ibid., vol. 11, 14. 19 Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance, 168–174, provides a vivid account of the earliest humanist responses to the Sack; Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 179–207, discusses the response to the Sack in the early 1530s by patrons and artists. 20 For Paul III’s urbanism and attitudes towards revitalizing Rome and protecting its antiquities, see Allan Ceen, Quartiere de’ Banchi: Urban Planning in Rome in the First Half of the Cinquecento (New York: Garland Press, 1986), 102–106 and 174–178. 21 Walter Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1955), 108: “Grenzen jeder Leidenschaft auf Chaos, aber die Leidenschaft der Kollektorgrenzen auf dem Chaos des Speichers” (“Every passion borders on chaos, but the passion of the collector borders on the chaos of memory.”) 22 On the development of Rome’s sculpture collections over the course of the mid-sixteenth century, see Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire Without End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 23 Willem van Enckevoirt was in Rome from his time as datary to Pope Adrian VI until his death in 1534. Consensus in all Van Heemskerck literature is that Van Enckevoirt is indeed the cardinal whom Karel van Mander mentions in Het

notes to Chapter 3 Schilder-Boeck, f. 245v23–24, as Van Heemskerck’s host. See Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 12. 24 For the most recent thoughts on the Helen’s patron, see the present volume, 169–172. For the notion of the Helen as a “collection painting,” see the present volume, 169–170. 25 For Van Heemskerck’s Triumph of Bacchus as a product of his Roman stay, see ch. 6, n. 5. 26 On Van Heemskerck’s drawings of collections see DiFuria, “Maerten van Heemskerck’s Collection Imagery in the Netherlandish Pictorial Memory,” Intellectual History Review 20, no. 1 (2010): 27–51. See also Kathleen Wren Christian, “For the Delight of Friends, Citizens, and Strangers. Maarten van Heemskerck’s Drawings of Antiquities Collections in Rome,” in Röm Zeichnen, 129–156. 27 The Palazzo Medici has been called Palazzo Madama since 1540. In addition to Van Heemskerck’s surviving drawings portraying collection environments appearing in the present volume as catalog numbers 62–68, are his drawings portraying collections or parts of collections without settings: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2, fols. 23r, 27r, 29v, 46r, 47v, 53v, 63r, 72r. 28 DiFuria, “Collection Imagery,” 32–36. 29 Raphael Workshop, Standing Female, Fossombrone Sketchbook f. 32r, ink on paper, 332 × 218 mm., Biblioteca Passionei, Fossombrone, Italy. 30 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 31 For memory’s pictorial and spatial aspect, see Yates, Art of Memory, 92–94. 32 Arthur J. DiFuria, “Self-Fashioning and Ruination in a Print Series by Maerten van Heemskerck,” in eds. M. Galassi and A. De Floriani, Culture figurative a confronto tra Fiandre e Italia dal XV al XVII secolo, Atti del convegno internazionale Nord/Sud. Ricezioni Fiamminghe al di qua delle Alpi. Prospettive di studio e indagini tecniche (Milan: Silvana Editore, 2008): 123–124; Idem., “Remembering the Eternal in 1553: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Self Portrait Before the Colosseum,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 59 (2010): 93–95.

notes to Chapter 3 33 See Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 91–125 for Hermannus Posthumus and Lambert Sustris, where they visited the Domus Aurea with Van Heemskerck. 34 While Van Heemskerck executed broad-view panoramas from high vantage points [cat. nos. 56–59], he executed none from the vantage point the figures occupy in on the Palazzo Medici loggia’s roof. 35 See especially the work of Kathleen Wren Christian, cited in the present volume, Introduction, n. 80 and ch. 3, n. 22 and 37. Also see Bentz, “Cardinal Cesi and his Garden” and Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception.” For a definition of cultural memory in the sense I use the phrase here, see Assman, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und Kulturell Identität,” and especially Connerton’s bifurcated notion of “memory as such” and “social memory in particular,” in How Societies Remember, 2: “We experience our present world in a context which is causally connected with past events and objects, and hence with reference to events and objects which we are not experiencing when we are experiencing the present,” and 3, “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory … impeded by different sets of memories.” Applied to early modern collections of antiquities, Connerton’s notion of cultural memory counters the binary identified by Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26–27, in which there are two sets of humanists, one that “seeks to make the ancient world live again,” and another that “seeks to put the ancient texts back into their own time.” Rather, the collection acknowledges the antiquity’s pastness, while bringing it into contact with – and inviting it to affect – the viewer’s present. 36 Arnold Nesselrath, “Drei Zeichnungen von Marten van Heemskerck,’ in Ars Naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern 1996), 252–271, published the drawing in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fol. 53, the present volume’s cat. no. 67, attributing it to Van Heemskerck. In its symmetry, it is different in compositional character from most of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings and its technique resembles his preparatory drawings for prints. Thus, it might

457 be a post-Roman preparatory sketch for the print of the collection published by Hieronymus Cock (the present volume’s fig. 3.5, Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 589). 37 Kathleen Wren Christian, “Instauratio and Pietas: the della Valle Collections of Ancient Sculpture,” in Studies in the History of Art 70. Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe, CASVA Symposium Papers, eds. Nicholas Penny and Eike Schmidt (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art): 50. 38 For Peruzzi’s interest in scenography, see Richard Krautheimer, “The Tragic and Comic Scene of the Renaissance,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, 90 (1948): 328–346 and Baldassarre Peruzzi: Pittura scena e architettura nel Cinquecento, edited by M. Fagiolo and M. L. Madonna (Rome: Istituto del Enciclopidio, 1987). 39 David Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 247–248. 40 Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, vol. VI, 144. “… molti ignudi … di diverse attitudini … fece conoscere il buon disegno che aveva nelle figure e l’intelligenza de’ muscoli e di tutti le membra.” 41 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 321. 42 Gaetano Luigi Marini, Degli Archiatri Pontifici, vol. II (Rome: Pagliarini, 1784), 280–283. 43 Ruth Olitsky Rubinstein, “‘Tempus edax rerum’: A newly Discovered Painting by Hermannus Posthumus,” The Burlington Magazine, 127, no. 988 (1985): 425–430. 44 Dacos, “L’anonyme A de Berlin,” 61–81. 45 Idem, Roma Quanta Fuit, 91–125. 46 Veldman, “Anonymous B,” and and the present volume, 430–434. A Brief Explanation and List of Previous Deattributions. 47 First observed by Michaelis, “Skizzenbucher,” 130–131. 48 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 553–572. 49 Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 10, 321–329. 50 On the sequence of execution at the Chigi Chapel, see John Shearman, “The Chigi Chapel in S. Maria del Popolo,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 24 no. 3/4 (1961): 129–160. 51 For Raphael’s legacy see Marcia Hall, After Raphael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 95–128 and Henk Th. van Veen, ed., The Translation of Raphael’s Roman Style (Leuven: Peeters, 2007).

458 52 Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 325. 53 Hall’s formulation of the relief-like style permeates After Raphael. For a focused articulation of that pictorial approach in its socio-political context, see Hall’s essay “Politics and the Relief-Like Style,” in The Translation of Raphael’s Roman Style, 1–20. 54 For the Sala di Costantino’s antiquarianism, see Rolf Quednau, Di Sala di Costantino im Vatikaischen Palast: Zur Dekoration der Beiden Medici-Päpste Leon X (New York: G. Olms, 1979); Hall, After Raphael, 42–49. 55 For Van Heemskerck’s reliance on the Sala di Costantino’s motifs, see DiFuria, “Maerten van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus Driven from the Temple: Translatio and the Interrogative Print,” in Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, eds. Walter Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2014): 719–721 and Idem, “Concettismo of Triumph,” 172–177. 56 Maarten van Heemskerck, Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1545–50, Accession number 2001.637, 34.7 × 33.7 cm., pen and two hues of brown ink, brown-gray wash, heightened with white gouache, Rogers Fund, and the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2001, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I list the drawing here with a later date than the Metropolitan Museum ascribes to it. For the drawing, which is in the public domain, see http://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/349966, where it is dated to Van Heemskerck’s Roman phase. While the drawing is after the antique, it does not portray Roman monuments. It is an invention out of them instead. As such, there is no reason to date the drawing to Van Heemskerck’s Roman years. It bears all the characteristics of the early portion of his prime inventive years, from the mid-1540s to c. 1570, with a Virgin Mary resembling Van Heemskerck’s portrayal of her in his Rennes St. Luke [fig. 6.18 in the present volume]. 57 Vasari, Le Vite, vol. 4, 315–386. 58 Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione, “Letter to Leo X,” 181. For Raphael’s mapping and drawing of Rome, see Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 49–57 and Philip Jacks, “The Simulachrum of Fabio

notes to Chapter 3 Calvo: A View of Roman Architecture all’antica in 1527,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 3 (1990): 453–481. 59 Marcantonio Michiel, letter to Antonio Marsilio, in Marino Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 28 (Venice: F. Visentini, 1878) col. 424, cited in Jacks, “Simulachrum,” 457, n. 29. 60 Andrea Fulvio, Antiquitates Vrbis, fol. Aii r: “Ruinas Urbs interea tuis optimis auspiciis prospectus, ab interitu vendicare, ac litterarum lumen accederet. Priscaque loca tum per regions explorans observavi, quas Raphael Urbinas (Quem honoris causa nomino) paucis ante diebus quam e vita decederet (me indicante) penicillo finxerat; tametsi nullam ingenium ad attolendum urbem satis est, nec faciem quails ante fuerit exprimendam,” cited in Jacks, “Simulachrum,” 455. 61 Bartholomeo Marliani, Topographia Antiquae Romae (Rome: 1534, and Lyons: 1534). 62 For Enckevoirt as Peruzzi’s patron, see Sheryl Reiss, “Adrian VI, Clement VII, and Art,” in The Pontificate of Clement VI: History, Politics, Culture, Sheryl Riess and Kenneth Gouwens, eds. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press): 339–362. 63 Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 21–42. Peruzzi himself took the motif from an ancient Roman relief now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. For the grisaille composition called Landscape with Ruins and Vulcan’s Forge containing a similar figural motif, previously attributed to Van Heemskerck, which Dacos has given to Michiel Gast, see the present volume, ch. 6, n. 4. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2, f. 35r, by Van Heemskerck, shows drawing of a figure by Peruzzi on the ceiling of the Villa Farnesina’s Loggia di Psiche. 64 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 79. 65 Ibid., no. 72. 66 For Peruzzi’s drawings of ancient Roman architecture, see Heinrich Wurm, Baldassarre Peruzzi: Architekturzeichnungen: Tafelband (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth, 1984), Cristiano Tessari, Baldassare Peruzzi: Il Progetto dell’antico, intro., Howard Burns (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 1995), and Anne Huppert, Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Badassarre Peruzzi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 67 Publications on Peruzzi’s imaging of architecture and its relation to antiquity and architectural

459

notes to Chapter 4 theory are many. In addition to the sources cited directly above, see William Dinsmoor, “The Literary Remains of Sebastiano Serlio,” Art Bulletin (1942): 55–91 and 115–154; Howard Burns, “Baldassarre Peruzzi and Sixteenth-Century Architectural Theory,” in Les Traités d’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris: Picard, 1988): 207–226; Christoph Frommel, Baldassare Peruzzi als Maler und Zeichner (Vienna: Schroll, 1967–68); Idem, “Peruzzis Römische Anfänge, von der ‘PseudoCronaca-Gruppe’ zu Bramante,” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, vol. 27/28, 137–182. 68 For Van Heemskerck’s elimination of the medieval elements in the vistas he drew, see the present volume, 115. 69 See Introduction, n. 105. 70 Vasari, Le Vite vol. 4, 457–458, “Laonde inanimiti di ciò, cominciarono sì a studiare le cose dell’antichità di Roma, ch’eglino contraffacendo le cose di marmo antiche ne’ chiari e scuri loro, no restò vaso, statue, pili, storie, né cosa intera or rotta, ch’eglino non disegnassero e di quella non si servissero. E tanto confrequentazione e voglia a tal cosa posero il pensiero, che unitamente presero la maniera antic.” 71 Hall, After Raphael, 76–77. 72 Richard Turner, “Two Landscapes in Renaissance Rome,” Art Bulletin 43, no. 4 (1961): 280. 73 Vasari, Le Vite, 259. 74 E.g., the present volume’s catalog number 39 (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 55v), which may be a copy of a drawing of the façade of Palazzo Branconio dell’Acquila. Drawings that are perhaps copies by ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus of Van Heemskerck originals are cat. nos. 15, 21, Berlin Kupferstichkabinett Inv. No. 6696, which copies the present volume’s cat. no. 2, 79D2a 47r, 47v, and 52r. A copy of 52r by a more accomplished hand can be found in Sir John Soane’s Museum, Margaret Chinnery album. For this drawing see the section in this book’s catalog, A Brief Explanation and List of Previous Deattributions. 75 For the notion of the procession’s influence on Van Heemskerck’s Triumph of Bacchus, see Caecilie Weissert, “Satire im hohen Stil,” Dialog und Dialogizität in Maarten van Heemskercks Triumph des Bacchus,” kunsttexte.de 1 (2011): 1–16. 76 For Charles’s processional route and its apparatus, see Maria Luisa Madonna, “L’ingresso

di Carlo V a Roma,” in La città effimera e l’universo artificiale del giardino; la Firenze dei Medici e l’Italia del ‘500, Marcello Fagiolo, ed. (Rome: Officina, 1980), 63–68; Ceen, Quartiere de’ Banchi, 54–56; Andre Chastel, “Les entrées de Charles Quint en Italie,” in Fetes et ceremonies au temps de Charles Quint. IIe Congrès de l’association internationale des historiens de la Renaissance (2d Section). Bruxelles, Anvers, Gand, Liège, 2–7 Septembre 1957, Jean Jacquot, ed. (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1960): 197–206; Idem, Sack of Rome, 207–215; Elena de Laurentis, “Magnifiche gesta: I trionfi di Carlo V,” Alumina: Pagina Miniate 49 (2015): 6–19. 77 For the tension surrounding Charles’s procession, see Chastel, Sack of Rome, 209. 78 Ceen, Quartiere de’ Banchi, 55. 79 Chastel, Sack of Rome, 179–207. 80 Vasari, Le Vite vol. 6, 572–73. Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 154–155, identified Hermannus Posthumus as the “Ermanno” listed on payment sheets. 81 We know Paul III’s renovations to the forum for Charles’s procession from the oft cited contemporary account by Marcello Alberini, Il Sacco di Roma: L’ edizione Orano de I ricordi di Marcello Alberini, intro. Paola Farenta (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1997), 46, which describes Paul’s preparations in the forum. 4

Memory and Maarten van Heemskerck’s Eternal Eye

1 For example, Patricia Emison, “Architectural Imagery in Prints from the Kirk Edward Long Collection,” in Bernard Barryte, ed., Myth, Allegory, and Faith: The Kirk Edward Long Collection of Mannerist Prints (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2015): 115–135. 2 DiFuria, “Van Heemskerck’s Rome,” 129–126 and the present volume’s, chapters 6 and 8 map the relation of Van Heemskerk’s drawings to motifs in his post-Roman oeuvre. See also this book’s catalog entries, which point out the relation between specific drawings and postRoman works. For the general notion of the Roman drawings as a repository of motifs to which Van Heemskerck later turned, see also Veldman, “Maarten van Heemskerck’s Travel Sketchbook,” 19–21.

460 3 For these concerns, see also Tatjana Bartsch, “Praktiken des Zeichnens ‘drinnen’ und ‘draußen’: Zu van Heemskercks römischem Itinerar,” in Röm Zeichnen, 25–48. 4 Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci, John Francis Rigaud, trans. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1877), 149. 5 The present volume’s catalog number 74 contains a view of the forum at left that might be a copy of a lost Van Heemskerck. In its portrayal of more of the medieval buildings on view, it varies from the right half of catalog number 1, which shows the same part of the forum. 6 Christian, “Friends, Citizens, and Strangers,” expands this notion into an essay, using the collection drawings to reconstruct Van Heemskerck’s Roman milieu. 7 Catalog numbers: 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 43, 54. In any parsing of Van Heemskerck’s drawings into pictorial categories, parameters are inevitably imperfect. For example, I include his foreshortened drawing of the Arch of Constantine among his portrayals of single buildings despite its inclusion of the Colosseum in the distance, and despite the fact that the Arch of Constantine leaves the frame and does not appear completely. In the final analysis, the drawing’s primary focus is on the Arch. I do not include drawings showing details or interiors of single buildings to the exclusion of most of the structure, such as catalog number 30, which shows only a small part of the Baths of Diocletian. Nor do I include building complexes, such as San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure [cat. no. 32] and San Giovanni in Laterano [cat. no. 49]. As a series of structures at varying angles from the picture plane, these structures impose demands on the artist similar to medium view panoramas [e.g. cat. no. 1]. However, where Van Heemskerck has focused on the crossing of the New St. Peter’s [e.g. cat. nos. 42 and 43] the remainder of the building complex appears as secondary scenery, sufficient to consider the drawing as a portrayal of a single building. Single buildings appearing at a great distance from the picture plane as in catalog number 45, where the exterior of the Vatican Belvedere is small within a landscape, or catalog number 51, where the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica appears similarly, are not included in this list because of the compositional emphasis on the broader vista. I do not include

notes to Chapter 4 Van Heemskerck drawings of elevations [cat. nos. 39 and 40] in my analysis of his single building compositions because they involve no compositional deliberation. The low number of elevations among surviving sheets traditionally attributed to Van Heemskerck and their careless execution suggest his lack of interest in drawing in elevations. Their lack of facility resembling that of other traditionally attributed Van Heemskerck drawings leaves open the possibility of another hand entirely. 8 Even though these drawings contain multiple buildings, this compositional scheme did not necessarily force Van Heemskerck onto larger sheets of paper. Drawings of multiple building and medium-view panoramas on small sheets from Van Heemskerck’s little book of drawings include his drawing of the southwestern slope of the Palatine Hill, San Lorenzo Fuori Le Mure, and Piazza del Popolo [cat. nos. 12, 32, and 37]. However, it is not as if some of the more copiously appointed sites did not find him yearning for more paper on which to draw; he composed his drawings of the forum and San Giovanni in Laterano [cat. nos. 1 and 51] on two horizontally oriented small sheets from the booklet laid side by side. In both examples, the left side could stand alone as a successful independent composition. Medium-view panoramas on large sheets are: catalog numbers 13, 26, and 41. 9 See cat. nos. 56–60. Also meriting mention is catalog number 45, a Van Heemskerck composition on a large sheet in Berlin’s second volume that shows the Vatican Hill in the distance from Monte Mario. Parts of many of Van Heemskerck’s spatially emphatic drawings from Rome’s high vantage points also show distant buildings in their backgrounds resembling his broad-view panoramas, while focusing on buildings nearby. For example, in his foreshortened drawing of the reclining statues before the Conservator’s Palace [cat. no. 7], his Capitoline vantage point afforded him a view of Castel Sant’Angelo and the Pantheon, which appear in the distance at right. 10 E.g., Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 27r and Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 28r. 11 Vaughn Hart and Peter Hicks, “On Sebastiano Serlio: Decorum and the Art of Architectural Invention,” in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the

notes to Chapter 4 Renaissance Architectural Treatise, eds. Vaugh Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 140–157. 12 For drawings of single and multiple buildings that emphasize the extreme foreground and background, which comprise their own compositional category, see The Compelling Space and the Epochal Time of Van Heemskerck’s Ruinscapes, 118–127. 13 Scorel’s Drawing of Bethlehem, c. 1520, British Museum, London, No. PD 1928-3-10-100. 14 Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 29v. See also f. 26v and 30v. 15 This pictorial license is clearly in anticipation of the reconstruction of the Forum appearing on the next page of the publication, ff. 17v–18, in which orthogonal lines dominate and the Capitoline is host to a vanishing point. 16 Hülsen and Egger, Römishcen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 74, attribute Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 12r to “Anonymous A.” However, if there was ever a drawing around which to build a case that their “Anonymous A” comprises multiple hands, this sheet is it. While the ink wash technique is comparable to other drawings by “Anonymous A,” the outlines are much less sure handed when compared to several other examples. See Berlin Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 84v, 85r, and 87r. 17 Compare the photograph in the public domain at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/a/a4/Forum_romanum_1880. jpg, which reveals the pictorial fidelity to the landscape in the left sheet of this book’s catalog number 1. Van Heemskerck did move the Column of Marcus Aurelius to the east in order to ensure its appearance in this drawing. 18 Jorg Garms, Vedute di Roma Dal Medioevo all’Ottocento: Atlante iconografico, topografico, architettonico, vol. 2 (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1995), contains a convenient survey of views of the Forum’s north end. Cf. figs. C24, C27, C30, C33, C47. Garms attributes fig. C30 to Van Heemskerck after the attribution in Artisti Olandesi e fiamminghi in Italia: Mostra di Disegni del Cinque e Seicento della Collezione Frits Lugt, eds. Carlos van Hasselt and Albert Blankert (Florence: 1966), cat. no. 29. See the present volume’s catalog number 78 for a reattribution of this drawing to the “Circle of Maerten van Heemskerck.”

461 19 Despite their encompassing scope, all four of these drawings appear on the small sheets in Van Heemskerck’s portable drawing booklet. If he drew broad-view panoramas on larger sheets, they have not survived. Van Heemskerck may have placed enough importance on drawing Rome in broad panoramic views to reserve a section of his booklet for them. Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher vol. 1, ix, in their attempt to reconstruct the sketchbook’s original sequence, show the four sheets from catalog numbers 56 and 57 on adjacent pages. 20 We identify these parameters via the identification of monuments as follows – to – which allows a cartographic determination of a span of roughly 10,300 ft. or 1.95 miles. 21 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, I, 10–11. Hülsen hypothesizes that Van Heemskerck drew catalog number 56 from the campanile of Santa Sabina on the Aventine. Egger, loc. cit. vol. 1, 32, says that catalog number 58 was drawn from the “highest point on the Vatican loggia.” However, the drawing’s angle of view suggests a higher point that is further back from the piazza below. The campanile of Old St. Peter’s is the likeliest place. 22 Catalog number 57 of the Ripa Grande is from a point on the Aventine near the one chosen by the artist of Codex Escurialensis. E.g. Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 56v. See also the top half of Giuliano da Sangallo’s “View of the Ponte Quattro Capi from north of the Ponte Fabriccio” in Hülsen, Libro Sangallo, f. 34v. Another drawing in Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 27v, is from the same vantage point as Sangallo’s. An anonymous artist produced a comparable view (c. 1570, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, inv. No. 5807). Van Heemskerck’s drawing, catalog number 59 from the Monte Mario is from a vantage point that is comparable to a drawing on two sheets in Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 7v and f. 8r. 23 Chastel, Sack of Rome, 72, posits Cranach’s appropriation of Hartmann Schedel’s image. 24 For the importance of landscape in Van Heemskerck’s northern training, see the present volume, Leaving Van Scorel’s Workshop: Landscape and the Wanderjahr Drawing, 71–76. The most recent discussion of panoramic landscapes in the early 16th

462 century Netherlandish paintings is in Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of the Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 26–52. 25 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 235r. See the present volume, 74 and ch. 2 n. 32. Van Scorel may have also drawn Rome in a broad-view panorama, but no drawings survive. Nor do we have any paintings by Van Scorel that appear to have derived from such drawings. Ibid., f. 235v, does not mention Van Scorel’s pursuit of broadview panoramas in Rome and on 235r only states that while Van Scorel was in the Holy Land, he drew “landscapes, views.” 26 A medium-view panorama of an “unidentified northern Italian town” attributed to Van Scorel in Jan van Scorel, intro. G. J. Hoogewerff (Utrecht: 1955), cat. no. 120, does not receive substantial analysis in subsequent studies of Van Scorel. 27 None of Van Heemskerck’s broad-view panoramas contain relocations of any building to for the sake of making prettier landscapes. In addition to always including the largest most conspicuous topographical elements, Van Heemskerck was sure to render antiquities and important churches, no matter how small. 28 The panorama attributed to ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus in Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 91v and 92r had previously appeared as a Van Heemskerck in Egger, Die Römische Veduten (Vienna: 1911), II, pl. 105. But by the time Hülsen and Egger published the Berlin Albums in Römischen Skizzenbucher, they had determined that Van Heemskerck left Rome in 1534 and therefore reattributed the panorama to “Anonymous A” on the basis of its date, 1535, which appears at far left. See Ibid., vol. 2, xvi, for their re-attribution. Even though other scholars have since determined that Van Heemskerck stayed in Rome past 1535 (see the present volume, n. 201), the panorama should be given to ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus on stylistic grounds. Not only does the artist show the non-antique, vernacular buildings in view, but this drawing’s unbroken contour lines and use of ink wash are nearly identical to that of the sheets traditionally attributed to ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus (e.g., Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 53r, 84r, 89v). See also Hendrick van Cleve,

notes to Chapter 4 View of Rome from the Esquiline Hill, 1583–1588, Inventory Number 6606, Fondation Custodia / Frits Lugt Collection, Paris. 29 Hendrik Gijsmans, View of the Tiber, c. 1570, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, inv. No. 5807. 30 For Massaio’s map of Rome, see Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. Lat. 277, f. 131r. 31 For Van Heemskerck and Peruzzi, see the present volume, Introduction, n. 105 and ch. 3, n. 63. 32 For Van Heemskerck’s use of his broad-view panoramas in Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World [fig. 6.1] and his post-Roman paintings and prints, see the present volume, 239–241 and Stritt, Helena in de Romruinen, 71–72. 33 On this tendency of Van Heemskerck’s see Tatjana Bartsch, “Kapitell. Colosseum. Überlegungen zu Heemskercks Bildfindungen am Beispiel von. Fol. 28r des römischen Zeichnungsbuches,” in Zentren und Wirkungsräume der Antikrezeption. Zur Bedeutung von Raum und Kommunikation für die neuzeitliche Transformation der griechischrömischen Antike (Munster: Scriptorium, 2007), 27–38; DiFuria, “Van Heemskerck’s Rome,” 74–80 and Idem, “Eternal Eye,” 159–161, which serves as the basis for this section of the present volume. 34 See also Maarten van Heemskerck, Crucifixion, c. 1530, Accession number 34.15, oil on panel, 39.3 × 35.5 cm., Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI., which features Christ angled to the picture plane and foreshortened while the Virgin and St. John the Evangelist grieve in the extreme foreground. Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 114– 5, likens the Rest on the Flight’s composition to Van Scorel’s Lokhorst Triptych, which is indebted to Michelangelo’s deluge. However, the Rest on the Flight, the Detroit Crucifixion, and Van Heemskerck’s drawings that are so aggressively evocative of Roman space are unlike Van Scorel’s or Michelangelo’s compositions in their focus on single figures, objects, and/or small figure groups as opposed to the multitudes of figures we see in the Van Scorel and Michelangelo examples. 35 Bartsch, “Kapitell,” DiFuria “Van Heemskerck’s Rome,” 184–187 and Idem, “Eternal Eye,” 159, provide in depth analyses of this particular drawing. 36 For Polidoro’s genre study in the Albertina, c. 1525, see Inventory number 398, SCR474.

notes to Chapter 4 37 In addition to the present volume’s fig. 4.7, see also Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2a 71r and 91r, also by ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus, and also foreshortenings of the Colosseum’s spaces. 38 See Garms, Vedute di Roma, fig. D120. 39 E.g., A. L. Ducros, Villa Medici Gardens from inside the Western Loggia, c. 1782, Inventory number D-8884, Losanna, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts and G. F. Grimaldi, L’Isola Tiberina, Ponte Fabricus, c. 1679, Inventory number FC 125300, Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale dei Disegni e delle Stampe. 40 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 33–35. The Bicker family portraits are Grosshans’ cat. nos. 3 and 4. 41 Eleanor Saunders, “Old Testament Subjects in the Prints of Maarten van Heemskerck: ‘Als een Clare Spiegele der tegenwoordige Tijden’” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1978), 75, argues convincingly that Lucas’s prints may have had an influence on the compositional motifs in Van Heemskerck’s prints, but makes no relation to his drawings. Recent studies that discuss Lucas’s thematic play of background with foreground are by Liesel Nolan, “Is she Dancing?: a new reading of Lucas van Leyden’s Dance of the Magdalene of 1519,” in: Equally in God’s Image: women in the Middle Ages, Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright and Joan Bechtold, eds. (New York: P. Lang, 1990), 233–250, and Bart Cornelis and Jan Piet Filedt Kok, “The Taste for Lucas van Leyden Prints,” Simiolus (v. 26, no. 1/2, 1998), 18–86. 42 Heinrich Gerhard Franz, Niederländische Landschaftsmalerei im Zeitalter des Manierismus (Graz: Akademische Druck – u. Verlagsanstalt, 1969), 62, makes a general mention of Van Scorel’s tendency towards asymmetrical compositions in his post-Roman work without connecting it to Van Heemskerck’s more pronounced asymmetries. Jefferson Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 23, n. 25, attributes Van Heemskerck’s tendency to juxtapose large foreground forms with distant landscape prospects in his paintings to Van Scorel’s influence, but makes no connection to Van Heemskerck’s drawings. 43 Albrecht Dürer, The Painter’s Manual: A Manual of Measurement of Lines, Areas, and Solids by Means of Compass and Ruler, Walter L. Strauss, trans. (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 258. 44 Ibid., 204, 214, and 258.

463 45 Aside from Gossart’s and Van Heemskerck’s views of the Colosseum from this viewpoint, we find an anonymous late Quattrocento drawing in Sir John Soane’s Museum (Margaret Chinnery Album, f. 28), and two that are nearly contemporary with Gossart’s from near this viewpoint in Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 28v, the present volume’s fig. 4.6, which depicts the Arch of Constantine to the right of the Colosseum, and was thus drawn from further north and east, and f. 41v, the present volume’s fig. 4.8. 46 Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 41v, the present volume’s, f. 41v, also notes this aspect of the drawing. 47 Thoenes, “San Pietro come rovina,” 136: “Ma a questo punto l’immagine della città cominciò a essere caratterizzata, oltre che dale rovine antiche, anche dale’rovine nuove,’ cioè da edifice moderni condotti a termine.” 48 For the notion that early modern objects bear a temporal collapse see Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance. Especially germane are their chapters on painted architecture, 159–174, and Donato Bramante’s tegurio, 313–320, the temporary structure housing the altar of St. Peter’s before and during the lapsed phase of construction Van Heemskerck portrays and that we explore here. 49 Hart and Hicks, Palladio’s Rome, 181. 50 Bartsch, “Kapitell,” also addresses the question of Van Heemskerck’s drawings as topographical inventions as this drawing raises them. I use the term “fantasia” in the sense used by Cennini in Il Libro dell’Arte (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1971), 3, who says that the painter has the freedom to compose and combine figures as poets do, “come gli piace, secondo sua fantasia (as he pleases, according to his imagination).” 51 We are certain the Temple of Divus Claudius was extant between 203–211, CE because it appears on the Forma Urbis. 52 Rodolfo Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome (New York: MacMillan and Company, 1967), 208. Despite its appearance on the Forma Urbis, which was known in the 16th century, the Temple of Divus Claudius does not appear on Bufalini’s map. 53 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 17, “Ein umgekehrt am Boden liegendes

464

notes to Chapter 5

kolossales Compositakapitell, fast genau stimmend zu denen des Hauptsaales der Diocletiansthermen.” Hülsen cites Desgodetz, Les édifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés très exactement (Paris: Chez Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1682), 313, pl. V. 54 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 8. Hülsen notes their similarity to the capital on the present sheet, but does not suggest that they are also from the Baths of Diocletian or that these are the source for the capital in Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 28r, the present volume’s cat. no. 17. 55 I am indebted to Tatjana Bartsch, who keenly observed that the capitals in these two drawings are not an exact match; the abacus of the capitals on Fol. I, 12r does not contain a frieze of lotus palmettes. 56 E.g. the present volume’s catalog numbers 9, 10, 36, and 57. 57 For the notion of the drawings as the record of Van Heemskerck’s own internalized map of Rome, see Bartsch, “‘Drinnen’ und ‘draußen,’” 42–44. 58 Margaret R. Scherer, The Marvels of Ancient Rome, Charles Rufus Morey, ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 1955), 80. 5

The Copious Hand

1 David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 61–62. 2 For Van Heemskerck’s pure pen and ink hatching drawings in high finish, see catalog numbers 10, 17, 22, 24, 25, 36, 41, 62, and 64. 3 For pure pen and ink hatching drawings of medium finish, see catalog numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 38, 42, 47, 48, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72. 4 Drawings of low finish are catalog numbers 6, 12, 31, 32, 37, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56–59, and 66. Also notable are drawings that Van Heemskerck barely started, which I do not include in my analysis of Van Heemskerck’s technique because the application of pen to paper does not appear to have come close to being his primary concern at any point in their execution. They are: cat. nos. 23, 46, 55, and 60. Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett contains other drawings barely begun that I have

not included in the present volume’s catalog because they do not figure in any of my various analyses of Van Heemskerck’s pictorial approach. They are Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 42v and 79D2a 45v. 5 Cat. nos. 2, 43, 45, 49, 61. The others, catalog number 40 (a sheet containing two elevations of palace facades) and catalog number 50 (of San Giovanni in Laterano’s ambulatory) are rendered with little deliberation in low finish. 6 Several of Van Heemskerck’s pure pen and ink hatching drawings contain touches of ink wash for accenting and heightened contrast. See the present volume, 153. 7 Van Mander would have been able to see Van Heemskerck’s drawings while he was living near Haarlem, writing Het Schilder-Boeck. See the present volume, 10 and 19. Van Mander’s generic account of the subject matter in Van Heemskerck’s drawings, Ibid., f. 245v, “many ruins, ornaments and all kinds of subtleties of the ancients,” suggests either that he had a limited number of them at his disposal, did not study them in detail, or, as I suggest in the present volume, 16–19, he wished to align Van Heemskerck’s pursuits in Rome with his overarching theoretical scheme. 8 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 247r32–33, for the full passage, see the present volume, Introduction, n. 60. 9 While finishes range from the quick and gestural [e.g., cat. no. 6] to the meticulously worked [e.g., cat. no. 17], there is little correlation between finish and pictorial type. Van Heemskerck drew all of his broad-view panoramas [cat. nos. 56–60] in a low finish. But other pictorial frameworks accommodated drawings that Van Heemskerck subjected to varying degrees of finish. 10 For the Pictorum, see Nadine Orenstein, The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts 1450–1700: Hendrick Hondius (Roosendaal – Amsterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive, 1994). For an overview of points of contact between Van Mander and the Pictorum, see Annette de Vries, “Hondius Meets Van Mander: The Cultural Appropriation of the First Netherlandish Book on the Visual Arts System of Knowledge in a Series of Portraits,” in The Artist as Reader: On Education and Non-Education of Early Modern Artists, eds. Heiko Damm, Michael Thimann, and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2013), 259–299.

notes to Chapter 5 11

P ictorum Aliquot Celebrium Praecipuae Germaniae Inferioris Effigies, no. 67: “Quae region, Hemskerki Batavi non plena laboris? / Tot pinxit, finxit quit ingenio tabulas. / Urbes admirans, turres, tristesque ruinas, / Dices Daedalus composuisse manus (What region is not filled with the works of Van Heemskerck the Batavian / who painted and made so many pictures with his ingegno? / Wondrous cities, towers, and sad ruins / which you will say the hands of Daedalus made).” Translation mine. 12 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 246v. See the present volume, 167, for the full passage. 13 For an alternative to this interpretation of the allusion to Daedalus, see de Vries, “Hondius Meets Van Mander,” 287, who cites the mythological figure’s status as an exemplum against pride. Given the frequently conspicuous nature of Van Heemskerck’s displays of mastery, and the changing tastes at the time of the Pictorum’s publication in the early seventeenth century, this is also an appropriate interpretation. 14 See Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, ix, for their stylistic observation supporting their assertion that Van Heemskerck was only in Rome until 1534: “Die Einheitlichkeit im Stil der Zeichnungen wird auch dadurch verständlicher, daß ihre Entstehung in eine kürzere Zeitspanne fällt, als man bisher angenommen hat. Daß Heemskerck seine italienisch Reise im Sommer 1532 angetreten hat, steht fest … sein Aufenthalt in Rom dauerte, nach K. van Mander ausdrücklicher Angabe, drei Jahre.” For Hülsen and Egger’s summary of Van Heemskerck’s process, see Ibid., vol. 1, v: “Was die technische Ausführung der Zeichnungen anbelangt, so sind sie zum größten Teil mit Feder in bräunlicher Tinte ausgeführt; bei einzelnen Blättern ist Lavierung geschickt und meist sparsam erfolgt. Die Vorzeichnung ist, wo sie je vorhanden gewesen, sorgfältig getilgt; wie es scheint, hat Heemskerck die Konturen mit einem Metallstift vorgerissen (wofür besonders das nicht ganz vollendete Blatt 45 belehrent ist); Vorzeichung in Rotstift ist nirgends zu erkennen. – Nächst den Federzeichnungen sind am zahlreichsten die in Rotstift, zumeist nach plastichen Werken, weich und gewandt ausgeführt; weit seltener sind Zeichnungen mit schwarzer Kreide (fol. 23v. 45v. 70. 74).”

465 15 Ibid., vol. 2, iv. The full passages say, “Von ihnen müssen wir ausgehen, um gegen die große Zahl der bisher Heemskerck zugeschriebenen, zum Teil auch tatsächlich mit ihm in Zusammenhang stehenden Zeichnungen des II. Bandes die nötigen Kriterien zu erhalten. Es sind – mit ausnahme von fol. 16v., 22 und 48v. – durchweg Veduten, in denen uns Heemskerck ebenso wie im Skizzenbuch des I. Bandes al seine in jeder Hinsicht gefestigte künstlerische Individualität, namentlich aber als ein Meister der reinen Federzeichnung entgegentritt” and “mit einer breiten, mit überraschender Sicherheit durchgeführten Schaffierung sind alle Schlag – und Selbstschattenpartien durchgeführt, während durch eine sparsame, aber wohlüberlegte Strichelung der belichteten Flächen der Eindruck des Vor – oder Zurücktretens derselben oder ihrer schrägen Neigung beim Beschauer erreicht wird (vgl. Z. B. Taf 130).” 16 Veldman, “Review,” 106. 17 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, Cecil Grayson, trans. (London: Penguin, 1991), bk. 2, sect. 54, 76. 18 Desiderius Erasmus, De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia (Paris: Josse Bade, 1512). For the initial impetus to frame my analysis of Van Heemskerck’s technique by invoking Erasmus’s elaboration of copia, I am indebted to Koen Jonckheere, who gave a talk at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, Berlin, 2015, entitled “De Copia, or The Amplification of Northern Art in the Sixteenth Century.” Jonckheere did not discuss Van Heemskerck, or drawing techniques, but the poetics of the copy and its relation to Erasmus’s notion of copiousness among northern painters. 19 Nicolas Orme, Medieval Schools: from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 130, states that most boys left Latin school by their late teens. 20 For editions of De Copia, see Betty Knott, trans. “Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style,” Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 281. 21 This is Hülsen and Egger’s suggestion. Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, ix, “Die Zeichnungen des Skizzenbuches weisen durchweg eine bereits gefestigte künsterische Individualität auf, wie wir das von dem bein Antritt seiner Reise etwa 34 jährigen Meister

466 erwarten dürfen. Augenfällige stilistiche Differenzen, erhebliche fortscritte vom Schülerhaften zur sicheren Beherrschung der Formen lassen sich nicht erkennen.” 22 Pictorum Aliquot Celebrium Praecipuae Germaniae Inferioris Effigies, no. 29: “Propria Belgarum laus est bene pingere rura: / Ausoniorum, homines pingere, sine deos. / Nec mirum in capite Ausonius, sed Belga cerebrum / Non temere in guava fertur habere manu / Maluit ergo manus Jani bene pingere rura / Quam caput, aut homines, aut male scire deos (The proper praise for Belgians is to paint fields well / For Italians it is to paint men or Gods / Nor is it surprising that the Italian is said to have his brain in his head, as the Belgian’s is in his hand / Thus, Jan’s hand preferred to paint fields well / than for his head to know the gods poorly).” Translation mine. 23 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of The Courtier, I.26. 24 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 25 For Jan Van Scorel’s wanderjahr drawings, see above, the present volume’s n. 186. 26 The present volume’s catalog number 21 (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 47r), which is the only Roman drawing associated with Van Heemskerck’s hand that shows the Colosseum from a vantage point comparable to Gossart’s, and in a technique that is similar to the pen and ink technique we associate with Van Heemskerck, is widely regarded as a copy of after lost autograph Van Heemskerck. We therefore cannot rely on it for assessing Van Heemskerck’s technique. 27 See above in the present volume, 128–129. 28 For drawing techniques in the early modern period, see James Watrous, The Craft of OldMaster Drawings (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); Carlo James Old Master Prints and Drawings: A Guide to Preservation and Conservation (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997); Edward Saywell, “Behind the Line: The materials and Techniques of Old Master Drawings,” Bulletin of the Harvard University Art Museum, 6, no. 2 (1998): 7–39. The most recent description of the fundamental aspects of Netherlandish drawing techniques of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is

notes to Chapter 5 found in Fritz Koreny, Erwin Pokorny, and Georg Zeman, eds., Early Netherlandish Drawings from Jan van Eyck to Hieronymus Bosch (Antwerp: Rubenshuis, 2004), 10–20. 29 See Bartsch, “‘Drinnen’ und ‘draußen,’” 33–38 for thoughts on these questions. 30 Eight of Van Heemskerck’s Roman topographical drawings in the Berlin albums contain notable traces of under drawing: cat. nos. 7, 13, 26, 27, 33, 36, 44, 54. 31 Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the Porticus Octaviae [cat. no. 33] shows black chalk traces of quickly applied under drawing strokes just below the Porticus’ cornice. The sheet with his rendering of the Crater now in the cortile of Santa Maria in Trastevere [cat. no. 27] contains sparingly applied single line under drawing remnants around the Crater’s handles where he was working out their size and shape. He sometimes also made notes to himself during this preliminary phase. His broad-view panorama of the few north from the Aventine Hill [cat. no. 56] contains a faint black chalk letter “A” above the Palatine Hill’s apex. A drawing of the area of the Forum Boarium [cat. no. 34] has similar faint letters, “B” and “A,” on either side of San Giorgio in Velabro’s campanile. 32 Similar examples are the underdrawn lines that are still present throughout Van Heemskerck’s view of the southeastern end of the Palatine and Septizonium [cat. no. 13] and his fastidious rendering of the southern side of the ancient portico of the Arco Argentari, affixed to San Giorgio in Velabro [cat. no. 36], which still has undulating, free hand red chalk under drawing around the columns, pilasters, and roof. 33 See also the Colosseum’s appearance in the backgrounds of the Overturned Capital drawing [cat. no. 17] and the foreshortened drawing of the Arch of Constantine [cat. no. 22]. 34 For another clear example of this process, see the more finished of two foreshortened drawings in the Forum [cat. no. 3], where three buildings receding from the picture plane, from left to right, appear in thick, medium, and thin lines, respectively. 35 The misshapen Colosseum in the background of the present volume’s catalog number 9 is an anomalous instance of awkward foreshortening.

467

notes to Chapter 6 36 We must also classify some of Van Heemskerck’s drawings as medium finish because despite containing some features found in his highly finished sheets, they are incomplete. Van Heemskerck has not finished the background, or even the horizon line of his drawing of the Porticus Octaviae drawing [cat. no. 33]. With the exception of a half-finished capital, the entire foreground topography in Van Heemskerck’s view of the unfinished St. Peter’s [cat. no. 42] forever awaits ink. In his view over the forum from the Capitoline [cat. no. 5], Van Heemskerck never finished Santa Maria in Aracoeli’s monastery or the base of the Torre dei Santa Francesca Romana. His portrayal of the forum seen through the Arch of Titus [cat. no. 16] is mishandled, with confusing, incomplete passages in the buildings on the Capitoline. 37 Maryan W. Ainsworth, “Northern Renaissance Drawings and Under drawings: A Proposed Method of Study,” Master Drawings 27, no. 1 (1989): 16. The National Gallery of Art’s technical analysis of Van Heemskerck’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt [fig. 2.2] verifies Van Heemskerck’s use of this under drawing technique. 38 Jan Van Scorel, Landscape with Shepherds by a River and a Town Beyond, c. 1525, Object number 90.GG.8, brown, yellow and light orange ink wash, 137 × 195 mm., J. Paul Getty Museum. 39 Numerous sheets in the Berlin albums contain Van Heemskerck’s sculptural studies in red chalk. These are most often, but not always, on the verso sides of the sheets containing drawings of Roman topography. In Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2: 8v, 11v, 19v, 31r, 33v, 37v, 43v, 45v, 46v, 47v, 49r, 50r, 50v, 51v, 52v, 56r, 56v, 60v, 61v, 63v, 65v, 71v, and 75v. In 79D2a: 1v. 40 For example, when viewing Van Heemskerck’s masterfully inked drawing of the Forum Romanum [cat. no. 1], we may not even notice that some of the Temple of Faustina’s columns are double lines, or that others overshoot the ground line. 41 Van Heemskerck’s studies of perhaps the same capital appear on catalog number 69 in pen with ink wash and show less detail than catalog number 17. Van Heemskerck draws ornamental details in red chalk in catalog number 71. 42 For example, see Anonymous, Trofei di Mario, 1675–1711, Object number RP-P-1907-5792, ink on

paper, 163 × 191 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 43 Veldman, “Review,” 110. 6

Invention, Collecting, Antiquarianism

1 Karel van Mander, f. 246v25–27, “Hy was een seer goet ordineerder / ae een Man die de heels Weerelt schier vervult heft met zin inventien / wesende oock een goet Architect / ghelijk in al zijn dinghen overbodichte sien is.” Van Mander does not use the same words in the passage on f. 246r15–16, where he claims that Van Heemskerck often said, “every painter who wants to thrive should avoid decoration and architecture.” For the full passage, see Introduction, n. 55. There, he uses the word “metselrijen,” translated as “architecture” by Miedema, Lives, 242. 2 The definitive study of Van Heemskerck’s circle is Veldman, Dutch Humanism. However, other publications build on and supplement Veldman’s findings. See DiFuria, “Remembering the Eternal,” 99–103, Idem, “Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus,” 717–723, Idem, “Personifying Virtue,” 539–542, and Christian, “Friends, Citizens, and Strangers,” 142–152. 3 For Van Heemskerck’s Vulcan’s Forge, see Grosshans, cat. no. 22, 124–125, Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 20, 313–320 and Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 21–25. For the print that revises the painting, see Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 587. 4 Earlier than either the Vulcan or Gideon prints, and also suggesting the popularity of the motif among Van Heemskerck’s retinue, is the well-known drawing in the British Museum of contested attribution which features a similar figure group and subject: Ruins with Vulcan’s Forge Beneath an Arch, 1538, Museum Number 1949,0411.93, ink, chalk, and white heightening on paper, 393 × 433 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London. Inscribed at lower left, “hemskerck,” the drawing has long been given to the Haarlem artist, as the British Museum still does with no elaboration. See http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/ collection_online/collection_object_details. aspx?objectId=709377&partId=1 (accessed

468 04/20/2017). Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 28 and Filedt Kok, ed., Kunst Voor de Beeldenstorm, 59, discuss the drawing as a Van Heemskerck, although the latter describes it as a “surprise” after Van Heemskerck’s Helen canvas, suggesting his suspicion of alternative authorship. Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 52, was the first to give the drawing to Michiel Gast, albeit with little elaboration for the reattribution. Idem, Fiamminghi a Roma, cat. no. 96, 165, gives the drawing to Gast on the basis of its “esitazioni così flagranti nella resa della prospettìva e dell’anatomia [e] vigorosi rialzi di bianco per rendere gli effetti di luci (hesitations in the rendering of landscape and anatomy [and] vigorous white heightening effects).” Despite the lack of elaboration, I agree with Dacos’s deattribution from Van Heemskerck on the basis of the general notion that its figuration and white heightening would be anomalies in Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre, with the former being uncharacteristically slight, and the latter applied in unusually liberal amounts. 5 For the Triumph of Bacchus, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 24 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 18, 279–292. Harrison argues convincingly for Van Heemskerck’s execution of the painting during his Roman period on the basis of its provenance and stylistic grounds, citing “structural and figurative correspondences with … Heemskerck’s earlier Haarlem paintings.” While I agree with Harrison that the Bacchus is a Roman painting, I disagree with his suggestion that it belongs to the earlier part of Van Heemskerck’s Roman stay. Its compendium of motifs from Rome’s collections recommends it as a small memento of all the artist had absorbed during his Roman phase, a record of his time in Rome. Thus, it seems likelier that the Bacchus dates to later in his time in Rome. 6 The bibliography on Van Heemskerck’s Helen is growing. In addition to the concise but thorough entries on the Helen in Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 19 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 19, major contributions are King, “A New Heemskerck,” and Martin Stritt, Helena in de Romruinen. See also Idem, “Helen in Rome”; Joneath Spicer, “Heemskerck’s Rainbow: Symbol or Narrative Motif?” in: Pictura Verba Cupit: Essays for Lubomír Konecny, eds. Beket Bukovinská and Lubomír Slavicek

notes to Chapter 6 (Prague: Artefactum, 2006): 146–152; Alexandria Rebecca Brown-Hedjazi, “Of Land and Sea – The Rebuilding of Rome and the Expansion of Empire: Revisiting Maarten van Heemskerck’s panorama in the context of 1530s Rome,” M.A. thesis, Harvard University, 2015. 7 King, “New Heemskerck,” 65. The year “1535” appears on a crate in the rowboat in the painting’s central foreground; the side of the ship in the painting’s right foreground bears the year “1536.” 8 For my use of the of the term “fantasia” see the present volume, ch. 5, n. 50. 9 Van Heemskerck later made prints of all seven world wonders plus the Colosseum. His portrayals of those monuments have provided a reference for our identification of the wonders in the Helen. For Van Heemskerck’s Eight Wonders of the World, see Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 513–520. 10 The notion that Van Heemskerck could have spent significant time in Florence has received scant attention in the literature on the artist. However, given Florence’s importance as an artistic center and its proximity to Rome, and the length of Van Heemskerck’s stay there, the burden of proof must be on those who think he did not go to Florence. Rosier, “The Victories of Charles V,” 36 suggests but does not elaborate on the notion that Van Heemskerck studied Michelangelo’s New Sacristy in the Church of San Lorenzo. The central panel of Van Heemskerck’s Caritas triptych and his print, The Reward of Labor and Diligence, 1572, Museum number 1875,0710.442, ink on paper, 210 × 250 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London (Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 506), contain motifs suggesting that Van Heemskerck viewed Florentine sculptures by Michelangelo and indicating clearly that he saw either Jacopo Sansovino’s Caritas or Andrea del Sarto’s fresco in the Chiostro dello Scalzo revising the same figure group. For details, see DiFuria, “Personifying Virtue,” 534. 11 The spiral structure behind the hanging gardens corresponds with Van Heemskerck’s print of the gardens from the Eight Wonders series. See Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 519 and Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Walls of Babylon,” Eight Wonders of the World,

notes to Chapter 6 1572, Museum number 1875,0508.46, ink on paper, 212 × 267 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London, which also features the spiral tower. However, see also Veldman, loc. cit. no. 514, and Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Lighthouse at Alexandria,” Eight Wonders of the World, 1572, Museum number 1948,0410.4.72, ink on paper, 211 × 265 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London, which also features a spiral tower resembling the one in the Helen. 12 Ariane Mensger, “Review of Martin Stritt,” Die Schöne Helena in den Romruin,” Sehepunkte (v. 5, no. 9, 2005), http://www.sehepunkte.historicum .net/2005/09/4629.html (accessed 9/21/2018), maintains that we can only identify the Colossus of Rhodes with confidence. Intrinsically, Mensger is correct. However, the correspondence of the Helen’s monuments with those appearing in the Eight Wonders series comprises a strong suggestion that we can positively identify the Helen painting’s display of the other monuments I name above. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that 1535–36, Van Heemskerck did not conceive of the monuments portrayed as wonders but then retrofitted them to his conceptualization of a print series he made fifty years later. It seems likelier that the continuity between the two sets of images has its origins in the 1530s and Van Heemskerck did intend the painting’s monuments to stand as the wonders we now recognize. 13 Samuel Quiccheberg, Inscriptiones vel tituli theatric amplissimi (Munich: 1565). For Quicchelberg’s notions of the collection’s encompassment of memory, see Elizabeth M. Jojós, “The Concept of an Engravings Collection in the Year 1565: Quicchelberg, Inscriptiones vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi,” Art Bulletin, 40 no. 2 (1958): 151–156. Peter Parshall, “Art and the Theater of Knowledge: The Origins of Print Collecting in Northern Europe,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 2, no. 3 (1994): 14–15, argues for the collection environment as a “general arrangement of knowledge.” engendering an exegetical intertextuality of image and text that in turn demanded that “looking at prints … became a form of reading, an active arena of interpretation.”

469 14 See E. S. King, “New Heemskerck,” 63–65, Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 117–118, and Harrison, Catalogue Raisonée, cat. no. 19, all of which move seamlessly from discussions of the scenery to the narrative with little synthesis. Dacos, ed., Fiamminghi, cat. no. 111, thinks that the ruins presage the outcome of Helen’s abduction, the fall of Troy. Joneath Spicer, “Heemskerck’s Rainbow,” 151, relates the rainbow in the backdrop to The Cypria, a mid-seventh century BC telling of the story by Stasinus of Cyprus, who says that Hera “stirred up a storm” against Paris and Helen as they sail away. 15 Stritt, Helena in de Römruinen. 16 E.g., Zanobi Strozzi’s portrayal of the same episode, c. 1450, National Gallery, London, Inv. No. NG591, and the earthenware version by Francesco Xanto Avelli, painted in Urbino in 1534, J. Paul Getty Museum, Inv. No. 84.DE.118. For a broader analysis of portrayals of Helen’s abduction, see Victor Stoichita, “La Bella Elena ed il suo doppio nella Galeria del Cavalier Marino,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale Estetica Barocca, Sebastian Schütze, ed. (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2004): 205–221. 17 King, “New Heemskerck,” 63–64. 18 Margaret R. Scherer, “Helen of Troy,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 25 no. 10 (1967): 368. 19 Here, I am in agreement with Martin Stritt, Helena in de Römruinen, 44, who argues similarly that the presence of a few wonders constitutes a “poetic evocation” of all of them. 20 For Van Scorel’s use of Michelangelo’s Deluge, see Faries, “Jerusalem Landscapes,” 113–117 and the present volume, 73. 21 Jan van Scorel, Landscape with the Drowning of the Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, 1520, oil on panel, 54 × 134 cm., Milan, Private Collection; Idem, Landscape with Tobias and the Angel, 1521, Inventory number M 1995-12, oil on panel, 452 × 880 cm., Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf. For both of these paintings, see Molly Faries and Martha Wolff, “Landscape in the Early Paintings of Jan van Scorel,” Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1124 (1996): 725–727. Van Scorel returned to the compositional scheme yet again in the mid 1540s, suggesting his success with it. See Landscape with Bathsheba, c. 1545, Object

470 number SK-A-670, oil on panel, 110.4 × 203.9 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 22 For Van Heemskerck’s prints of Michelangelo’s ignudi, see the present volume, ch. 3, n. 48. 23 On the subject of artistic activity in postSack Rome, I agree with Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 45–46, who is most explicit in insisting that although artistic activity had not yet returned to its early Clementine heights, commissions had not dried up entirely. See also Silver, “Review,” 272. Chastel, Sack of Rome, 179–214, provides examples of continued artistic activity in post-Sack Rome. 24 For an enumeration of the families that welcomed Van Heemskerck to draw their collections, see the present volume, 89. For the notion of Van Heemskerck’s collection drawings as indicative of his immersion in Rome’s collecting culture, see DiFuria, “Collection Imagery,” 37–38. For Van Heemskerck’s Roman patronal network as evinced by his collection drawings, see Christian, “Friends, Citizens, and Strangers,” 142–152. 25 For Van Heemskerck’s drawings as a collection, see DiFuria, “Collection Imagery,” 48–51. 26 Scholarly thinking on the identity of the Helen’s patron begins with expressions of doubt that we can ever know it. See King, “New Heemskerck,” 61–73 and Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 19, 116–119. 27 According to the inventory of 1564, the Helen was in Rodolfo’s collection. See C. Franzoni, Gli inventari dell’eredetà cardinale Rodolfo Pio da Carpi (Pisa: Musei Civici Comune di Carpi, 2002), 60. This has prompted scholars to believed that Van Heemskerck painted it for Carpi. The Walters Art Museum has asserted that Carpi was indeed the patron of the Helen canvas. See http://art.thewalters.org/detail/21286/ panorama-with-the-abduction-of-helen-amidstthe-wonders-of-the-ancient-world/ (accessed, 05/05/2017), which states that Van Heemskerck painted the Helen “almost surely to complement the famous antiquities belonging to [Rodolfo].” 28 For Rodolfo as a collector, see Elena Filippi, ‘“Certe belle anticaglie da presso e da lontano …” La presenza neerlandese nella collezione di Rodolfo Pio,’ in Alberto III e Rodolfo Pio da Carpi collezionisti e mecenati. Atti del seminario internazionale di studi. Carpi, 22 e 23 novembre 2002, edited by M. Rossi (Carpi: Comune di

notes to Chapter 6 Carpi – Museo Civico / Soprintendenza Beni Storici e Artistici di Modena e Reggio Emilia, 2004): 122–35. 29 For the view that Rodolfo did commission the Helen upon his return to Rome, see Christian, “Friends, Citizens, and Strangers,” 148–151. Brown-Hedjazi, “Of Land and Sea,” 8, expresses disagreement with Christian. 30 Mary Smith Podles’ letters to various scholars in the Walters Art Museum’s archive, Helmut Nickel in particular, form the basis for the discovery of the heraldry on the foregrounded boat’s shields. The recognizable coats of arms appear on the three shields at far right. From left to right, they are the arms of the Farnese family, the Habsburgs (and thus, the Holy Roman Empire), and the Kingdom of France. For Podles’ correspondences, see Brown-Hedjazi, “Of Land and Sea,” 42–47 and 88–118. 31 For Charles’s triumphal procession, see the present volume, 104–107. 32 On the painting’s heraldry and its relation to the painting’s patron, see Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonée,” cat. no. 19, 312, who bases his suggestion of Margaret of Parma on Podles’ findings. Brown-Hedjazi, “Of Land and Sea,” 42–47 dismisses the possibility that Margaret’s wedding occasioned Van Heemskerck’s Helen, as did Podles’ correspondent Helmut Nickel, who calls the wedding a “red herring” in the search for the relation of the painting’s heraldry to its patron. 33 Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell’impresse militari et amorosi (Lyons: Guglielmo Roviglio, 1559), 49. 34 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 307, notes the painting’s “tone of light hearted celebration” in conjunction with his speculation after Podles that the wedding occasioned the painting’s commission. 35 For paintings by Van Scorel that bear the same color scheme, see this chapter’s n. 21. 36 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 303 and Stritt, Helena in de Römruinen, 71–72, have also noted this relation. 37 The Palatine’s substructures are ubiquitous among Van Heemskerck’s extant sheets on the site, of which we have the most extant drawings by his hand [cat. nos. 9–15]. Arcaded structures like those appearing in this passage of the Helen appear on catalog numbers 12, 13, and 15. 38 The Temple of Castor in the Fritz Lugt collection’s drawing of the Forum – the present

notes to Chapter 6 volume’s catalog number 78 – sits at the same angle to the picture plan as this ruined temple in the Helen painting. The Capitoline obelisk as it appears in that drawing is also at a comparable distance from the picture plane as the obelisks in the Helen canvas. However, the resemblances are not close enough to identify the Lugt drawing as a source for the painting’s motifs or an autograph Van Heemskerck. For my doubts on its attribution to him see the entry for the drawing in the present volume, 415–417. 39 See this chapter, n. 11. 40 For the Helen’s relation to Romes’ founding, see Scherer, “Helen of Troy,” 368, J. Spicer, “Heemskerck’s Rainbow,” 151, and DiFuria, “Van Heemskerck’s Rome,” 109–118. 41 Franzoni, Inventari, “Inventory C,” from 1564 lists the Helen as item number twenty-three, found in the “loggia” and described as “Un quadro di longhezza di 16 palmi et alto sei colorita in tela a olio tutto di paese dove sono dentro di molte belle et varie fantasie con un pezzo di mare con diverse navi dentro molto bello, dove è la historia in figure piccole di Paris che ha rapito Helena con molte alre fantasie di mano di … Martino Fiamingho.” In a nearby room, the “camera della torre” there was a painting, item number twenty-one, which the inventory describes as “Un altro quadro pur di paese dove è una torre di Babilonia.” Also in the loggia was a painting of antiquities, item number twenty-five, described as “Un altro quadro pur della medesima grandezza et pur in tela colorito a olio di mano del detto, dove sono molte belle antiquità che rappresentano il vicino et il lontano.” Item number twenty-six: “un altro quadro della medisima grandezza pur colorito a olio in tela fatto di paese con molti fragmenti di antiquità.” 42 For a concise overview of the ekphrastic tradition vis-à-vis visuality, see Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner, “Introduction: Eight Ways of Looking at an Ekphrasis,” Classical Philology 102 no. 1 (2007): i–vi. 43 E. H. Gombrich, “The Style all’antica: Imitation and Assimilation,” in Norm and Form, 127. 44 For the same notion applied to the architectural treatise and Sebastiano Serlio’s decontextualization of the orders, or “bibliospace,” see Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural

471 Theory, Sarah Benson trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 45–49. 45 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 24. 46 Ibid., 28. 47 Ibid., 30, n. 57, cites Plato’s “Phaedrus”, in which, Socrates says that written words only “remind one who knows that which writing is concerned with.” 48 Yates, Art of Memory, 256–257, argues that Giordano Bruno, influenced by Plotinus, thought the imagination was of primary importance for receiving stimuli in a cognitive system that included memory. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 52–57, traces a thread of agreement on imagination’s dependence on memory from Aristotle to Avicenna, Averroes, through to Aquinas. Rosand, “Remembered Lines,” 814–815, reminds us of Giambattista Vico’s statement in his Scienza Nuova that imagination “is nothing but the springing up again of reminiscences,” and that “memory is the same as imagination.” 49 Yates, Art of Memory, 92–94. 50 For an analysis of the inventive aspects of Van Heemskerck’s broad-view panoramas, see the present volume, 115–116. For the inventive nature of the Overturned Capital Before the Colosseum [cat. no. 17], see 128–130. And for St. Peter’s as a ruin, see 126–127. 51 Catalog number 30, where we cannot see S. Anastasia though it should be visible, may also be an example of Heemskerck’s tendency to favor the antiquities in his field of vision. 52 Jacob Franckaert the Elder, The so-called Temple of Minerva Medica (c. 1590), Biblioteca Vaticana, coll. Ashby. Disegni.135. 53 To gain a clearer picture of Van Heemskerck’s revisions of the forum in catalog number 1, compare it with the view of the same vista by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus [fig. 4.2], the artist of the drawing in the Lugt collection [cat. no. 78] and the possible copy of another drawing possibly by Van Heemskerck of the Forum’s northeastern side [cat. no. 74]. 54 Consultation on site, of Nolli’s map, and of Google Earth reveal the impossibility of the column’s visibility from the northern foot of the Palatine in the forum. 55 Maarten van Heemskerck, Landscape with the Good Samaritan, c. 1550, cat. no. 156, oil on wood, 71.5 × 97 cm. Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. See Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 58. Maarten van

472 Heemskerck, Landscape with the View of Rome, c. 1550, transferred from wood to canvas, 125 × 190 cm., whereabouts unknown. See Ibid., cat. no. 59. Maerten van Heemskerck, Landscape with Dioscorii, 1546, whereabouts unknown. See Ibid., cat. no. 56. 56 See above in the present volume, 130. 57 For a drawing perhaps containing similar device, see the top half of catalog number 37,where Van Heemskerck shows the Muro Torto leading to an unknown gate. 58 The grotto was not in the physical relation to the Frontespizio as it appears in catalog number 27. In addition to the present volume’s figure 6.2, see Giovanni Antonio Dosio, Frontespizio di Nerone, c. 1550, Uffizi, Florence, UA 2512. 59 Giovanni Antonio Dosio, Substructures of the Palace of Septimius Severus, c. 1550, Florence, Uffizi, UA 2519. 60 Rodolfo Lanciani, Ancient Rome in Light of the Recent Excavations (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890), 94–99 surveys the area around the Porticus. No sculptural fragment of a foot is known to have ever existed there. 61 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 93. 62 For Van Heemskerck’s increased usage in the late 1540s of conspicuous references to antiquities see DiFuria, “Remembering the Eternal,” 93–95. 63 E.g., Leon Preibisz, Martin van Heemskerck: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Romanismus in der Niederlandischen Malerei des XVI Jahhunderts (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1911), 70, and David Cast, “Marten van Heemskerck’s Momus Criticizing the Works of the Gods: a problem of Erasmian Iconography,” Simiolus 7 (1974): 23, who discuss Van Heemskerck’s use of his Roman drawings for monuments in the backdrop of his Momus Criticizing the Gods, 1561, Inv. no. I 734, oil on wood, 120 × 174 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. On this painting, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 93. E. S. King, “New Heemskerck,” identifies a range of sources for the motifs in Heemskerck’s Helen painting and states that Van Heemskerck’s “sketches … indicate the source of some of [the painting’s] features, though none correspond literally with the original Roman monuments.” 64 Veldman, “Review,” 110. Idem expresses the same conclusion in Rom zeichnen; 18–19. 65 The view towards the Colosseum from the Palatine [cat. no. 9] is the only Roman drawing

notes to Chapter 6 of Van Heemskerck’s to appear verbatim in print; Hieronymus Cock published it in 1561 [fig. 7.15]. 66 Aside from Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum only three of Van Heemskerck’s paintings and a handful of prints explicitly portray places in the Eternal City. They are Landscape with the Good Samaritan and the now lost Landscape with Dioscorii and Landscape with the View of Rome (see the present volume, ch. 6, n. 55). The latter is a marvelous reconstruction of ancient Rome rivaling Ligorrio’s or Piranesi’s and suggests that Van Heemskerck possessed a sophisticated, archaeologically informed vision of antiquity that extends far beyond what we find in his Roman drawings. As such it raises questions that, while tantalizing, are beyond this book’s scope. 67 Krautheimer, “Tragic and Comic,” 332. 68 Some of Van Heemskerck’s paintings and prints indicate places in Rome that he must have drawn, although the drawings do not survive. Examples include the building in the backdrop of Momus Criticizing the Gods, which resembles the Villa Farnesina; the spiral staircase in “The Adoration of the Magi” from the Clades Judaeae Gentis series (Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 257), clearly derives from the Bramante staircase in the Vatican. From the same series, the Temple of Jerusalem as it appears in “The Chaldeans Carrying Away the Temple Treasures” (Ibid., no. 255), contains a variation on Santo Stefano Rotondo’s interior. The Clades’s “Destruction of Ai and the Stoning of Achan,” [fig. 8.5] and the print of “Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom” [fig. 8.6] from King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord both suggest a lost drawing of the Pantheon’s interior. 69 See Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 138, 455, 520, 588, and 590. These last two are prints after paintings, St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape [fig. 6.20] and Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater [fig. 7.16]. 70 For the possible significance of the sculpture see C. Malcom Brown, “Martin van Heemskerck, The Villa Madama Jupiter, and the Gonzaga Correspondence Files,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 121 (1979): 49–60. 71 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 520. 72 Ibid., no. 138. 73 For the Septizonium-like structure appearing in Balaam and the Angel’s right sheet, not

notes to Chapter 6 reproduced here, see Ibid. no. 77. For Ruth and Boaz [fig. 6.22] see Ibid. no. 91 and Arthur J. DiFuria “The Timeless Space of Maerten van Heemskerck’s Panoramas: Ruth and Boaz (1550),” in The Primacy of the Image, 412. In the painting of Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater, the same place in the composition contains a single-story edifice that does not resemble the Septizonium. For the print of Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater see Ibid. no 590. 74 Ibid., no. 219, 301, respectively. 75 Ibid., nos. 243 and 495. 76 Ibid., no. 160. 77 Ibid., no. 91. 78 Ibid., no. 304. 79 Ibid., no. 159. 80 For other prints containing variations on the Forum Nervae drawing, see Ibid., nos. 239 and 253. 81 Ibid., no. 92. 82 Ibid., no. 182. 83 Ibid., nos. 225 and 354, respectively. The print of Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan [fig. 7.12], Ibid., 354 is an entirely different composition than the painting (for the painting, see the present volume, ch. 6, n. 55). 84 Ibid., nos. 181, 220, 224, 250, 254, 400. 85 Ibid., no. 146. 86 Ibid., no. 255. 87 Ibid., no. 493. 88 Ibid., nos. 331 and 178, respectively. See also Ibid., no. 303, “The Adoration of the Magi” for another variation on the motif from catalog number 18. 89 Ibid., nos. 332 and 349, respectively. 90 Ibid., nos. 340 and 454, respectively. 91 Ibid., nos. 316, 399, and 411, respectively. See also Ibid, no. 403 for a reversal and recontextualization of the loggia. 92 Again, Van Heemskerck may have used his Forum Nervae drawing [cat. no. 26], for Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan (the present volume’s fig. 7.12). In this print design, it may be the source for the footbridge in the middle ground. Although the structure above the footbridge is convex, its three-tiered construction leading to curved walls is Van Heemskerck’s invention from the Colosseum as it appears in the backdrop of his exquisite drawing of the Arch of Constantine in catalog no 22. An equally plausible source,

473 however, is Heemskerck’s sheet of the Palace of Septimius Severus, catalog number 14. 93 We have only six prints from Van Heemskerck from 1537–47, all engraved by Cornelis Bos. See Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 76, 355, 367, 453, 507, and 587. Prints by Van Heemskerck and Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert begin in 1548. See Ibid., nos. 159, 183–188, 273–302, 356–359, 372, and 329; prints from 1549 are nos. 8–13, 17–22, 23–30, 35–38, 51, 92, 93, 116, 127, 236, 304, 306, 338, 350–353, 392, 393, 417, 454, 455, 508, 509, 43–50; prints from 1550 are nos. 1, 52–63, 91, 174–177, 418– 431, 456–459, 460–463, 585, 123–126. Of these, Coornhert did not engrave no. 329, executed by Cornelis Bos. Compiler Ilja Veldman suggests that either Coornhert or Van Heemskerck himself engraved nos. 35–38. 94 Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 106, bases this supposition on Van Heemskerck’s and Coornhert’s 1547 purchase of forty-two reams of paper from Symon Claeszoon Bybel, an alleged publisher who was working without a permit in the 1540s. 1547 is the year that marks the beginning of Van Heemskerck’s prolific partnership with Coornhert. In the foreword to New Hollstein, n.p. she again suggests that Van Heemskerck’s pre-Quatre Vents print designs “were very probably published by Coornhert, Heemskerck, or both.” 95 Melion, Netherlandish Canon, 38–59. 96 For the notion of Junius’s tale as a “fable,” and for a reproduction of the passages from Batavia making the claim on Coster’s behalf, see Antonius van der Linde, The Haarlem Legend of the Invention of Printing by Lourens Janszoon Coster Critically Examined (London: Blades, East, and Blades, 1871), 62. 97 On reception’s protean nature, the seminal texts are by Jans Robert Jauss, e.g., Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Timothy Bahti, trans. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982). For an application of this consciousness to early modern art both north and south of the Alps, see Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 9, who state that a work of art propels us “forward to all its future recipients who will activate and reactivate it as a meaningful event.” 98 On early modern collecting culture, see the present volume, ch. 6, n. 13. 99 See DiFuria, “Collection Imagery,” 48 and Idem, “Personifying Virtue,” 32.

474 100 For Van Heemskerck’s second St. Luke in Rennes, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 75. Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné” cat. no. 76. 101 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 173–189. 102 In light of Van Mander’s comments in Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 247r, “after the fall of Haarlem many of [Heemskerck’s] works were taken by the Spaniards, under the pretext that they wanted to buy them, and removed to Spain – not to mention all the outstanding works of art that the senseless iconoclasm shamefully destroyed – so that now, at the present, there is not much by him to be found in this country,” we must make conclusions about van Heemskerck’s artistic development cautiously. However, it is unlikely that mid 1560s iconoclasts selectively destroyed only Heemskerck’s works dating from c. 1537–1545. Moreover, with the exception of the “Drapers Altarpiece,” what remains of Heemskerck’s paintings for churches suggests that they were less of a venue for topographical inventions all’antica than were his paintings for private settings. E.g. Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. nos. 29, 42–43, and 47a–c. 103 Maarten van Heemskerck, Venus and Cupid, 1545, Inventory number 875, oil on wood, 108 × 157 cm., Wallraf-Richartz Museum. See Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 48 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 66. 104 Homer, Odyssey, Samuel Butler, trans. (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2007), VIII ll. 266–369. 105 For the Drapers Altarpiece see the present volume, 17–19 and Introduction, n. 53. 106 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 57 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 69. The publication of a nearly reproductive print followed in 1552. See Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 588 and the present volume, fig. 6.21. 107 Eleanor Saunders, “Old Testament Subjects,” 95, suggests that Van Heemskerck’s choice to compose horizontally and with figures in smaller scale for more “expressive” backdrops emerged in the 1550s. She does so by comparing two series of prints of the History of Tobias from 1548 (Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 183–188) and 1556 (Ibid., nos. 189–198). 108 E.g. Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 644. 109 See Select Letters of St. Jerome, F. A. Wright, trans. (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932). For the reception of Jerome in the sixteenth

notes to Chapter 7 century, especially after the Erasmian revision of his identity towards the scholar saint Erasmus envisioned in himself, see Eugene F. Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 110 Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II, vol. 6 (Buffalo: The Christian Literature Company, 1886), Letter 127, para. 12. 111 Jerome, Epistles 121, quaest. 11. In J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus (Paris: Garnier Fratres, 1877), 22: 1037, cited by David Levine, “Urbs Aeterna and Dutch Painting of Roman Ruins,” in Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque: A Cat’s Cradle for Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, eds. David A. Levine and Jack Freiberg (New York: Italica Press, 2010), n. 7. 112 The quoted passage comes from Jerome’s preface to the Gospels. For the entire preface, see Jerome, Preface to the Gospels, Kevin P. Edgecomb, trans. (Berkeley, CA: http://www.tertullian.org/ fathers/jerome_preface_gospels.htm#1, accessed 08/03/2016). For an analysis of the preface, see P. C. Sense, A Critical and Historical Inquiry into the Origin of the Third Gospel (Oxford: Williams & Norgate, 1901), 326. 113 Joris van Grieken, ed., The Renaissance in Print, cat. no. 34. 114 On the significance of scale for interpreting prints, see Elizabeth Wyckoff and Larry Silver, “Size Does Matter,” in Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and titian, Larry Silver and Elizabeth Wyckoff, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008): 8–13. For an expansion on this book’s analysis of Ruth and Boaz, see DiFuria, “Timeless Space,” 405–418. 115 For the articulation of the kinsman redeemer and the obligations it entails, see Biblia Sacra, vulgatæ editionis sixti V et clementis VIII Pontt. Maxx, “Liber Levitici” (Paris: Sumptibus P. Lethielleux, Bibliop. Editoris, 1891), Caput XV, 25, “Si attenuatus frater tuus vendiderit possessiunculam suam, et voluerit propinquus ejus, potest re dimere quod ille vendiderat.” 116 See DiFuria, “Timeless Space,” 412, for a detailed observation of the print’s indebtedness to the drawing. 117 F. M. Nichols, ed., Mirabilia Vrbis Romae (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1889), 102.

notes to Chapter 7 7

Antiquity in 1553: Ruins and Self-Fashioning

1 Margaret McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 18. 2 Heemskerck reprised this “double-portrait device” in his self-portrait frontispiece to the Clades Judaeae Gentis series of prints [fig. 8.4], Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 237, in which he again shows himself drawing Roman architectural ruins. Almost every print in the series is composed to feature all’antica landscapes, scenery, and fantasia. See the present volume, 263–281. 3 For entries on the painting see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 79, Harrison “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 79, and Dacos ed., Fiamminghi, cat. no. 113. For analyses, see Robert F. Chirico “Maerten van Heemskerck and Creative Genius,” Marsyas, XXI (1981–1982), 7–11 who argues for the painting’s embodiment of a contrast between the vita contemplativa and the vita active; Josua Bruyn, “Old and New Elements in 16th-Century Imagery,” Oud Holland 2 (1988): 90–112, who contextualizes the selfportrait within the sixteenth century’s growing self-consciousness while noting the Colosseum’s status as emblematic of the ephemerality of humanity and even its greatest achievements; Gabriella Szalay, “Contesting the Colossal: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Eristic Self-Portrait” (MA thesis, Penn State University, 2003), argues that Van Heemskerck fashions himself in an analogic relation to the Colosseum and to his “rival” Michelangelo; for the contextualization of the painting, which served as the basis for this chapter, see DiFuria, “Remembering the Eternal”; for the relation of Van Heemskerck’s time in Rome to Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum see Helmut Puff, “Self-Portrait with Ruins: Maerten van Heemskerck, 1553,” 262–276; Kaspar Thormod, “Memory in Ruins: Maarten van Heemskerck’s Self-portrait with the Colosseum,” Immediations 2 (2011): 59–72, argues for the painting’s presentation of a “tension between durability and decay.”; Pieter van der Coelen, “Maarten van Heemskercks Zelfportret met het Colosseum: Context en voorbeelden,” in Face Book: Studies on Dutch and Flemish Portraiture of the 16th–18th Centuries, Liber Amicorum Presented to Rudolf E. O. Ekkart on the Occasion of his 65th

475 Birthday (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2012): 55–62 builds on my contextual approach but suggests a print by Nicolò della Casa after Baccio Bandinelli as the source of Van Heemskerck’s portrait. 4 See above in the present volume, 121–125. 5 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, John R. Spencer, trans. and intro. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 63. “Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.” 6 E.g. the Bicker family portraits, Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. nos. 3 and 4. 7 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 734. 8 It was not until the Soderini family turned the mausoleum’s inner core into a garden c. midcentury that details of the site began to become known. See Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations, 463–467 and Jane C. Reeder, “Typology and Ideology in the Mausoleum of Augustus: Tumulus and Tholos,” Classical Antiquity, 11 no. 2 (1992): n. 229. 9 For painting’s illusionism and reflexivity in the construction of identity, see Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 183–228. For the cartellino as an important device for later constructions of reception and assertions of artistry, see Steven F. Ostrow, “Zurbarán’s Cartellini: Presence and the Paragone,” Art Bulletin 99 no. 1 (2017): 67–96. 10 In addition to Van Heemskerck’s first St. Jerome, cartellini with meaningful text appear in his Man of Sorrows (Ibid., no. 57), Mars and Venus Surprised (Ibid., cat. no. 64), Venus and Amor (Ibid. no. 66), The Pleasures of the Gods (Ibid., cat. no. 83), The Ecce Homo Altarpiece (Ibid., cat. no. 88), Jonah Under the Gourd (Ibid., cat. no. 90; totally effaced), Momus Criticizing the Gods (Ibid., no. 91), Concert of Apollo and the Muses (Ibid. cat. no. 98). The cartellino at lower right on the Triumph of Bacchus (Ibid., cat. no. 37) is totally effaced. One also appears suspended from the coat of arms in Van Heemskerck’s Portrait of Johannes Colmannus (Ibid., cat. no. 32), but it contains only the number, “67.” The cartellino in Portrait of a Man (Ibid., no. 39) bears the age of the sitter. Van Heemskerck’s Portrait of a Man (Ibid., cat. no 33) contains an inscription expressing the ephemerality of existence: LUX. TENEBRIS. RURSUS. / LUCI. TENEBRE.

476 FUGIENTI. / SUCCEDUNT. STABILIS. / RES. TIBI. NULLA. MANET (concisely: “Darkness, then light; then light fleeing darkness again; nothing remains stable for you.”). 11 For this device, see Matthias Winner, “Vedute in Flemish Landscape Drawings of the 16th Century,” in: Netherlandish Mannerism: Papers Given at a Symposium in Nationalmuseum Stockholm, September 21–22, 1984, G. CavalliBjörkman, ed. (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1985): 85–96. 12 Copy After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, River Landscape with Draftsman and Quarry, 1553, chalk on paper, 223 × 342 mm., Musée des BeauxArts et d’Archeologie de Besançon, France. See David Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Tokyo: Tokyo Shimbun, 1989), cat. no. 81. 13 We also find a figure in the act of drawing ruins in a print frequently associated with Van Heemskerck, although we have no proof that he composed it. See Johannes or Lucas van Doetechum after Maarten van Heemskerck (possibly?), “Garden with Fragments of Antique Sculptures,” Operum Antiquorum Romanorum, 1562, Hieronymus Cock, pub., Object number RP-P-1985-215, ink on paper, 240 × 329 mm. See also Barryte, The Kirk Edward Long Collection, cat. no. 20. 14 E.g., Harrison’s entry in “Catalogue Raisonné,” 736–737, traces the Colosseum’s meaning all the way back to its opening by the Roman Emperor Titus in 80 AD. Szalay, “Contesting the Colossal,” 6–18, also elaborates an analogy between Van Heemskerck and the Colosseum. 15 Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 24r. 16 On Coornhert and Van Heemskerck, and on Coornhert’s publications, see the present volume, ch. 7, nn. 52–57. 17 For Hieronymus Cock’s publication of “Italianate” prints, see Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 157–179 and Van Grieken, ed., The Renaissance in Print, 42–51 and cat. nos. 30–45. 18 The most extensive publications to date on Perrenot’s interest in art are Jacqueline Brunet, ed., Les Granvelle et l’Italie au XVIe Siécle, (Besançon: 1996), and Krista de Jonge, ed., Les Granvelle et les Anciens Pays-Bas: liber doctori Mauricio van Durme dedicatus, (Leuven: Universitaire Per Leuven, 2000). For Perrenot’s correspondences with artists see Luigi Ferrarino, Lettere di Artisti Italiani ad Antonio Perrenot

notes to Chapter 7 di Granvelle (Madrid: Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 1977). For Perrenot’s collaboration with Hieronymus Cock, see Edward Wouk, “Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the Quatre Vents press, and the patronage of prints in Early Modern Europe,” Simiolus 38 nos. 1–2 (2015–2016): 31–61. 19 Until recently, studies on the phenomenon of Netherlandish antiquarianism, less frequently described as “Romanism” these days, have focused on Netherlandish artists in Rome instead of their transmissions of the Italianate manner north. The definitive early study is Godefridus Joannes Hoogewerff, Nederlandsche schilders in Italie in de 16de eeuw; De geschiedenis van het Romanism (Utrecht: 1912). Seminal studies that tracked the art of Netherlanders upon their return north are Dacos, Les Peintres Belge à Rom au XVI Siècle (Brussels / Rome: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1964); Idem, Fiamminghi a Roma; Idem, Roma Quanta Fuit; Idem, Voyage à Rome. See also the bibliography on Jan Gossart in the present volume, ch. 1, nn. 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11. On Jan Van Scorel see the present volume, ch. 2, nn. 6, 15, 18, 24, and 27. 20 For Posthumus called from Mantua to Landshut, Bavaria, see Nicole Dacos, “Hermannus Posthumus: Rome, Mantua, Landshut.” Burlington Magazine 127 no. 988 (1985): 433–438. 21 Sustris has not yet been the subject of a major monographic study. For a survey of Sustris’ career, see Vincenzo Mancini, “Aggiornamento su Lambert Sustris,” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 24 (2000): 11–29. For Sustris in Italy, see Dacos, Peintres Belges, 15–20, Bert Meijer, “Lambert Sustris in Padua: frescos en tekeningen,” Oud-Holland 107 no. 1 (1993): 3–16 and Idem., “Fiaminghi e Olandesi nella bottega veneziana: il caso di Jacopo Tintoretto,” in: Il Rinascimento a Venezia e la pittura del nord ai tempi di Bellini, Dürer, Tiziano (Milan: Bompiani, 1999): 499–557. For Perrenot’s portraits see Pierre Curie, “Quelques portraits du cardinal Granvelle,” in: Les Granvelle et l’Italie au XVIe Siècle, 159–174. 22 Lionel Cust, “Notes on Pictures in the Royal collections – XVIII. On Some Portraits Attributed to Antonio Moro and on a Life of the Painter by Henri Hymans,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 18, no. 91 (1910): 2, 5–7, 10–12; Joanna Woodall, “Patronage and Portrayal: Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle’s Relationship

notes to Chapter 7 with Anthonis Mor,” in Les Granvelle et les Anciens Pays-Bas, 245–277; for an ascribing of a 1540s journey to Rome by Mor, see Idem, who has produced the definitive monograph on the artist, Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority, Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History (Leiden: Waanders, 2006). 23 For Lambert Lombard, see Dacos, Peintres Belges, 31–39 and Godelieve Denhaene ed., Lambert Lombard: Peintre de la Renaissance, Liège 1505/061566. Essais interdisciplinaires et catalogue de l’exposition, Salle Saint-Georges, Musée de l’Art Wallon, Liège, April 21–August 6, 2006, Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique de Belgique (Brussels: KIK/IRPA, 2006). 24 Curie, “Quelques portraits,” 168–170. 25 See Denhaene, Ibid. and especially Edward Wouk, “Reclaiming the antiquities of Gaul: Lambert Lombard and the history of Northern art,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 36, 1/2 (2012): 35–65. 26 For Floris, see Carl van de Velde, Frans Floris (1519/20-1570) Leven en werken (Brussels: Palais der Academiën, 1975) and Edward Wouk, Frans Floris (1519/20-1570): Imagining a Northern Renaissance (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2018). 27 Mark Meadow, “Ritual and civic identity in Philip II’s 1549 Antwerp Blidje incompst,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 49 (1998): 36–67. 28 For Floris’s prints, see Edward Wouk, New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts 1450–1650: Frans Floris de Vriendt, 2 vols., ed. Ger Luijten (Roosendaal – Amsterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive, 2011). For Floris’s prints that Hieronymus Cock published, see Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. nos. 67–100 and Van Grieken, ed., The Renaissance in Print, cat. nos. 38.2–38.11, 40–43, and 44.1–44.7. 29 Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani, Antiquae Romae Topographia (Lyons: 1534) and Idem, Urbis Romae Topographia (Rome: In aedibus V. Dorici et Aliosii fratris, 1544). 30 Lucio Fauno, Antichità della Citta di Romà (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1548 and 1552). 31 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau after Leonard Thiry, Fragments d’architecture antiques (Paris: 1550). 32 Joachim du Bellay, The Ruins of Rome, trans. A. S. Kline, 2009, http://www.poetryintranslation.

477 com/klineasruins.htm (accessed 2/15/2017). For an analysis, see Richard Cooper, Poetry in Ruins: the Literary Context of du Bellay’s Cycles on Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also McGowan, Vision of Rome, 212 and 219. 33 Veldman, Dutch Humanism 14, n. 35, Van Heemskerck was a vinder (“head man”) of Haarlem’s Guild of St. Luke from 1551 to 1553 and moved up to deken (“deacon”) in 1554; Ibid., 13, n. 26, that Van Heemskerck had begun to achieve success in the late 1540s is also indicated in Haarlem Conveyance Register 76/21, fol. 68, March 1549, which records his purchase of a house on Lange Begijnen Straat. 34 Van Heemskerck and Coornhert were responsible for Veldman, New Holstein nos. 91, 92, 127, 159, 304, and 455, all of which contain ruin landscapes. 35 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 43–50. 36 Ibid., 20–21, cannot identify as prolific a print collaboration as that between van Heemskerck and Coornhert. 37 Ibid., no. 588. The print is in the same direction as the painting. For a discussion of the painting, see above in the present volume, 209–212. 38 The amphitheater in the print’s closer kinship with catalog numbers 10 and 20 suggests that whoever made the transfer sketch had Heemskerck’s drawings of the Colosseum nearby. The whereabouts and authorship of the preparatory drawing for transfer are unknown. Cock’s signature on the first state of the print, “Cock Fecit 1552,” suggests that he executed the preparatory sketch himself. The added second state signature at lower right, of Cock engraver Henrik Hondius, “Hh. ex,” suggests the publisher’s attempt to squeeze as many prints as possible out of a popular design. 39 Ernst Gombrich, “Archaeologists or Pharisees? Reflections on a painting by Maarten van Heemskerck,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991) 253–256. 40 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 84. Although the engraver is unidentified, the plate was found in the inventory of Volcxken Diericx (1525–1600), Hieronymus Cock’s partner, collaborator, and widow. The middle ground’s tapering free standing column with a spiral of relief sculpture reveals Heemskerck’s observation of the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, though no detailed drawing of either survives. Heemskerck

478 drew the base of the Column of Trajan in catalog number 73. Both columns appear in the distance in the right sheet of catalog number 1. The repeating motif of elephant heads on the circumference of the printed column’s base is Heemskerck’s inventive combination of similarly placed lion heads on the base of the Capitoline obelisk and his drawing of the Villa Madama’s elephant fountain. For the Capitoline Obelisk, see cat. no. 6. For the Villa Madama’s Elephant Fountain, see catalog number 14. 41 See above in the present volume, 193–297. Important drawings for Van Heemskerck’s Balaam and the Angel include but are not limited to the present volume’s catalog numbers 10, 26, 47, and 48. 42 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 20–21, cannot cite any other printing concern of the late 1540s that was as prolific as the possible one by Heemskerck and Coornhert and cannot establish Cock’s priority beyond dispute, but convincingly describes the Quatre Vents as the only known publishing establishment in the early 1550s. 43 Ibid., 309–383, provides a handlist of prints published by Cock demonstrating this breadth. 44 Ibid., 43–50, Riggs describes the Quatre Vents’ early phase of producing “Italianate” prints, that is to say, images after the antique and after contemporary Italian artists working in an antiquarian manner. 45 See Veldman, New Hollstein. Van Heemskerck and Coornhert produced fifteen series containing four or more prints and 15 single prints. Of the latter set, five were comprised of two plates. Their aggressive approach to the market accords neatly with van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 246r, who says of Van Heemskerck that “there would be no end to it if one wanted to relate how many prints have already been published by him.” On Ibid., f. 247r, Van Mander refers to Van Heemskerck’s miserliness and thrift. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 20, cites “the energy with which [Cock] pursued [publishing]” as the source of his pre-eminent status in the Netherlands. 46 Eleanor Saunders, “Old Testament Subjects,” 70–151, establishes Van Heemskerck and Coornhert as innovators in development of the print series. 47 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 236.

notes to Chapter 7 48 Michael Bury, “On some engravings by Giorgio Ghisi commonly called ‘reproductive,’” Print Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1993): 4–19, contests the term “reproductive print” by pointing out the discrepancies between Raphael’s School of Athens and Ghisi’s print. Bury argues that Ghisi alters the design to accommodate the new medium; Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 161–162, also points out adjustments made by Ghisi. For the Heliodorus Print and its relation to Raphael’s “prototype,” DiFuria, “Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus,” 713–717. 49 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. nos. 1–25. 50 Ibid., cat. nos. 98–109 (1561), and cat. nos. 110–130 (1562). Authorship is also problematic in both of the later series. We know of only a few drawings relatable to the 1561 series, and none relatable to the 1562 series. 51 Ibid., cat. nos. D-2, D-3, D-4. 52 Ibid., cat. no. D-4. 53 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 56–7, suggest that Cock copied Van Heemskerck drawings that have not survived, but they offer no supporting evidence. M. J. K. Netto Bol’s claim in the unpaginated foreword to the facsimile of Ibid., that Cock’s vedute are “prints after [Van Heemskerck’s drawings],” is unsupportable. Idem, The So-called Maarten de Vos Sketchbook, n. 27, 12, and n. 46, claims that Van Heemskerck sent his drawings to Antwerp and that Cornelisz. van Haarlem returned to Haarlem with them in 1580. Veldman, “Review,” 111, calls Bol’s hypothesis “farfetched,” but thinks that “it can be assumed that Cock was acquainted with the drawings from the two collections now in Berlin.” Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 166, offers a carefully reasoned general assessment of Cock’s use of Heemskerck’s sketchbook: “Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawings were definitely a source for other prints of antique art published by Cock, and perhaps a major source. At least two prints derive from known drawings by him.” His n. 45 acknowledges that these are the “Head of Laocoön” (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 40r) and the view of the Colosseum from the Palatine, the present volume’s catalog number 9. Riggs also says “the dependence of two others on lost drawings by [Heemskerck] is probable.” These are Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 128, 129, which are not part of any of the vedute series.

479

notes to Chapter 8 54 We may never know the exact nature of Van Heemskerck’s or Cock’s involvement in their formulation. A total lack of signatures on the 1551 vedute does not confirm or refute Cock’s authorship, or anyone else’s. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. nos. 36–50, points out that Cock published prints by his brother Matthys and Pieter Bruegel without their signatures. 55 Ibid., cat. no. 20 (fig. 21), of the Baths of Caracalla, resembles Van Heemskerck’s in the present volume’s catalog number 48. Cat. no. 6 (fig. 9), of the break in the Colosseum’s northwestern side, also resembles Van Heemskerck’s in the backdrop of the present volume’s catalog number 9. A possible third correspondence is Riggs’s cat. no. 3, Cock’s print of the Colosseum’s southwest quadrant, which closely resembles a drawing attributed to Posthumus, not Van Heemskerck, in Hülsen and Egger, II, 94v. However, Riggs, cat. no. D-2 shows a preparatory sketch by Cock for this print that may date from his 1540’s Roman stay; Hülsen and Egger, II, 47r shows a view of the same side of the amphitheater slightly further north, which Hülsen and I think is a copy after a Van Heemskerck; Garms, cat. no. C97, publishes a view like II, 47r from c. 1534 by the obscure C. M. Pomodello, now in Vienna’s Albertina. 56 E.g., the present volume’s catalog number 19 is 131 × 205 mm., but Riggs, cat. no. 20 [the present volume’s fig. 7.14] is 302 × 223 mm. 57 The present volume’s catalog number 9 is 282 × 237 mm.; Riggs, cat. no. 98 [the present volume’s 7.15] is 245 × 325 mm. 58 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, in his catalog of “Prints Etched by Cock,” 256–287, “Prints after Designs by Cock,” 288–295, and “Prints perhaps after Designs by Cock,” 296–302, only finds three drawings whose function as preparatory sketches is beyond doubt. 59 Ibid., cat. nos. 22–23. 60 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 258. 61 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 168. 62 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 4. 63 See Bruce Boucher, “Leone Leoni and Primaticcio’s Moulds of Antique Sculpture,” Burlington Magazine 123 no. 934 (1981): 23–26.

Krista de Jonge, “Le Palais Granvelle à Bruxelles: premier example de la Renaissance Romaine dans les anciens Pays-Bas,” in: Les Granvelle et les Anciens Pays-Bas, 341–387, brings to light three drawings for the now lost palace and finds affinities to Peruzzi’s Farnesina. 64 For Perrenot’s patronage, see the present volume, ch. 7, n. 18. Perrenot also commissioned tapestries after designs by Hieronymus Bosch, see Otto Kurz, “Four Tapestries after Hieronymus Bosch,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967): 126–127. 65 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 47, finds eight of Cock’s publications dedicated to Perrenot in their frontispieces. 66 Brown, “Villa Madama Jupiter,” 49–60. 67 Van der Coelen, “context en voorbeelden,” 59, argues that the differences between the two paintings cast doubt on their connectedness. 68 If Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 245v, is to be believed, Van Heemskerck was the victim of a burglary while in Rome, and was thus at least somewhat familiar with Rome’s seedier side, albeit unwillingly. 8

Regnum, Reform, and Ruin

1 The definitive study of the development of conflict leading to the iconoclasm of the late summer of 1566 and the start of the Eighty Years War is Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: the Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). David Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting in the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1566–1609” (D. Phil. diss., Balliol College, Oxford University, 1973), 1–10, also provides a general historical background leading to the iconoclasm of the late summer of 1566. For the response to sacred imagery during this time, but not its production or the anticlericalism related to the image debate, see also Keith Moxey, “Image Criticism in the Netherlands Before the Iconoclasm of 1566,” Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 57 (1976–77): 148–162. 2 For the Fall of Babylon see Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 412. For King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord, see Ibid., nos. 143–150. For the Clades Judaeae Gentis, see Ibid., nos. 237–258.

480 3 The literature on the image debate is vast. In addition to Arnade, Beggars, for a study of the conflict that is not wholly art-centered but does discuss matters of art, see Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the early stages of the image debate, see Hans Belting, Bild und Kult, trans. E. Jephcott; Likeness and Presence, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 459–470. On the beeldenstorm of 1566, see Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting.” Studies of the beeldenstorm’s aftermath include Mia Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image After Iconoclasm, 1566–1672 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2008), Angela Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012), and Koenraad Jonckheere, Antwerp Art After Iconoclasm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 4 David Freedberg “The Problem of Images in Northern Europe and its Repercussions in the Netherlands,” in Hafnia. Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art: Proceedings of the 7th International Colloquium in the History of Art (Copenhagen: 1976), 26. 5 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 470–484. 6 Marcia Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Other explorations of early modern sacred artistry in Belting’s “age of art” Include Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorach, “Introduction,” The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2009) and Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 7 Koenraad Jonckheere, “Images of stone: The physicality of art and the image debates in the sixteenth century,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 62 (2013) 117–143 addresses the Catholic response to iconoclasm and discusses St. Luke paintings by Van Heemskerck and Maerten De Vos. 8 On Van Heemskerck’s prints and the image debate, see Freedberg D., “The Problem of Images,” 35–37 and n. 98. Freedberg hypothesizes that Van Heemskerck’s prints portraying historical episodes of temple

notes to Chapter 8 destruction – e.g., Destruction of the Temple of Bel and Josiah Destroying the Temple of Ashtaroth and Chemosh – were the source for Frans Hogenberg’s famous journalistic print of the beeldenstorm of the 1560s, while offering no clear indication of his attitude towards the image debate. For Heemskerck prints showing idol worship and temple destruction, see Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 65, 79, 90, 145–149, 231, 252, 254, 255, 258, 264, and 454. 9 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, f. 247r. 10 Dirck Barendz, Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, RCIN 907786, ink on paper, 52.2 × 32.2 cm., The Royal Collection Trust, London. 11 On Karlstadt, see Hermann Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Brandstetter, 1905). For Karlstadt’s views on images, see Andreas von Bodenstein Karlstadt, Von Abtuhiung der Bylder (Wittenberg: 1522), in A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images: Three Treatises in Translation, trans. Bryan D. Mangrum and Giuseppe Scavizzi (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1998), 21–44. On Karlstadt in the early image debate, see Ronald J. Sider, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt: the Development of his Thought (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 1974), 166–171. On Hätzer, see J. F. Gerhard Goeters, Ludwig Hätzer (c. 1500 bis 1529), Spiritualist und Antitrinitarier; eine Randfigur der frühen Täuferbewegung (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1957). On the role of Zwingli and his circle in Zurich’s iconoclasm see Charles Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New York: Da Capo Press, 1966). and Ulrich Gäbler, Huldrych Zwingli: His Life and Work (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 72–78 and G. R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 130–132. For Luther’s view of iconoclasm during the early stages of the image debate, see Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation, 1521–1532 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985) 28–33. For Erasmus’s attitudes towards idolatry and iconoclasm, see Eire, War Against the Idols, 28–44. 12 All passages appear in Belting H., Likeness 545–547. 13 Sheryl Reiss, “Adrian VI, Clement VII, and Art,” 346–347.

notes to Chapter 8 14 On these early outbreaks, see Lee Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 15 On Heemskerck’s clerical milieu as evinced by his collection drawings see DiFuria, “Collection Imagery,” and Christian, “Friends, Citizens, and Strangers.” 16 On Heemskerck’s sacred commissions from the time of his return to Haarlem from Rome until his death, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, 50–60. 17 For entries on the St. Lawrence Altarpiece, see Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. nos. 17–26 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. nos. 22–31. For a monographic study on the altarpiece, see Bengt Cnattingius, Maerten van Heemskerck’s St. Lawrence altar-piece in Linkoping Cathedral: Studies in its Mannerist Style (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1973). See also A. Rohmdahl, “Das Altarwerk von Marten Heemskerck für die Laurentiuskirche zu Alkmaar,” Oud Holland 21 (1903): 173–174 and Merel Groentjes, “Clades Judaeae Gentis: Patterns of Destruction,” in Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, eds. Walter Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2013): 512–513. 18 For the relief-like style as formulated by Marcia Hall, see the present volume, ch. 3, n. 53. 19 For the poetics of Van Heemskerck’s spatial dynamism, see the present volume, 118–127. 20 Although Van Heemskerck’s interest in the Sala di Costantino is clear (see the present volume, 98–99 and ch. 3, n. 55 in particular), one must also consider his interest in relief sculpture. Extant sheets by Van Heemskerck showing relief sculpture are 79D2 4v, 47r, 50v, and 72r. 21 Yates, Art of Memory, 92–94. 22 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. nos. 47a–c. Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 63. For a more expansive version of the interpretation put forth here, see DiFuria, “Personifying Virtue.” 23 The painting’s provenance is traceable back to its earliest appearance in an early 17th century inventory of the house of Croÿ. See http:// bilddatenbank.khm.at/viewArtefact?id=902 (accessed 1/11/2017). See Georges Martin, Histoire et généalogie de la Maison de Croÿ (Lyons: La Ricamarie, 1980) and Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas Brian Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the

481 Renaissance and Reformation, Volumes 1–3, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 364–365. 24 See Martin Luther, “Answer to Latomus” in Luther: Early Theological Works, James Atkinson, ed. (London: Westminster Press, 1962): 332–333, 357. On this dispute see Vinken L., “Jacobus Latomus en Maarten Luther,” in: Edmond J. M. van Eijl and Anthony J. Black, eds., Facultas S. Theologiae Lovaniensis 1432–1797 (Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1977): 299–311. 25 Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” 579 records the height of the wings at 36.5 cm., while the central panel of Caritas is 71.5 cm. tall. The side panels were lost during World War II. 26 Biblia Sacra, “Epistola B. Pauli Ad corinthios I,” Caput XIV, 13, “Nunc autem manent fides, spes, caritas, tria hæc: major autem horum est charitas.” Italics mine. 27 E.g., Raphael Sanzio, “Caritá,” part of his Theological Virtues, 1507, Inventory number 40331, oil on wood, 16 × 44 cm. Vatican, Pinacoteca; Andrea del Sarto, Caritá, 1518, Inventory number 712, oil on canvas, 185 × 137 cm. Paris, Louvre; Lucas Cranach the Younger, Charity, 1537–50, Inventory number NG2925, oil on beechwood, 56.3 × 36.2 cm. London, National Gallery; Frans Floris, Caritas, c. 1560, oil on panel, 99 × 129 cm. Gdansk, Muzeum Narodowe. 28 DiFuria, “Personifying Virtue,” 534–539, provides an exploration of the painting’s mimetic, or “Eyckian” qualities, which are offset by some painterly passages that call attention to the painting’s own materiality. 29 See Ewing, “Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna” and Joanna Ziegler, “Michelangelo and the Medieval Pietà: The Sculpture of Devotion or the Art of Sculpture?” Gesta 34 (1995): 31–33, who suggests that the sculpture made a vivid, even disturbing impression on its northern audience. 30 For another example of this display of reflexivity in Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre, see his Adam and Eve c. 1550, oil on oak, Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux Arts, Inv. No. 1747 A; Grosshans R., Gemälde cat. no. 71, Harrison J., Catalogue Raisonné cat. no. 75. 31 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 236. Like many of Van Heemskerck’s inventions of 1548–49, the print does not name Coornhert as engraver. However, its technique matches that of The

482 Story of Joseph series and The Dangers of Human Ambition, both from 1549, signed by Coornhert, ibid., nos. 43–50 and 455, respectively. For an expansive version of the analysis of Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus print offered here, see DiFuria, “Van Heemskerck’s Heliodorus.” 32 Biblia Sacra, Caput III, 13–27, f. 1182. 33 Bette Talvacchia, Raphael (London: Phaidon Press, 2008), 99. 34 The divide in the inscription appears between the ‘e’ and ‘m’ in ‘Heemskerc’. The abbreviation ‘In’ for ‘inventor’ appears on other prints by Van Heemskerck dated 1548 and 1549; see Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 266, 271, 272. 35 Michael Schwartz, “Raphael’s Authorship in the Expulsion of Heliodorus” Art Bulletin 79 no. 3 (1997): 467. 36 On medieval and early modern representations of the Temple of Jerusalem, see Krinsky C. H., “Representations of the Temple of Jerusalem before 1500”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970) 1–19; Pinson Y., “The Iconography of the Temple of Jerusalem in Northern Renaissance Art”, Assaph, Studies in Art History 2 (1996), Section B 147–174. 37 Schwartz, “Raphael’s Authorship,” 483. 38 Sydney Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500–1600 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 60. 39 For St. Peter’s in the 1540s and 1550s, see Henry A. Millon, “Michelangelo to Marchionni, 1546–1784,” in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, William Tronzo, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 93–97. Although Van Heemskerck was in Rome before the new church was complete, and although it remained incomplete in 1549 when he devised his Heliodorus, he could have easily envisioned its interior. If Raphael’s Heliodorus was accessible to him, so too, presumably, was the School of Athens. Heemskerck’s drawings of various parts of the Vatican complex indicate the considerable scope of his Vatican access, e.g. cat. nos. 41–46, 58, 75, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 23r and v, 28r, 30r, 39r, 41v, 51r, 54r, 59r and v, 62r, 63r, 67r and v, 71v, 73r and v, 74v, and Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 22r, 52v. 40 Biblia Sacra, Caput III, 24. 41 Scholars contest the identification of Julius’s sedan bearers as Marcantonio and Raphael. On Raphael in Heliodorus, see Oskar Fischel, Raphael vol. 2, trans. B. Rackham (London: Paul, 1948), 103; Leopold Dussler, Raphael: A

notes to Chapter 8 Critical Catalogue of his Pictures, Wall-Paintings, and Tapestries, trans. Sebastian Cruft (London: Phaidon, 1971), 79; John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 197; and Schwartz, “Raphael’s Authorship,” who bases his argument on Raphael’s appearance in the painting. For a dissenting view, see Paul Barolsky, “Art History as Fiction,” Artibus et Historiae 34 no. 17 (1996): 12–13. 42 On Raphael’s and Giulio’s contributions to the Sala di Costantino, see Frederick Hartt, “Raphael and Giulio Romano: With Notes on the Raphael School,” Art Bulletin 26, 2 (1944): 67–94; and Hall, After Raphael, 69–73. For Van Heemskerck’s study of the Sala, see the present volume, ch. 3, n. 55. 43 Nicole Dacos, “Les peintres romanistes: Histoire du terme, perspectives de recherche et l’exemple de Lambert van Noort,” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 50 (1980) 161–186, traces use of the term ‘Romanism’ to late 19th c. Antwerp archivists and to Eugéne Fromentin. The earliest uncritical use of the term appears in Hoogewerff J. G., Nederlandsche schilders in Italië in de 16de eeuw. De geschiedenis van het Romanism (Utrecht: 1912); and Lindeman C. M. A. A., Oorsprong, ontwikkeling en betekenis van het Romanisme in de Nederlandsche schilderkunst (Utrecht: 1928). 44 Michael Bury, “Engravings by Giorgio Ghisi,” 5–8. 45 G. W. Pigman, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 no. 1 (1980): 1–32. 46 Biblia das ist die gantze Heilige Schrifft Deudsch (Wittenburg, Hans Luft: 1534/1545). 47 Cited in Brecht, Martin Luther, 98. 48 Ibid. 49 See Pastor, History of the Popes XII, 260 and James Waterworth, ed. and trans., The Council of Trent: The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: C. Dolman, 1848), 18–19. 50 Das Augsburger Interim, ein Bedenken Melanchthons und einige Briefe desselben in Bezug auf das Interim, die Bulla reformationis Pauli III. und die Formula reformationis Caroli V., als Grund für den Religions-Frieden vom 26. September 1555 (Leipzig: 1855). 51 Pastor, History of the Popes 439–440; and N. B. Rein, “Faith and Empire: Conflicting Visions of Religion in a Late Reformation Controversy –

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notes to Chapter 8 the Augsburg ‘Interim’ and its Opponents, 1548– 50,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 no. 1 (2003): 45–74. 52 On the attribution of the Heliodorus to Coornhert as engraver, see above in the present volume, n. 604. On the division of labor between Coornhert and Van Heemskerck, and on who was responsible for the choice of subject matter, see Ilja Veldman, De wereld tussen goed en kwaad: late prenten van Coornhert (The Hague: SDU, 1990) 11–13; and Walter S. Melion, “Book Review of Ilja M. Veldman, De wereld tussen goed en kwaad,” Print Quarterly 9 (1992): 88–90. On Coornhert’s ideology in prints after Van Heemskerck, see Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 60. On Coornhert before 1561, see Gerrit Voogt, Constraint on Trial: Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Religious Freedom (Kirksville, MO: Truman University Press, 2000) 18–21. 53 Stridbeck Bruegelstudien (1977), 20, 29 applies the description to the extended circle that included Coornhert, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Christophe Plantin. 54 On Coornhert’s ‘invisible church’, see Becker B., “Coornhert de 16de eeuwsch apostel der volmaakbaarheid”, Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 19 (1926) 59–84; and Bonger H., The Life and Work of Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, trans. G. Voogt (New York: 2004) 73, 293. 55 Voogt, Constraint on Trial 81–102. 56 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, Synod on the Freedom of Conscience: A Thorough Examination during the Gathering Held in the Year 1582 in the City of Freetown, Gerrit Voogt, ed. and trans. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). 57 Voogt, Constraint on Trial 105–118. 58 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Officia Ciceronis, leerende wat yegelick in alle staten behoort te doen, trans. Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert (Gronigen: Hendriks, 2007). 59 For the Clades Judaeae Gentis see the present volume, ch. 8, n. 2. 60 Veldman, New Hollstein, cites Joshua 7:25, 8:19–20 as the scripture Van Heemskerck portrays. 61 See Philip W. Comfort, ed., Cornerstone Biblical Commentary: Joshua, Judges, Ruth (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2012), 89. The Hebrew, “‫יַעָה‬‎” ‎(phonetically: hā-’āy), translates to “heap of ruins.”

62

 iblia Sacra, “Liber Josue,” Caput VIII, 19–20: B “Cumque elevasset clypeum ex adverso civitatis, insidiae, quae latebant surrexerunt confestim: et pergentes ad civitatem, ceperunt, et succenderunt eam. / Viri autem civitatis, qui persequebantur Josue, respicientes et videntes fumum Urbis ad cælum usque conscendere, non potuerunt ultra huc illucque diffugere: præsertim cum hi qui simulaverant fugam, et tendebant ad solitudinem, contra persequentes fortissimo restitissent.” 63 Ibid., 28: “Qui succendit urbem, et fecit earn tumulum sempiternum.” 64 In addition to the prints from King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord reproduced here, the “Removal and Destruction of the Chariot and the Horses of the Sun,” Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 146.1, and “The Slaughter of the Priests of Samaria,” Ibid., no. 149.1, show temple destruction, but not ruins or ruination in progress. 65 Biblia Sacra, “Apocalypsis Beati Joannis Apostoli,” Caput XVIII, 1–24. 66 David Freedberg, “The Problem of Images,” 25–45. On the equivocal nature of Van Heemskerck’s prints showing idol and temple destruction also see Eleanor Saunders, “A commentary on Several Print Series by Maarten van Heemskerck”, Simiolus 10, 2 (1978–79) 59–83. 67 In addition to “The Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom,” Freedberg, “The Problem of Images,” 35, cites Van Heemskerck’s scenes of temple destruction by the Chaldeans (Veldman, New Holstein, no. 120) and Titus (Ibid., no. 124). 68 For Horst Bredekamp on Van Heemskerck’s “anti-Roman image polemic” in the Josiah series and the print of the “Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom” in particular, see “Maarten van Heemskercks Bildersturmzyklen als Angriff auf Rom,” Bilder und Bildersturm in Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, Martin Warnke, ed., (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1990): 207–245. 69 David Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550–1672 (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2002), 127–129. The fact that Van Heemskerck and Coornhert did not collaborate on prints after 1559 renders more difficult the positing of their shared point of view on the image debate. See Veldman, New Hollstein,

484 nos. 434–443, for prints marking the end of their collaboration. 70 Gombrich, “Archaeologists or Pharisees?” 255–256. 71 Maarten van Heemskerck, Lamentation, 1566, Inventory number 41, oil on panel, 140 × 196 cm., Stedelijk Museum, Delft. See Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 99, and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 99. 72 Biblia Sacra, “Evangelum Secundum Matthæum,” Caput XVI, 52–53: “tunc ait illi Jesus: Converte gladium tuum in locum suum: omnes enim, qui acceperint gladium, gladio peribunt. / An putas, quia non possum rogare Patrem meum, et exhibebit mihi modo plus quam duodecim legions angelorum?”. 73 For images of the apocalypse in the Weltchronik and other northern European prints and printed books, see Cynthia Hall, “Before the Apocalypse: German Prints and Illustrated Books, 1450–1500,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 4 no. 2 (1996): 8–29. 74 Nadine Orenstein, ed. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) cat. nos. 62 and 63. 75 Margaret D. Carrol, Painting and Politics in Northern Europe (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008), 71–73. 76 Marco Folin and Monica Preti, “Les Désastres du Peuple Juif de Maarten van Heemskerck: un Oeuvre Polysémique,” in Marco Folin and Monica Preti, eds., Les Villes Détruites de Maarten van Heemskerck: Images de ruines et conflits religieux dans le Pay-Bas au XVI siècle (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2015), 20–85. 77 See also Dagmar Eichberger, “Framing Warfare and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Prints: The Clades Judaeae Gentis Series by Maarten van Heemskerck,” Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700, Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika, eds. (London: MacMillan Publishers, 2016): 239. Eichberger’s essay appears in a volume describing, in part, portrayals in early modern art of emotional responses to death and disaster. In that context, she concludes that Van Heemskerck “resort[ed] to a much more restrained style of representation,” in the Clades.

notes to Chapter 8 78 Eleanor Saunders, “Chapter IV: Contemporary Allusions: The Clades Judaeae Gentis and the revolt of the Netherlands,” in “Old Testament Subjects,” 224–276. 79 Groentjes, “Patterns of Destruction,” 511. 80 For Haarlem in the period discussed here, see W. P. J. Overmeer, De Hervorming te Haarlem (Haarlem: 1904), and J. J. Temminck, “Haarlem in 1566 en 1567,” in Haarlem Jaarboek (1971): 73–84. 81 For the discussion of the 1561 controversy over which church should house the new bishopric of Haarlem, the old parish church or another, see A. T. Mous “Geschiedenis van het vorrmalig Kapittel van de Kathedrale Kerk van SintBavo te Haarlem 1561–1616,” in Archief voor de Geschiedenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland, especially 4 (Nijmegen: Dekker, 1962) 75–123, 295–330, but also 6 (1964): 257–290; 8 (1968): 257–286; and 11 (1969) 276–347. 82 For these events in detail, see Saunders, “Old testament Subjects,” 15–69. 83 Karel van Mander, Het Schilderboek, f. 247r, says that Van Heemskerck was keerkmeester for twenty-two years before his death. 84 Nico de Glas “Context, Conception and Content of Hadrianus Junius’ Batavia,” in The Kaleidescopic Scholarship of Hadrianus Junius (1511–1575): Northern Humanism at the Dawn of the Dutch Golden Age, Dirck van Miert, ed. (Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishing): 69–95. 85 For these songs and songs like them, see Saunders, “Old Testament Subjects,” 242–246, who cites S. Cramer and F. Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria neerlandica, 10 vols., The Hague, 1903–14. 86 For a discussion of Coornhert’s relationship with Van Heemskerck and their print practice, see Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 56–57 and Idem, Goed en Kwaad, 11–14. 87 For a fuller expression of the notion that Van Heemskerck “never forgot Rome,” see Veldman, “Maarten van Heemskerck vivre à Haarlem sans jamais oublier Rome,” in Folin and Preti, Détruites, 7–20. 88 The socle’s inscription reads “Martinus Heemskerck / Pictor, alter nostri / Sæculi Apelles, in: / ventionum Pater ad / vivium expressus (Maerten Heemskerck, painter, an Apelles of

485

notes to Epilogue our age, father of (the following) inventions, expressed from life).” The base’s inscription reads “DAMVS TIBI BENIGNE LECTOR, VNO LIBELLO TANQVAM IN / SPECVLO EXHIBITAS, MEMORABILIORES JVDÆÆ GENTIS CLADES, VT DELICTORVM SEMPER COMITES, ITA CVM PRÆSENTI, TVM POSTERÆ ÆTATI PRO EXEMPLIS FVTVRAS (We deliver to you, the kindly reader, a little book displaying as in a mirror, the memorable disasters of the Jewish nation, so that the sins of the past count as examples with the present, as well as later ages, for the future).” Translations mine. 89 Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 150. 90 DiFuria, “Self-Fashioning” 124–125. 91 Saunders, “Old Testament Subjects,” 224–226, also argues that the image suggests Van Heemskerck’s “preoccupation with the perpetuation of his own name.” 92 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, 36, asserted that we had confirmation of Van Heemskerck’s visit to Santo Stefano Rotondo in a roughly drawn circular church ambulatory [cat. no. 50]. However, Ronald Malmstrom has since convincingly identified the interior portrayed as the ambulatory of S. Giovanni in Laterano in “A Drawing by Marten van Heemskerck of the Interior of S. Giovanni in Laterano,” Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 14 (1973): 247–251. Santo Stefano Rotondo does appear in the backdrop of the present volume’s catalog number 47 and a visit to the church seems inevitable given the attempt at near encyclopedic completeness indicated by the extant contents of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. 93 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 257. 94 For “Lot and his Family Leaving Sodom” [fig. 8.11], see Ibid., no. 242. 95 For “The Drunkenness of Noah” [fig. 8.13], see Ibid., no. 239. 96 For the southwestern slope of the Palatine, see Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 20r; for “Lot Making Love to His Daughters” [fig. 8.12], see Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 243.

Epilogue

1 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 513–520. Preparatory drawings dated 1570 survive for all except the Jupiter and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.

For the location of each, see Ibid., 192–93. See also Lise Dulcaux, “Dessins de Martin van Heemskerck,” Revue du Louvre et les Musées de France, no. 30 (1981): 375–380. 2 See cat. nos. 17–21 for drawings of the Colosseum, but also note the amphitheater’s presence in catalog numbers 2, 5, 9, 22, 23, and 57. 3 Veldman, New Hollstein, 269–270. 4 See DiFuria, “Concettismo of Triumph,” 172–177. 5 Edith A. Standen, “Some Tapestries at Princeton,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 47, no. 2 (1988): 3–18. 6 For Rembrandt’s indebtedness to Van Heemskerck’s prints, a pictorial tendency that Pieter Lastman’s Balaam and the Ass suggests he inherited from his most important master, see Christian Tümpel, “Discourse Held at the Celebration on the Occasion of the Presentation of de-Jong-van-Beek-en-DonkPrize,” in Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen 13 no. 3 (Amsterdam: Bijsondere Bijeenkomst der Afdeling Letterkunde, 1972): 9. 7 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 591

A Note on the Catalog

1 For a discussion of attribution problems in drawings of Roman topography by Van Heemskerck and artists in his circle, see the present volume, 415–430. 2 E.g. Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 72r, of the Casa Galli sculpture garden, which has only plain walls, no loggia or niches or other classical architectural elements. 3 The first phase of research was facilitated by Dr. Alan Ceen, who, upon hearing of this project, graciously invited me to use his facilities as a research fellow at his Studium Urbis, Rome. The second research expedition was funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and again benefited from Dr. Ceen’s unsurpassed knowledge of 1530s Rome and Roman urbanism.

In and Around the Forum

1 Van Heemskerck also depicts the Capitoline Obelisk at close range in catalog nos. 5 and 6. See

486 also the drawings of “Anonymous C.” cat. nos. 85 and 86. 2 Hieronymus Cock published a print showing this part of the Forum, with the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine in the right backdrop. The print is not a precise match to Van Heemskerck’s drawing, but the drawing may have provided a reference. See Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, n. 262, cat. no. 16. 3 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 5, n. 2, was the first to observe this; “Um diese Durchblicke zu ermöglichen, hat sich Heemskerck mancherlei Abweichungen von der Wirlichkeit gestattet (die Zeichnung II, 12 ist treuer), z. B. ist die in den Faustinatempel hineingebaute Kirche gänzlich ignoriert, die Häuser jenseits S. Adriano weggelassen, die Marcussäule etwas nach rechts gerückt u.a.” 4 Adolf Michaelis, “Römische Skizzenbucher,” 131. Also suggested by Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 12. 5 For an updated discussion of the length of Van Heemskerck’s stay in Rome, see above in the present volume, nn. 1 and 208. 6 For Paul III’s alterations to the forum and S. Sergio e Bacco in particular on the occasion of Charles’s procession in 1536, see Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations, 281. 7 Francesco Cancellieri, Storia de’ Sollenni Possessi de’ Sommi Pontefici: detti anticamente processi or processioni dopo la loro coronazione dalla basilica vaticana alla lateranense (Rome: Luigi Lazzarini Stampatore, 1802), 94–103, 502; Ceen, Quartiere de’ Banchi, 57–65. 8 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 177, 178. 9 Ibid., nos. 14, 177, 178, 331, 332, 338, 484. 10 Ibid., no. 92. 11 Ibid., no. 484. 12 Ibid., nos. 77 and 91. 13 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 79v and 80r. See Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 84. 14 The latter name is also given to the nearby church of San Giorgio. For drawings of the area near the Velabrum, see catalog numbers 34, 35, and 36. 15 The Savelli tower appears in catalog number 57. 16 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, iv, say that the present volume’s cat. nos. 3, 4, 26, and 44 are in “seine Technik vollständig ausgereift.”

notes to In And Around The Forum 17 Van Heemskerck has uncharacteristically drawn all of the fluting on the Temple of Castor’s nearest column. The second and third columns receive the more typical treatment, in which he shows only the end of the fluting near the top of the column’s shaft (see cat. nos. 22 and 54, for example). 18 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 91. 19 Ibid., no. 411. 20 Ibid., no. 354. 21 See cat. no. 86 in my discussion of attribution problems. 22 Some of the symbols Van Heemskerck drew near the top of the needle are consistent with the hieroglyphs on the actual obelisk, currently on the grounds of the Villa Celimontana. 23 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 225. 24 Ibid., no. 138. 25 Two mid-sixteenth century images show the Capitoline from the northwest, slightly east of the iconic view depicted by Du Pérac in 1569. See for example, Louvre 11028, dated 1544 by Cesare D’Onofrio in Gli Obelischi di Roma (Rome: Casa di Risparmio di Roma, 1965), pl. 98. Adolf Michaelis, “Michelangelos Plan Zum Kapitol und Seine Ausführung,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, N. F. II (1891), 189, shows a print by Jan or Lucas Doetecum from a lost 1548 drawing of the Capitoline by Hieronymus Cock. 26 Van Heemskerck drew catalog number 6 from nearly the same vantage point while gazing south. 27 D’Onofrio, Gli Obelischi, pl. 98. 28 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 42. Hülsen claims he is revising the reading of this inscription offered by Petrus Hofstede de Groot. However, Hülsen offers no translation by de Groot, cites no bibliography, and does not specify oral communication with his Dutch contemporary. Veldman, “Review,” 109, calls this the “mystifying inscription on the obelisk on the Capitoline Hill.” 29 For Van Heemskerck’s detailed drawings of these sculptures, see Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. I 45r, and 61r. 30 The Lions at the foot of the obelisk, and some of its hieroglyphics appear in catalog numbers 6 and 85. 31 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 240. 32 The lion’s head statue appears on Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 50r, deattributed

notes to In And Around The Forum from Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre in this volume. See the present volume, cat. no. 83. 33 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 33. 34 See Denis Ribouillaut, “Inversion Comique ou Critique Satirique? La Vue du Capitole de Hieronymus Cock (1562),” RACAR 38 no. 1 (2013): 79–96. 35 Etiénne Du Pérac, “Capitoli sciographia ex ipso exemplari Michaelis Angeli Bonaroti …,” Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, 1569, Museum number 1947,0319.26.46, ink on paper, 383 × 563 mm., Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London. 36 The broken quadrant of the Colosseum also appears from this angle in catalog number 19. See also Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 588. 37 In addition to this book’s introduction, see Martin Stritt, “Kolumbus der Ruinenlandschaft?” 173. 38 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. no. 98. 39 Hendrick van Cleve (attr.), Le Colisée, vue d’ensemble, 1550, Inventory number Rés. B12, pen and ink wash on paper, 21 × 41.8 cm., Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 40 Marijn Schapelhouman and Frits Scholten, Nederlandse Tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, vol. 3. The Hague: 2009, 89–90. 41 For a plan of the Palatine, see Filippo Coarelli, Guida Archeologica di Roma, 5th edition (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1989). Hieronymus Cock published a print from a vantage point to the northeast of Van Heemskerck’s, looking south, with the arc of the exedra foreshortened in the left foreground. See Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. nos. Q-1 and 100. 42 No traces of under drawing remain on this sheet. 43 For example, see the present volume’s catalog number 1, where the ancient Roman monuments in the Forum Romanum appear in a thick line while the buildings behind them on the Capitoline appear in a much thinner line. 44 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 243. Though the drawing’s size is comparable to the print’s, the exedra in the sketch is much larger than the one appearing in the print, disqualifying the possibility of direct transfer from drawing to print. Nor does the drawing bear any physical evidence of direct transfer.

487 45 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 495. 46 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. nos. 12 and 13. 47 The drawing of the elephant is from the villa Madama’s elephant fountain, which Van Heemskerck drew twice [cat. no. 14 and Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 19v] and incorporated into his design for the base of a spiral column in his print of Samson and Delilah (1553). 48 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 77, 159, 271, 304, 340. 350, 353, 354, 454, 455, 458, and 588. 49 See, for example, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 82r. 50 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 255 and 493. 51 Rodolfo Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations, 201. 52 Van Heemskerck’s writing of the inscription is faithful to the inscription as it reads on the Arch of Titus, which says: SENATVS POPVLVS QVE ROMANVS
 DIVO TITO DIVI VESPASIANI F(ILIO) VESPASIANO AVGVSTO (“The Senate and People of Rome (dedicate this) to the divine Titus Vespasianus Augustus, son of the divine Vespasian”). 53 Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations, 281. 54 Observations of the drawing in June 2005 and March 2015 showed no traces of under drawing. 55 No other drawings of the Palazzo by Van Heemskerck or anyone else show it this way because it never had two towers. See for example the present volume’s catalog number 1, the anonymous drawing of the Capitoline in the Louvre (inventory number 11028), and the famous print engraved by Jan or Lucas Doetecum from a lost 1548 drawing by Hieronymus Cock and published by Cock. For that print, see Michaelis, “Michelangelos Plan Zum Kapitol und Seine Ausführung,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst (1891): 189, and Ribouillaut, “Inversion Comique ou Critique Satirique?” Only Alessandro Strozzi’s map (1474, Florence, Biblioteca Hertziana, MS Laur. Redi 77, CC) portrays the Palazzo with two towers. In the Strozzi map, however, the second tower appears to be an exaggeration of the Tabularium’s crenellated southeast corner. For the Strozzi Map, see Hart and Hicks, Palladio’s Rome, xli – xliii. 56 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 34. Hülsen does not suggest two vantage points, but implies it where he says “Auf dem Kapitol … links der Senatorenpalast mit Turm (Die Zeichnung dieser Gebäude scheint Heemskerck korrigiert zu haben,

488 daher links noch ein zweiter Turm mit hohen anschließenden Bauten).” 57 Ibid., 33. 58 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 242. 59 The drawing shows a lone second floor interior vault also found twice in the second Berlin album: cat. no. 21, a copy after Van Heemskerck, according to Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 74, and Berlin 79D2a, 94v, which they attribute to “Anonymous A.” 60 We are certain the Tempio del Divo Claudio was extant between 203–211, CE because it appears on the Forma Urbis. 61 See Rodolfo Lanciani, Destruction of Ancient Rome, 208. Despite its appearance on the Forma Urbis, known in the 16th century, the Tempio del Divo Claudio does not appear on Bufalini’s map. 62 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 17: “Ein umgekehrt am Boden liegendes kolossales Compoisitakapitell, fast genau stimmend zu denen des Haupstaales der Diocletiansthermen.” Hülsen cites Desgodetz’ Édifices de Rome, 313, pl. V. Though Hülsen describes the capital as “kolossales,” we are ultimately unable to determine its scale given its close proximity to the picture plane, and a lack of evidence that would enable us determine its distance from the Colosseum. 63 Ibid., vol. 1, 8. Hülsen notes their similarity to the capital on the present sheet, but does not suggest that they are also from the Baths of Diocletian or that these are the source for the capital in this drawing. 64 There is only one light pencil trace on the upper right edge of the capital. Since the drawing is so highly finished and no lead traces remain, we do not know if Van Heemskerck corrected the capital’s proportions during the course of executing this drawing. 65 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 517. 66 Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 28v, shows the same ruins. 67 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 91r. 68 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 331. 69 Ibid., nos. 181, 303, 402, and 448. 70 Ibid., no. 178. Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 91. 71 Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 24v and 28v. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. no. 6. 72 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 138, 455, 520, 588, 590.

notes to In And Around The Forum 73 We also gaze through two arches on the verso of this sheet, depicting the cortile of the Casa Maffei. Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 3, cite Lanciani, Plan Bl. 21 for their claim that we are looking at the Northwestern quadrant. The appearance of the upper wall in the backdrop confirms it. 74 Compare with catalog number 18 above. 75 For the Darmstadt drawing, see the present volume, catalog number 79 and Christian Hülsen, “Unbekannte Roemische Zeichnungen von Marten van Heemskerck,” in Mededeelingen van Het Nederlandsch Historisch Instituut te Rome (‘s-Gravenhage: 1927): 83–96. Drawings by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus drawings appear in Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 59v, 72r, and 91r. For Hieronymus Cock’s views of the Colosseum, see Timothy Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. nos. D-3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and Van Grieken, ed. The Renaissance in Print, cat. no. 10.2. 76 Examples include Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 9, 14, 15, 256, 332, 359, and 465. 77 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 74. Their table indicates that both sides of this sheet (the other side is the present volume’s cat. no. 15) are copies after Van Heemskerck by “Anonymous A,” later determined to be Hermannus Posthumus by Nicole Dacos, in “L’anonyme A de Berlin”). See Ibid., vii, where they say the technique here is comparable to that of sheets Berlin II, 52 and 53. The technique is very close to some examples traditionally attributed to Van Heemskerck executed with precision (cat. no. 26) and high finish (cat. nos. 17 and 22). But the hatches on this sheet tend to be longer, straighter, and at closer intervals than Van Heemskerck’s. Only some sheets by Posthumus, who favors ink wash for shadows, contain a technique similar to this (e.g., 79D2a, 82r). The lack of a precise match in technique may be the result of ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus hand copying a precisely rendered Van Heemskerck very closely. 78 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, vii, incorrectly say this signature is on the verso. 79 Etiénne Du Pérac, Disegni de le Ruine di Roma e Come Anticamente erono, Pierpoint Morgan Library, plate 24. For the images of the Colosseum by Van Heemskerck, Posthumus,

489

notes to On The Quirinal Hill Pomodello and Cock, see DiFuria, “Van Heemskerck’s Rome” Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2. 80 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, vi, describe “weak” chalk traces: “Und zwar tragen die Blätter …69… nur ganz schwache Spuren”. 81 Hülsen and Egger provide no entry for this drawing, and only a short one for the drawing on the verso side, catalog number 21. 82 The upper registers of the Arch of Constantine appear in the Codex Escurialensis. See Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 45r. For a view of the Colosseum from the same angle, see Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. no. 17 and Van Grieken, ed. The Renaissance in Print, cat. no. 10.3. 83 Examination of the site and of Nolli’s map reveal that this view of the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum is possible, unlike the much more hastily executed drawing in catalog number 24. 84 Raphael’s drawing of the Pantheon’s interior, for example, bears the same convention. See John Shearman, “Raphael, Rome, and the Codex Escurialensis,” Master Drawings 15 no. 2 (1977): 107–146+189–196 and Kristina Luce, “Raphael and the Pantheon’s Interior: a Pivotal Moment in Architectural Representation,” in Architecture and Mathematics from Antiquity to the Future, in M. Ostwald (Heidelberg: Birkhäuser, Cham, 2015): 43–56. 85 Van Heemskerck conducts a similar exercise on the verso of this sheet [cat. no. 18]. 86 Bartolomeo Neroni, Arch of Constantine, nd, 30.3 × 25.5 cm., pen and ink, brush and brown wash, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, acc. no. 80.3.585. 87 Raphael, “Letter to Leo,” 183. 88 Examination of the drawing in June, 2005 and March 2015 revealed no traces of underdrawing. 89 For the Septizonium in drawings that include other buildings, see catalog numbers 10, 13, 23, 36 and 56. 90 For views of the Septizonium from a vantage point further north and west, see Giovan Antonio Dosio, Florence, Uffizi, nos. UA 1774, 2524, and 2525. 91 Antonio Lafréry, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, f. 27. 92 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. nos. 58, 59. Veldman, New Hollstein, nos., 77, 91, and 590.

93 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 153, 154. E.g., Du Pérac, Disegni, ff. 20v–21r. 94 Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 57v, shows the only known example that is securely dated as earlier than Van Heemskerck’s and a contemporary double-sheet view by ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus in Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 82v (left) and 84r (right). See Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 45–47. A sheet previously attributed to Van Heemskerck, but deattributed here (see Appendix B), appears in Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 50r. The backdrop of Jan van Hemessen’s Unmerciful Servant, c. 1550, Inventory number 1959/1.108, University of Michigan Museum of Art, contains a view of ruins closely based on the Forum Nervae from the vantage point in this drawing. In 1551, Hieronymus Cock published a print of the Forum Nervae closely related to this drawing. See Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. no. 22. Mathijs Bril probably copied Cock’s print in the 1580s for a drawing now in Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, inv. no. 20.958. The Dosio circle produced two drawings of the Forum c. midcentury (Florence, Uffizi, UA 2583 and a copy on UA 2514). Around this time, so did Cornelis Cort (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. 1992.7). In the 1580s, the Forum Nervae also appeared in Du Pérac, Disegni, ff. 17v and 18r. 95 E.g., Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 77, 159, 239, 253, and 304, and 591. Christoph Thoenes, “San Pietro come rovina,” 138, draws a comparison between the ruins in Hollstein no. 77 and Bramante’s Genazzo ninfeo, but this drawing is a closer match. 96 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 239.

On the Quirinal Hill

1 Van Heemskerck also drew this crater in profile, deftly foreshortening the spiral handles, on Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 31v. Giuliano da Sangallo shows this crater on f. 71v of the Codice Barberini (Biblioteca Vaticano). The Crater also appears on Andreas Coner’s Codex f. 141r (vol. 115, Sir John Soane’s Museum). Giuseppe Vasi, Magnificenza, Book VIII (Rome, 1758),

490

notes to On the Tiber ’ s East Bank and On the Interior

pl. 145, shows a view of the Cortile of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, in which this crater appears. Giovanni Battista Piranesi published a print of the same Crater out of context in his Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi (Rome, 1778), I, 37. 2 A similar crater appears on Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 37r. 3 See Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 81v and 82r. For Giuliano da Sangallo’s Renaissance archaeological activity on the Quirinal, see Cammy Brothers, “Reconstruction as Design: Giuliano da Sangallo and the ‘Palazo di Mecenate’ on the Quirinal Hill”, Annali di Architettura 14 (2002): 55–72. 4 Hülsen and Egger, Römische Skizzenbucher, II 82r. 5 Giovan Antonio Dosio, Frontespizio di Nerone, 190 × 174 mm., Gabinetto delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence, UA 2512. 6 See Brothers, “Reconstruction as Design,” 59–60, who mistakes the ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus drawing for a Van Heemskerck and fails to observe that the drawings by ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus and Dosio cannot describe the same topographical reality as the one Van Heemskerck portrays. 7 Giovan Antonio Dosio, Rovine di Palazzo Maggiore, 170 × 230 mm., Uffizi, Florence, UA 2519. 8 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 160. 9 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 81v and 82r. See Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 44–45. 10 Du Pérac Vestigii, f. 31. 11 Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 118. 12 Formerly attributed to Etiénne Du Pérac, Palazzo Nerone, pen and brown ink, pale red wash, with framing lines in brown ink, 220 × 334 mm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Inventory number 59.73. 13 ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus also draws a grotto on the premises, but further down the hill that leads towards the temple, not directly beneath it. 14 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 305. 15 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 6, identify these as rooms in the northwestern part of the Baths of Diocletian complex, with a view through the northern Palaestra. They base their identification on

the appearance of the interior space and a comparison with ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus’s drawing in Ibid., vol. 2, 84v. However, they do not mention its more revealing connecting piece, the perspective view of Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 83r, which looks northeast at the ruins of the southwest corner. 16 Hieronymus Cock published a print of a different part of the Baths of Diocletian with a similar receding series of arches. See Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. no. 19, and Van Grieken, ed. The Renaissance in Print, cat. no. 9.9. 17 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 303. 18 Veldman, “Rhetoricians of Haarlem.” 96–112. Idem, New Hollstein, no. 585. 19 Etiénne Du Pérac, “Trofei di Mario,” Vestigii, f. 27. See also the anonymous late 17th / early 18th century etching from the same vantage point in the Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-1907-5792. 20 These frieze motifs also appear in the Codex Escurialensis, Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 43v.

On the Tiber’s East Bank and On the Interior

1 This is the Octavian structure’s only appearance among Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings. The Codex Escurialensis also contains a partial view of the right side of the Porticus’s pediment (fol. 38r, Egger’s text appears on page 107). 2 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 19, assume that the scale of the foregrounded object is “kolossal.” However, since the foot is unidentifiable, and the drawing offers no certain distance between the foot and the porticus, there are no grounds for this assumption. 3 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 19. 4 Ibid., vol. 1, 48v, contains two red chalk drawings of feet in sandals. Volume 1, 52r shows a foot in an open toed sandal. Volume 1, 53v shows sculptures of a left and right foot. 5 There is no physical evidence that this sheet was ever cut down. 6 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 520. For an analysis of Van Heemskerck’s “Amphitheatrum” see Dulcaux, “Dessins de Martin van Heemskerck,” 375–380. See Friedlander, Early Netherlandish

491

notes to In And Around The Vatican Painting, no. 215, pl. 109 and Grosshans, Die Gemälde, pl. III, fig. 27, cat. no. 24. 7 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 107, 133, 198. 8 See Van Heemskerck’s view of the Temple of Castor, Temple of Divine Augustus, and San Teodoro, the present volume’s catalog number 3. 9 E.g. Du Pérac, Vestigii, fs. 9v and 12v and Dosio, Florence, Uffizi, UA 2502 and 2503. 10 For “Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulchre,” see Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 93. 11 For Van Heemskerck’s rapid manner of working see Woollett et. al., Drama and Devotion, 46–50. 12 For the Palatine’s southwestern slope, see catalog numbers 12 and 13. 13 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 29, say that the portico blocks are view of the church, but given the church’s size, this seems unlikely. Whether by choice of vantage point, or simply by choosing not to draw it even though he saw it, this is another example of Van Heemskerck’s habit of favoring the ancient Roman antiquities in his field of vision. 14 E.g., Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 347, 398, and 505. 15 DiFuria, “Timeless Space,” 19–20. 16 This is one of only three sheets by Van Heemskerck containing a view of the same site from two vantage points. The others appear in the present volume’s catalog numbers 10 and 54. This sheet and Berlin Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 40r are the only ones by Van Heemskerck portraying Rome’s gates. 17 See, for example, Giuseppe Vasi’s views of the Porta del Popolo and the Muro Torto, see Delle magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna (Rome, 1747–61), ff. I and VII, respectively. 18 The gate’s bastions and Santa Maria del Popolo are by Sixtus IV della Rovere (r. 1471–1484). In 1518, Leo X built via di Ripetta, the street used by pilgrims to reach the Vatican upon their arrival in Rome. Bramante and Raphael had recently made alterations to Santa Maria del Popolo. For Leo’s renovations see Linda Pellecchia, “The Contested City: Urban Form in Early SixteenthCentury Rome,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, Marcia Hall, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 80–86. 19 While the Porta Pinciana is in this direction, it would not be visible from here. And although

Van Heemskerck sometimes drew monuments that were not visible, but were in the direction of his peripheral vision, this gate does not resemble the Porta Pinciana. Bufalini’s map shows a “V. di Bononiae” in this direction. 20 In Tempesta’s map of 1593, the gate appears taller than in Van Heemskerck’s drawing. The arch is higher above the ground line. 21 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 251, 399, 403, 404, 411. 22 Ibid., no. 252.

In and Around the Vatican

1 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 35, identify the building on the right as Palazzo Costa, which they say also appears in perspective ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus’s drawing on 79D2a 3r. However, the facades do not match. Van Heemskerck’s shows two sets of bases for pilasters on the piano nobile where ‘Anonymous A’ / Posthumus shows only one. In verbal communication, Alan Ceen also disagrees with the identification of the palace on Van Heemskerck’s sheet as the Palazzo Costa, recommending Palazzo Palma instead. No exact match is to be found, however. See Paul Marie Letarouilly, Édifices de Rome moderne, ou. Reçueil des palais, maisons, églises couvents et autres monuments publics et particuliers les plus remarquables de la ville de Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984), pl. I. Other possibilities include Ibid., I, 23 (Elevation d’un palais Piazza della Pace), I, 49 (Palazzo Linotte Vicolo dell’Aquila), and I, 106 (Palazzo Vicolo dell’oro). 2 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, vi, do not identify these marks in their effort to reconstruct the sketchbook’s original sequence by analyzing traces of red chalk. 3 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus drew similar elevations. See Berlin Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 3r, Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 4. 4 Ibid., I, xiii and 35, hypothesize that both of the elevations on 42 are copies after original drawings by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, but they offer no accession numbers for a specific drawing by the Italian architect.

492 5 For a discussion of Van Heemskerck’s encounters with Italian artists in Rome, see above in the present volume, 119, 137–139. 6 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 31. Hülsen and Egger think Van Heemskerck’s proportions are more accurate than Parmigianino’s. 7 Giovan Battista Naldini’s view of the Palazzo, c. 1560 (Firenze, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Inventory number 230 A r) shows less detail than either Parmigianino’s or Van Heemskerck’s. 8 For a study of architectural decorative elements in red chalk, see catalog number 71. For a study of the decorative elements on the right foot of the so-called Genius sculpture, which Van Heemskerck saw at the Villa Madama, see Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2 65v, and Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 35. For other sculpture in red chalk see Berlin 79D2 11v and 75v. 9 Two views are in the Duke of Devonshire’s Collection, Chatsworth, England. See this dissertation’s Appendix B for the drawing in Chatsworth that has been attributed variously to Jan Brueghel the Elder, Van Heemskerck, and ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast. A third is in the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. See Burton Dunbar III, “A Rediscovered Sixteenth Century Drawing of the Vatican with Constructions for the Entry of Charles V into Rome,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 2 (1992): 195–204. 10 André Chastel, “Les entrées de Charles Quint,” 197–206. 11 In a conversation about the drawing in the summer of 2005, Allan Ceen suggested to me that this figure might be the Pope and that such understated processionals were commonplace during the period after the papacy’s return to Rome and before the 18th century. 12 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 412 and 448, respectively. 13 Ibid., no. 157. 14 Ibid., no. 169. 15 Wolfgang Metternich thought that this could not be by Van Heemskerck because he found documents regarding the construction of St. Peter’s suggesting that parts of the building appearing on this sheet were not built until the late 1530s or early 1540s, at least two years after

notes to In And Around The Forum Van Heemskerck left Rome. However, Christoph Thoenes determined that the documents in question refer to the restoration of these parts, which had been built by Bramante. Metternich and Thoenes left the publication of these findings to Ilja Veldman, “Anonymous B,” 370–72. 16 Giorgio Vasari, cited in Christoph Thoenes, “San Pietro come rovina,” 140. 17 Compare this masterful display of foreshortening with the awkward handling of this same view in a drawing attributed to “Anonymous A?” by Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 1r. 18 Grosshans, Die Gemälde cat. no. 55. 19 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 52 and 120. 20 Ibid., no. 257. 21 Ibid., nos. 183 and 397. 22 Ibid., nos. 346, 379 and 414. 23 Ibid., nos. 77, 84, 107, 253, 317, 527. 24 The view of St. Peter’s by ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast is in Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 15r. For ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast, see the present volume, 430–435. For Hieronymus Cock’s print, see Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat no. 109, fig. 74. 25 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 526 and 527. 26 The drawing of this area by ‘Anonymous B’ / Michiel Gast is on Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 7r. See the present volume, 433. Dosio’s drawings are in Florence, Uffizi, Inventory numbers US 2535 and 2536. 27 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, iv, note the sure-handedness of these two drawings as well as the more highly finished cat. nos. 4 and 26. 28 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 414, 442, and 454. 29 Van Heemskerck may have gazed east from this spot to draw the present volume’s catalog number 59, a panorama including Borgo, Castel S. Angelo, the Pantheon, and the Torre dei Conti. For a panorama from the Vatican Palace to Torre dei Conti see Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 7v and 8r, 63 for a panorama from a comparable vantage point. 30 Unidentified buildings do appear in this area on Nolli’s map. 31 It is also like the monogram that appears on numerous prints after Van Heemskerck’s designs, combining the letters “M”, “V”, “H” and “K”. See for example Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 76.

notes to Near The South Wall 32 Like Leon Preibisz before them, Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 26 express uncertainty on the matter; accordingly, their table on p. 74 lists this as an autograph Van Heemskerck, but the “Kopie nach Heemskerck” symbol, followed by a question mark, appears in parentheses next to their attribution. 33 Ibid., Egger says he finds the same watermark on the present sheet as Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 40 (cat. nos. 53 and 60), which is securely attributed to Van Heemskerck. He describes it as “two crossed arrows and at the top between them an 8-radial star.” The present sheet showed no visible watermark when I examined it in the summer of 2005 and in June of 2011. My examination of 79D2a 40 found only the two arrows of the bottom half. Several sheets in the Berlin volumes contain two crossed arrows: 79D2 12, 13, 20, 25, and 43. I found no watermarks with more than six pointed stars among the sheets in Berlin: 79D2 6, 27, 30, 45, and 72, and 79D2a 9. 34 See catalog numbers 2, 40, 43, 49, and 61. 35 E.g., Van Heemskerck’s large ink wash drawing of the Forum Romanum, the present volume’s catalog number 2. 36 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 102, 169, 512. 37 Michaelis, “Romische Skizzenbucher,” part 1, 160, only calls it “Andeutung einer drestöckigen Architektur.”

Near the South Wall

1 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 32 identify the ancient sculptures on the other half of this sheet as having been in the gardens of the Villa Madama at the time of Van Heemskerck’s Roman stay. For a drawing of the Baths of Caracalla attributed to Van Heemskerck but not in Berlin, see catalog number 48. 2 Van Heemskerck apparently favored such views. See catalog number 36 for a similar composition of the Baths of Diocletian. 3 Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, cat. no. 20. 4 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 271. 5 Ibid., no. 249. 6 Nesselrath, 268. 7 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 39.

493 8 The equestrian statue appears at a similar angle in the Codex Escurialensis. See Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 31v. 9 For speculation on the drawing and the topography around the Lateran see Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 36–38 and Silvia Maddalo, “Ancora sulla Loggia di Bonifacio VIII al Laterano: Una proposata di ricostruzione e un’ipotesi attributive,” Arte Medievale 12–13 (1998–99): 211–230. 10 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, vi–vii, describe these as “weak,” but they are quite conspicuous. 11 Malmstrom, “Interior of S. Giovanni in Laterano,” 250, uses Carlo Rainaldi’s 1646 survey plan of the church (Alb. It. Az. 373) and a cross section of the same entry by Borromini’s workshop (Alb. It. Az. 381) to corroborate his hypothesis. 12 Jacob Franckaert the Elder, The so-called Temple of Minerva Medica (c. 1590) Biblioteca Vaticana, coll. Ashby. 13 Willem van Nieulandt, Nymphaeum in Rome, 1594–1618, Object number RP-P-OB-4160, ink on paper, 10.7 × 12.7 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 14 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 147, 225, 515. 15 Maerten van Heemskerck, Venus and Cupid, 1545, Inventory number 875, oil on wood, 108 × 157 cm., Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum. Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 48 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 66. 16 The Porta Maggior and the Porta del Popolo [cat. no. 37] are the only Roman gates to be found among Van Heemskerck’s remaining drawings. 17 See Van Heemskerck’s, Venus and Cupid (above in the present volume, n. 868) and Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 251, 304, 340, 353. 18 The only other known sheets on which Van Heemskerck shows two different views of the same landscape on the same side of the same sheet are the present volume’s catalog numbers 10 and 37. 19 The inscription on the pyramid says: “C. CESTIVS. L. F. POB. EPVLO. PR. TR. PL. / VII. VIR. EPLVLONVM.” 20 Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 45v. 21 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 91, 92, 177, 231, 305, 510. No 513, “Piramides Aegypti” from the Eight Wonders of the World series of prints, does not

494

notes to Further Afield: Otium appear to have been derived from Heemsekrck’s observation of the Pyramid of Cestius, but his drawings of Obelisks.



Further Afield: Otium

1 Veldman, New Hollstein, no, 507. 2 Ibid., nos. 77, 139, 140, 232, 386, 472, 492, 493, 511, 548. 3 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 95, 154, 190, 194, 239, and 348.

Panorama, Collection, Fragment, Fantasia

1 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 10. Hülsen hypothesizes that Van Heemskerck drew this from the campanile of Santa Sabina, but we may be further west than this. For a drawing from comparable vantage point, see Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 56v.. Giuliano da Sangallo’s View of the Ponte Quattro Capi from north of the Ponte Fabriccio, c. 1480, Codice Barberini, 4424, f. 34v (top half) shows this same section of the Tiber from a lower vantage point. Another drawing in the Codex Escurialensis, Egger, Codex Escurialensis, f. 27v, is from the same vantage point as Sangallo’s. An anonymous artist produced a comparable view c. 1570, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, inv. No. 5807. 2 Between them is a tower that Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 10 tentatively identify as the medieval tower of the Porta del Popolo. Consultation with the Nolli map reveals that it would be visible to Van Heemskerck in this location, between the Pantheon and the column. 3 See in the present volume above, 242–246. See also Stritt, Die Schone Helena in Romruin, 71–72. 4 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 91. 5 Ibid., no. 182. 6 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 40 say that Santa Sabina is visible next to the Savelli stronghold, but its distinctive campanile is not clear. Lines do not match seamlessly where the two sheets would meet. However, my examinations of drawings in Album I in the June of 2005, July of 2009, June of 2011, and March of 2015 revealed no evidence of cutting. Moreover, these pages are of average size

among those in Van Heemskerck’s portable book of drawings. 7 The foreground also presents identification problems but in Ibid., 40, Hülsen sees the little church of S. Omobuono “between the Palatine and the River.” 8 See above in the present volume, 242–246 and Stritt, Die Schone Helena in Romruin, 78–82. 9 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 32 thinks Van Heemskerck drew this view from the “highest point on the Vatican loggia” (“Panorama vom obserten Geschosse der vatikanischen Loggien”). However, the Vatican loggia was three stories high and the angle of view suggests a much higher point. The campanile of Old St. Peter’s, which appears in other drawings around the site (e. g. the present volume’s catalog number 42), is the likelier vantage point. 10 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 32. Egger suggests that the capital is from the building of the new St. Peter’s. 11 Ibid., I, pp. IX, 32. 12 Egger, Codex Escurialensis., ff. 7v and 8r comprise an unfinished panorama. 13 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 10. 14 Julia Viciose, “La Basilica di San Giovanni dei Fiorentini a Roma: individuazione delle vicende progettuali”, in: Bollettino d’arte 77 no. 72, (1992): 73–114. 15 See, for example, the natural topography in the upper right corner of the present volume’s catalog number 17 or before the Trofei di Mario in the present volume’s catalog number 31. 16 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 98. 17 Only one study of the Maffei family exists. See José Ruysschaert and Roberto Ridolfi, Recherche des deux bibliothèques romaines Maffei des XVe et XVIe siècles (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1959). 18 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 3–4, identify each of the sculptures in the Casa Maffei Cortile and trace their provenances. 19 Ulisse Aldrovandi and Lucio Mauro, Le Antichita Della Cita di Roma (Venice: 1558), 241. 20 This is the site that became the Italian Senate building in 1871. It has been altered considerably since Van Heemskercks’ drawing. For a building history, see Franco Borsi, intro., Senato della Repubblica: Guida alle Sedi (Rome: Editalia, 1994), Idem, intro., Facciata di Palazzo Madama (Roma:

495

notes to Deattributions Editalia, 1994), and Elena Fumagalli, “La Facciata Quattrocentesca del Palazzo Medici in Piazza Madama: Un Disegno e Alcune Considerazioni,” in Annali di Architettura 3 (1991): 26–31. 21 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 4–5 claim that the walls in the distant background of this drawing existed at the time they wrote their books. However, examination of the site around the current Palazzo Madama reveals no such configuration. See Ibid for their identification of the sculptures in this drawing. 22 For the study of the Palazzo’s sculpture collection, see Teresa M. Russo, “Appunti su Palazzo Medici e sul suo Proprietario,” Strenna dei Romanisti (1989): 485–500. 23 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 219, 301, respectively. 24 In their intro to Album II, Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, v, explain the sloppy technique in this sheet only by saying that Van Heemskerck could have added the ink later: “ist es nicht ausgeschlossen, daß die Lavierung erst nachträglich hinzugefügt worden ist.” 25 See Christian, “Friends, Citizens, and Strangers,” 140 and Bol, So-called Maarten de Vos Sketchbook, f. 5r. 26 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 114. 27 Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. nos. 21 and 24. 28 Ibid., no. 270. 29 Veldman, “Review,” 110 and Christian, “Friends, Citizens, and Strangers,” 133. 30 Hülsen and Egger, Skizzenbucher, I, 45, hypothesize that the print was the source for Van Heemskerck’s figures derived from sculptures in the Sassi collection because of their shared orientation. 31 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol., 1, 8, hesitate to identify these more specifically than the generic label given here, due to lack of evidence of a specific location. 32 In addition to the four sheets in this catalog, Van Heemskerck also drew a column and a bench from San Giovanni in Laterano [cat. no. 50], the frieze decorations at San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure [cat. no. 32], and an unidentified grave marker fragment on Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 4v. 33 There are sheets of similarly detailed Composite capitals in the Codex Escurialensis. See Egger, Codex Escurialensis, ff. 22r, 22v, and 24r. Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 12, find “completely correspondent” drawings of the

capital in the present volume’s catalog number 69, in the Codex Coner (f. 132 c), the Sketchbook of Giambattista da Sangallo (Uffizi, 1852), and Andrea Palladio’s Architettura, (I. IV, 22, ed. 1570). See also Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 9r. 34 Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 13, say these fragments are from the west corner of the temple’s ante-room. 35 Van Heemskerck’s drawing of Sixtus IV’s tomb is also in red chalk. See Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol., 1, 71v. 36 For print compositions containing architectural fragments that do not match these drawings precisely, see Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 62, 63, 77, 90, 171, and 271. 37 For the Frontispiece, see Ibid., no. 237. The preparatory sketch for this print is in Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2, 1r. See Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 1, 3. Ilja Veldman, “The Memorial at Heemskerck and its Hieroglyphics,” Dutch Humanism, 144–155, and Eleanor Saunders, “Old Testament Subjects,” 224–226, identified the structure leaving the top frame of the frontispiece’s composition as an obelisk, linking it to the obelisk Van Heemskerck designed for his father’s grave. However, neither Veldman nor Saunders note the wreath at the base of whatever vertical edifice is present, and its kinship to the wreath in this drawing. 38 David Cast, “Marten van Heemskerck’s Momus Criticizing the Worlds of the Gods,” 22–34. Grosshans, Die Gemälde, cat. no. 93 and Harrison, “Catalogue Raisonné,” cat. no. 91. 39 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 354. 40 Dacos, ed., Fiamminghi a Roma, 74. 41 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 93. 42 Hendrick van Cleve III, View of the Vatican Gardens and St. Peters Basilica, c. 1580, Inventory number 1307, oil on panel, 71.5 × 101 cm., Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris. 43 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 361. 44 Ibid., nos. 182 and 77, respectively. 45 Ibid., nos. 169, 31, and 342, respectively.

Deattributions

1 Van Hasselt and Blankert, Artisti Olandesi, 48. 2 Doubt is already expressed about Van Heemskerck’s authorship of the drawing in the

496 Landesmuseum’s catalog of drawings, Gisela Bergsträsser, ed., Niederländische Zeichnungen im 16. Jahrhundert: Kataloge des Hessischen Landesmuseums Darmstadt, Nr. 10 (Darmstadt: Kunst in Hessen und am Mittelrhein, 1979), 84–85. 3 See above in the present volume, 196–197. 4 E.g., Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, figs. 7 and 8. 5 Maarten van Heemskerck, The Elders Accusing Susanna of Adultery, 1562, Inventory number 667, ink on paper, 19.7 × 25.2 cm., Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth House, England. For the engraving, see Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 220. 6 Garms, Vedute di Roma, cat. no. E16. 7 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 208, 210, 366, and 442.

notes to Deattributions 8 For a list of the drawings first attributed to ‘Anonymous A,’ see Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 74. 9 Veldman, “Anonymous B,” 369–382. 10 Dacos, Roma Quanta Fuit, 89–106. 11 Alberto Carpiceci, “La Basilica Vaticana vista da Martin van Heemskerck,” Bolletino d’arte, 72 no. 44–45 (1987): 67–128. 12 For a discussion of this drawing and the Saenredam painting, see above, 18–19. 13 James Bryan Shaw, Old Master Drawings from Chatsworth: A Loan Exhibition from the Devonshire Collection (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 1969–70), figs. 87b, 41. 14 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 79D2a 52r, Hülsen and Egger, Römischen Skizzenbucher, vol. 2, 32–33.

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Index Page numbers in italics indicate where works of art appear. Adrian VI (Adriaan Florensz Boeyens) 4, 46, 87, 249 Alberti, Leon Battista 139, 219, 332 Altdorfer, Albrecht 264 Battle of Issus 264 Alva, Duke of 274–75 ‘Anonymous A’ / Hermannus Posthumus 27, 112, 114–15, 116, 123, 188, 342, 350, 423, 425, 426, 435 Maarten van Van Heemskerck and 32, 104, 154, 290, 291, 297, 317, 325, 329, 330, 330, 341, 429, 435 drawing techniques of 318 Hermannus Posthumus as 8 identification of 8 works by Foreshortened View of the Colosseum 123 Frontespizio di Nerone 187 North End of the Forum Romanum 114 Panorama of Rome from the Capitoline Hill 118 Ruins on the Palatine 28 Anonymous B 8, 11, 367, 370 Michiel Gast as 7, 96, 429, 435–38 Anonymous C 8, 425, 429–435 Antwerp 253, 416 as artistic center 7, 9, 33, 230 Blidje Incompst of 1549 230 Aux Quatre Vents and 4, 13, 232 Gate of St. George 272, 416 Aristotle 29, 183 Augsburg 250 Augustus (Gaius Octavius Thurinus) 220 Bamboccianti 284 Barbari, Jacopo de’ 41, 43, 44 Works by Mars and Venus 43, 44 Bandinelli, Baccio 92–94, 158, 207 Barkan, Leonard 30, 92 Bass, Marisa 40 beeldenstorm of 1566 (see iconoclasm) Belting, Hans 246, 256 Blaeu, Willem 284 Bondone, Giotto di 184 Bos, Cornelis 430 Bourbon, Charles Duke of Brabant 46, 253

Bramante, Donato 189, 227, 279, 365, 367, 374, 385, 432, 439 Bredekamp, Horst 268, 281 Brittenburg ruins of 32, 33, 40, 49–50, 230 Bronzino, Agnolo 260 Brown, C. Malcom 241 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 33, 225, 227, 241, 272 Brussels XI 32, 45, 46, 240, 253 Bufalini, Leonardo 292 Buonarotti, Michelangelo 1, 48, 73, 172, 249 Maarten van Heemskerck and 97, 124, 173 Works by “Bruges Madonna” 45, 255 Campidoglio 302–03, 305–06 Deluge (Sistine Chapel) 73, 172 Ignudi (Sistine Chapel) 173 Last Judgement 97 Piazza del Popolo 357 Santa Maria degli Angeli 129, 323 Terribilità of 97 Caligula 33 Caravaggio, Polidoro da 103 Works by Story of Mary Magdalene “Noli me Tangere” 104 Carpi, Rodolfo Pio da 174, 181–82 Carruthers, Mary 25 Castiglione, Baldassare 25, 140, 333 Cesi, Bartolommeo 82, 402–03 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) 5, 239–40, 247 Antwerp Blidje Incompst 33, 230 Paul III and 105, 174 Sack of Rome and 83–84 Schmalkaldic League and 261 Triumphal Procession, Rome 95, 105–07, 175, 181, 295, 320, 364, 438 Victories of Charles V 82, 83, 82–84, 247, 250–51, 284 Victory in Tunis 105, 174–75 Chastel, André 105 Chigi, Agostino 84, 87, 168 Christian, Kathleen Wren XIV 87 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 139, 183, 262

index Clement VII (Giulio de’ Giuliano de’ Medici) 83, 89, 98 death of 85 Sack of Rome and 82–84, 368, 394 Cleve, Hendrick van 116, 118, 308, 418 Codex Escurialensis 31, 112, 113, 121, 116, 125, 122, 126, 227, 327, 385, 395 Cock, Hieronymus 13, 305, 329, 330, 405, 419, 425, 437 Aux Quatre Vents and 4, 225, 228, 229, 232–42, 260, 376 Maarten van Heemskerck and 212, 227–229, 232–42, 235–39, 241, 308 works by Operum Antiquorum Romanorum 13, 33, 308,  310, 315, 361, 437 “Ancient Coffered Barrel Vault” 12, 13, 419 “Colosseum” 236, 237, 329 “Ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius and  Constantine” 225 “Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla” 236, 237,  239 “View from Palace of Septimius Severus  towards the Colosseum” 236–37, 238 Præcipua aliquot Romanae Antiquitatis Ruinarum 224–225, 235–39, 310, 425 Statue Court of the Palazzo Della-Valle Capranica 93, 405 Rome and 33, 235, 330 ruins and 33, 109, 212, 235–39 Coecke van Aelst, Pieter 32, 46, 154 Coornhert, Dirck Volkertszoon As engraver 4, 92, 204, 212, 231, 234, 266, 408 Balaam and the Angel 199 Casa Sassi Cortile and Sculpture Collection 207,  208 Dangers of Human Ambition 205, 206 Fall and Salvation of Mankind Through the Life  and Passion of Christ 196 Flight into Egypt 197 Heliodorus Driven from the Temple 234, 257,  260–61 Parable of the Unmerciful Servant “The Servant Forcing a Fellow Servant to Pay  his Debt” 202 Ruth and Boaz 193, 195, 212, 212–14, 234, 270,  299, 315, 325, 355, 380, 414 Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulchre  and Receiving Gifts from the Three Men 190 The Statue Court of the Palazzo della  Valle-Capranica 93

515 Story of Gideon 100 “Gideon Destroying the Altar of Baal” 100,  101 Story of Jonah “People of Ninevah Repenting Upon Hearing  Jonah’s Prophecies” 102 Story of Susannah “The Elders Trying to Seduce Susanna” 195 Victories of Charles V “The Death of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, and  the Capture of Rome” 82 “Pope Clement VII besieged in the Castel  Sant’Angelo, Rome” 83 exegesis and 275 Haarlem and 274 Humanism and 247, 260, 262, 275 Maarten van Heemskerck and 212, 228–29, 231–32, 234–35, 256–57, 268, 408 religious beliefs of 247, 256–57, 260–62, 268–69 Copenhagen 250 Council of Trent (see Counter-Reformation) Counter-Reformation 246–248 Council of Trent and 261, 273 Coxcie, Michiel 32, 430 Cranach, Lucas 50, 115 Cröy, Charles de 253 Dacos, Nicole 7, 8, 32, 74, 96, 343, 436 da Vinci, Leonardo 62, 110, 135, 292 Damasus I 211 Denhaene, Godelieve 230 Dente, Marco 109 Doetecum, Johannes and Lucas 13 As engravers Operum Antiquorum Romanorum “Ancient Coffered Barrel Vault” 13 “View from Palace of Septimius Severus  towards the Colosseum” 238 Ruin Landscape with the Parable of the Good  Samaritan 232, 233 Dosio, Giovan Antonio 188, 341, 352, 370 Du Pérac, Etienne 109, 114, 230, 306, 330, 343, 347, 352 Dürer, Albrecht 24, 26, 41, 43, 43, 52, 55, 72, 124, 125, 175 Works by Adam and Eve 41–2, 43 Dying Gallic Trumpeter 259 ekphrasis 174 Eighty Years War 245 Egger, Hermann 1, 2, 5, 8, 12, 138, 289, 291, 299, 374, 380, 394, 399, 400, 420, 435–36, 439

516 Enckevoirt, Willem van 87, 100 Erasmus, Desiderius 25, 248 Adages 39 De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia 139–40 sacred imagery and 248–49 St. Jerome and 211 Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (See Saint Jerome) Eyck, Jan van 15–16, 39, 41, 48, 55, 140–141, 254 exegesis 214, 275 visual 63, 264 fantasia definition of 129 Maarten van Heemskerck, and 9, 30, 33, 92, 101, 129, 169, 170, 190, 191–204 Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World) and 176, 178–81 Fauno, Lucio 231 Filippi, Elena 291 Fiorentino, Rosso 98 Firenze, Maturino da 103–04 Florence 169, 175, 223, 224 Floris, Frans 15, 17, 33, 230, 248 Folin, Marco 272, 281 Fossombrone Sketchbook 90 Francis I 174 Franckaert, Jacob 186, 381 Freedberg, David 246, 266, 267, 268, 269, 281 Freedberg, Sydney 259 Frisius, Simon 138 Fulvio, Andrea Antiquitates Vrbis 99 Raphael and 99 Gaius Octavius Thurinus (see Augustus) Galle, Philips 266, 278, 279, 283 as engraver Clades Judaeae Gentis 266 “Adoration of the Magi” 279, 366 “Adoration of the Shepherds” 238 “Destruction of Ai and the Stoning of Achan”  264–66, 265, 279 “The Drunkenness of Noah” 272, 279,  279–80, 339 “Lot and his Family Leaving Sodom” 194,  272, 278, 279, 321 “Lot Making Love to His Daughters” 195,  272, 278, 280, 313 “Noah’s Sacrifice” 272

index “Self-Portrait Frontispiece” 24, 91, 239, 263,  266, 276–78, 280, 315, 412 Eight Wonders of the World 283–84 “Amphitheatrum” 183, 282, 283, 350 “Pyramids of Egypt” 282, 283 “Temple of Diana” 324 Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle 194, 205 Fall of Babylon 271 King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord “Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth,  Chemosh, and Milcom” 267 “Destruction of the Temple of Samaria” 269 “Josiah Celebrating Passover” 270 Story of Johan (1566) “Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd” 200 Triumphs of Petrarch “Triumph of Death” 201 Gast, Michiel 7, 96, 429, 435–38 Geldenhouwer, Gerardus 41, 48–51 Geneva 250 Ghent 52, 253 Ghisi, Giorgio 234 Gijsmans, Hendrik 116 Giocondo, Fra Giovanni 45 Giotto (see Bondone, Giotto di) Goldthwaite, Richard 3 Goltzius, Hendrick Haarlem circle of 284 Het Schilder-Boeck and 16 Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawings and 20 Works by Four Disgracers 20 “Phaeton” 21 Gombrich, Ernst 182, 233, 268 Gossart, Jan (Mabuse) antiquarianism and 1, 32, 39–40, 51–52 drawing technique 135, 141–45, 154 Het Schilder-Boeck and 16–17 Maarten van Heemskerck and 23, 31, 53–56, 68, 81, 124, 143 Philip of Burgundy and 3, 39–41, 44–45 Rome and 3, 32, 37, 39–41, 50–52, 67 portratire and 219 scholarship on 15, 32 Scorel, Jan van and 51–52, 67–68 Works by Adoration of the Kings 50 Colosseum 31, 47, 49–50, 125, 143–45, 33–31 Middleburg Altarpiece 52

index Mocking of Christ 50–51 Neptune and Amphitrite 42, 40–45, 62 Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?) 53 St. Luke Portraying the Virgin 45 Groentjes, Merel 272–73 Grosshans, Rainhald 23, 52, 55, 124, 291 Gutenberg, Johannes 205 Haarlem as artistic center 204, 284, 235 Corporation of 274 “Haarlemensis” 273 Knights of St. John and 63 Maarten van Heemskerck and 1, 49, 55, 59, 280, 336, 66, 71, 140, 167, 182, 183, 188, 191, 192, 232, 250 Reform and 272, 273, 281 Saint Bavokerk 10 Scorel, Jan van and 4, 46, 55, 59, 66–68, 72, 74, 249 Haarlem, Cornelis van 10 Habsburg Dynasty (see Charles V) Hall, Marcia X, XIV, 98, 103, 246 Harrison, Jefferson 23, 53, 70, 219, 291 Hätzer, Ludwig 248 Heemskerck, Maarten van after Rome 165–287 Charles V’s Triumphal Procession and 106 Buonarotti, Michelangelo and 97 engravers of 206 in Florence 169 as keerkmeester 274 religious beliefs of 247, 256–57, 260–62, 268–69, 270 Works by Abduction of Helen (see Panorama with the  Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World) Adoration of the Shepherds (Metropolitan  Museum of Art, New York) 99 Balaam and the Angel 5, 193, 197, 199, 234,  310–10, 339, 419 Belvedere Torso 20, 21 Bullfight in an Ancient Amphitheater 193, 240,  240, 241 Caritas Triptych 252–257, 253, 408 Fides and Spes 254 Clades Judaeae Gentis “Adoration of the Magi” 279, 346, 366 “Adoration of the Shepherds” 238 “Destruction of Ai and the Stoning of Achan”  263–66, 265

517 “The Drunkenness of Noah” 272, 279, 280,  339 “Lot and his Family Leaving Sodom” 194,  272, 278, 279, 321 “Lot Making Love to His Daughters” 195,  272, 278, 280, 313 “Noah’s Sacrifice” 272 “Self-Portrait Frontispiece” 24, 91, 239, 263,  266, 276–78, 280, 315, 412 inscriptions on 277 Dangers of Human Ambition 20, 205, 206 Drapers Altarpiece 10, 17, 18, 209, 346 Eight Beatitudes “Blessed are they who do Hunger and Thirst  After Righteousness (The Presentation in the Temple)” 202, 203 Eight Wonders of the World “Amphitheatrum” 193, 283, 350 “Pyramids of Egypt” 283 Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle 194, 205 Fall and Salvation of Mankind Through the Life  and Passion of Christ “The Three Holy Women at the Sepulchre”  7, 195, 196, 402, 415 Fall of Babylon 245, 266, 270–72, 271, 364, 390,  414 Flight into Egypt 195, 197 Habakkuk Bringing Food to Daniel in the Lion’s  Den 199, 201, 203 Heliodorus Driven from the Temple 234, 252,  256, 257–62, 267, 268 Job on the Dunghill with his Wife and Three  Friends 195, 196, 341 Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd (1562) 201,  325 King Josiah Restores the Law of the Lord “Destruction of the Temple of Ashtoreth,  Chemosh, and Milcom” 266–67, 267 “Destruction of the Temple of Samaria” 269,  269 “Josiah Celebrating Passover” 269, 270 “The Removal and Destruction of the Chariot  and the Horse of the Sun” 200 Lamentation of Christ (1566) 268 Landscape with Ruins 284–86, 285 Last Judgement and the Six Works of Mercy “Feeding the Hungry” 201, 325 “Giving the Thirsty to Drink” 202 Man of Sorrows 52

518 Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the  Wonders of the World 5, 9, 15, 87, 117, 124, 167–183, 170, 186, 190, 192, 194, 209, 214–15, 219, 283, 295, 306, 352, 384, 387, 390, 392, 414, 417–19, 438 “Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins” 202 “People of Ninevah Repenting Upon Hearing  Jonah’s Prophecies” 101, 102 Portrait of a Woman with a Spinning Wheel  53–54 Rest on the Flight into Egypt 60, 61, 62–67, 75,  119, 140, 219 Roman Panorama with the Good Samaritan 268 Ruin Landscape with the Parable of the Good  Samaritan 199, 203, 232, 233, 299, 413 Ruth and Boaz 193, 195, 212, 212–14, 234, 270,  299, 315, 325, 355, 380, 414 St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape (1547) 209–212,  210 St. Jerome in a Ruin Landscape (1552) 5, 210, 212,  213 St. Lawrence Altarpiece 250–52, 251 St. Luke Portraying the Virgin (1532) 66, 66, 223 St. Luke Portraying the Virgin (c. 1545–50) 252,  256, 262, 404, 408 Samuel Anointing Saul 198, 198 Satan Smiting Job with Boils 195, 198, 339 Saul Meeting the Two Men at Rachel’s Sepulchre  and Receiving Gifts from the Three Men 190, 190 Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum IX, X, 5, 24,  27, 91, 217, 217–43, 260, 262, 327, 329 Parable of the Unmerciful Servant “The Servant Forcing a Fellow Servant to Pay  his Debt” 202 Roman Panorama with the Good Samaritan 268 Story of Gideon “Gideon Destroying the Altar of Baal” 100,  101, 168 Story of Jonah (1566) “Jonah Complaining Under the Gourd” 199,  200, 201, 390, 419 Story of Susanna “The Elders Trying to Seduce Susanna” 7,  195, 195, 402 Ten Commandments “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Susanna  Accused by the Elders)” 100, 101 Torso of a Youth from Casa Santa Croce 154, 155 Triumph of Bacchus 19, 87, 88, 168, 351, 387, 404

index Triumphs of Petrarch “Triumph of Death” 200, 201, 318 “Triumph of Pride” 194, 296 Victories of Charles V “The Death of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, and  the Capture of Rome” 82 “Pope Clement VII besieged in the Castel  Sant’Angelo, Rome” 83 Venus and Cupid 208, 382 Vulcan’s Forge 87, 88, 168 Hogenberg, Frans 266 Hondius, Hendrick 137, 284, 285, 286 Homer 209 Hülsen, Christian 1–2, 6, 8, 12, 116, 129, 138, 289, 291, 299, 323, 350, 374, 380, 399, 400, 420, 434, 435–36, 439 iconoclasm (see also image debate and Reformation) 245, 248–250, 263, 266, 268, 275 beeldenstorm of 1566 245, 248, 263 Haarlem and 274 idolatry / idol worship 64, 65, 202, 245, 247, 254–55 image debate (see also iconoclasm and Reformation and iconoclasm) 66, 206, 245–46, 248–49, 252, 254, 256–58, 262, 264, 267, 276, 280 Jacobsz, Dirck 219–20 Jan II of Wassenaer 49 Jerusalem 63, 73, 74, 116, 124, 172, 200, 258, 279, 364, 366, 419 Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere) 39, 40–41 260, 268 Junius, Hardianus 4, 282 Batavia 205, 273 Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von 248–50 Krautheimer, Richard 192 Kunzle, David 268, 281 Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin 6, 9, 11, 189, 226, 291, 352, 429, 436, 439 Lafréry, Antoine 33, 109, 231, 338 Lanciani, Rodolfo 129, 323 Landino, Cristoforo 30 Latomus, Jacobus 254 Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici) 27, 72, 98, 99, 128, 333, 357 Leuven 253 liefhebbers 7, 146, 184, 228, 255, 266 Lighthouse of Alexandria (Pharos of Alexandria) 169, 180, 282, 419

519

index Lippi, Fillipino 45 Lombard, Lambert 33, 230, 430 Louis X (Duke of Bavaria) 229 Lucas van Leyden 45, 124, 154, 219 Works by Archangel Gabriel Announcing the Birth of  Christ 141, 142 Jael and Sisera 51, 51 Luther, Martin followers of 261 image debate and 248–49 Latomus, Jacobus and 254 September Testament 115 Wittenberg Bible 261 Maarten de Vos Sketchbook (so-called) 9, 13, 180, 181, 290, 397, 415–17, 415–19 Mabuse (see Gossart, Jan) Malmstrom, Ronald 380 Mander, Karel van Gossart, Jan and 55 Grondt 19 Haarlem circle of 20 Het Schilder-Boeck 16–24, 59 Heemskerck, Maarten van and 9, 16–20, 59–62, 67, 136–38, 150, 167, 204–05, 353, 396 on iconoclasm 248 influence of 22–24, 68 landscape 17–18, 396 Melion, Walter on 17 as painter 11 Rome and 18, 209 Scorel, Jan van and 4, 37, 48, 55–56, 60–62, 66–67, 72, 74, 116 Vasari, Giorgio and 16 Works by Continence of Scipio 19–20, 20 Manetti, Latino Giovenale 87, 94 Mantegna, Andrea 26 Margaret of Parma 175, 181, 230 Marliani, Batholomeo 100, 230 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) 131 Massaio, Pietro del 117 Master of the Good Samaritan 71 Master of Oxford 228 Mazzola, Girolamo Francesco Maria (see Parmigianino) McGowan, Margaret 217 Medici, Alessandro de’ 175 Melion, Walter XIII 16, 17

Memory antiquity and 3, 4, 14, 24, 41, 45, 75, 95 Aristotle and 29 Carruthers, Mary and 25 Cicero and 139, 183, 262 collecting and 86–94, 170, 173 cultural 27, 81, 86–87, 91–92, 164 drawings as 25–26, 181 knowledge as 1, 3, 6, 7, 25, 29, 45, 75, 79, 187 imagination and 172 imagines and 25, 183–84 loci and 25, 91, 128, 184, 276 Maarten van Heemskerck and 1, 3, 5, 24–29, 41 mnemotechnics 24, 128 temporality and 24 pictorial 5, 6, 56, 75, 100, 116, 187 play and 215 of Rome 85, 109 Rosand, David on 25 topography as 127, 128–133 ruins and 2–3, 4, 24–26, 28–29, 94, 99 Yates, Frances on 25, 184, 252 Mensger, Ariane 45 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 99 Michelangelo (see Buonarotti, Michelangelo) Mirabilia Vrbis Romae 214–15 Moorsel 253 Mor, Anthonis 229–30 Muller, Harmen Janszoon As engraver The Eight Beatitudes “Blessed are they who do Hunger and Thirst  After Righteousness (The Presentation in the Temple)” 203 The Ten Commandments “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Susanna  Accused by the Elders)” 101 Münster 250 Nagel, Alexander 26–27 Natoire, Charles Joseph 123–24 Nicholas IV (Girolamo Masci) 380 Nolli, Giambattista 292 Novellanus, Simon 227 Noyen, Sebastian van 240 Old Testament 245, 272 Achan 263–64, 266 Ai 263–65 Elisha Receiving Elijah’s Mantle 193, 194, 205, 301

520

exegesis 214, 264, 275–76 Heliodorus 99, 234, 252, 257, 257, 259 Jael and Sisera 51 Joshua 264–65 King Josiah 200, 245, 266–69 Maccabees 257, 261 Noah 272, 279, 280, 369 Onias 258–59 Ruth and Boaz 193, 195, 212–214, 212, 234, 270, 299, 315, 325, 355, 390, 414 Seleucus IV Philopator (King Seleucus) 258 Septuagint and 261

Orley, Bernard van 45, 46, 154 works by Thomas and Matthias Altarpiece 46 Ottoman Empire 84–85, 94, 105, 174–74 Oudenaarde 175 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 95 paragone 41, 97, 252 Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola)  98, 362 Patinir, Joachim 64, 175 Paul III (Alessandro Farnese) Augsburg Interim and 261 Forum Romanum and 295, 320 Charles V and 105 election of 85 Rome and 86, 94–98, 371 Peruzzi, Baldassare 168, 202 inventions all’antica 31, 100, 103 Enckevoirt, Willem van and 87 Maarten van Heemskerck and 79, 87, 92, 100, 117 San Silvestro al Quirinale 103 Works by Sala delle Prospettive 84, 100–01, 117, 168, 202 Theatrical Perspective with the Symbolic  Monuments of Rome 92, 94 Perrenot, Antoine 5, 9, 228–30, 239–42 Pharos of Alexandria (see Lighthouse of Alexandria) Philip II of Burgundy 3, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52 Philip II of Spain 5, 33, 229, 230, 239, 247 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 11, 123, 333 Pius IV 273, 371 Plato 183 Posthumus, Hermannus (see also Anoymous A / Hermannus Posthumus) as “Anonymous A” 8

index Maarten van Van Heemskerck and 8, 31, 32, 104, 116, 154, 229, 290, 291, 297, 317, 325, 329, 330, 330, 341, 429, 435, 439 Triumphal Procession of Charles V and 106 Works by Tempus Edax Rerum 95–96, 95, 224 Preti, Monica 272, 281 Raimondi, Marcantonio 98 Raphael (see Sanzio, Raphael) rederijkers 14 Reformation (see also image debate and iconoclasm)  245–263 apocrypha debate 262 art and 84, 247, 249, 252 Counter-Reformation and 246 Haarlem and 273–74, 280 Martin Luther and 249 Rome and 50, 84, 261, 268, 272 Schmalkaldic League and 261 relief-like style 98, 251–52 Reiss, Sheryl 249 Rembrandt 33, 284 Ripanda, Jacopo 227 Romano, Giulio 98, 252 Works by Sala di Costantino (see Sansio, Raphael; works by;  Sala di Costantino) Riggs, Timothy 239 Rome Archeology in 12, 30, 82, 95, 97, 99, 105, 109, 182, 220, 310, 341, 414 Buildings in Baths of Caracalla 20, 189, 190, 236, 346, 355,  375–77, 237 Baths of Diocletian 123, 129, 150, 189, 240, 323,  345–46 Baths of Trajan 121, 325 Belvedere 41, 127, 367, 371, 372–74, 420 Casa Sassi 81, 89, 207, 208, 255–56 407–08 Castel Sant’Angelo 82–83, 84 394–95, 429 Colosseum IX, 5, 12, 24, 27, 31, 41, 47, 48–51, 88,  96, 97, 112, 120–23, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129–31, 136, 141, 143–145, 148, 150, 153, 156, 177–78, 187, 193, 200, 205–06, 209, 211, 218, 224, 226–27, 228, 232, 236, 237, 241, 242, 262, 283–84, 289, 290, 300, 301, 307, 308, 310, 312, 322–35, 342, 343, 376, 391, 412, 420, 422, 423, 423–425, 434, 434, 435 Domus Aurea 32, 45, 74, 96, 103

index Frontespizio di Nerone 131, 150, 187, 188, 195,  209, 289, 292, 294, 295, 340–344 Meta Romuli 179 Muro Torto 159, 356–57 Ospedale di Santo Spirito 394, 395 Palace of Septimius Severus 188, 195, 238, 307,  313, 317, 392, 422 Palazzo Cesi in Borgo 82, 90, 92, 402 Palazzo Conservatori 302–05 Palazzo della Cancelleria (Palazzo Riario) 90 Palazzo della Valle 92, 93, 403–06 Palazzo Medici (Palazzo Madama) 90, 148, 224,  398–400, 406, 415 Palazzo Riario (see Palazzo della Cancelleria) Palazzo Senatori 151, 294, 300, 302–05, 320, 395,  421 Pantheon 19, 159, 178, 200, 202, 231, 264, 279,  289, 304, 358–59, 390 394 Ponte Sant ‘Angelo 394 Ponte Fabriccio (Pons Fabricus) 177, 178, 190,  390 Porta Maggior 160, 208, 289, 301, 381, 383, 396 Porta San Pancrazio 115, 391 Porticus Octaviae 150, 188, 289, 349–51 San Giorgio in Velabro 151, 186, 214, 351–54, 355 San Giovanni in Laterano 372, 378–80 San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure 159, 348 San Lorenzo in Miranda 107, 294 San Silvestro al Quirinale 74, 103 San Teodoro 103–04, 297–99, 352, 392 Sant’Agostino 169, 390 394, 395 Sant’Adriano 294, 301 Santa Cecelia in Trastevere 188, 340 Santa Costanza 95 Santa Maria in Aracoeli 294, 295, 300–01, 302,  303, 320, 421, 430, 432, 432–433 Santa Maria del Popolo 98, 189, 356–57 Santa Maria della Febbre 10–11, 96, 126, 200,  364–67, 369–70, 437 Santa Maria Sopra Minerva 45 Santa Sabina 131, 299 Ss. Sergio e Bacco 107, 294, 296–97, 320, 421 Santo Stefano Rotondo 20, 279, 375–76 380, 392 St. Peter’s 13, 19, 26, 28, 84, 89, 98, 112, 115,  126–27, 136, 150, 154, 185, 189, 232, 259, 289, 297, 363–70, 377, 390, 393, 397, 414, 418, 425, 428, 431–32, 436–39 Septizonium 9, 28, 112, 130, 147, 150, 187, 193, 214,  217–18, 289, 292, 309, 310, 314–15, 334–337, 342, 355, 390, 392

521 Tabularium 107, 114, 146, 151, 294, 296–97, 320,  321, 421 Temple of Castor (Temple of Castor and Pollux;  Temple of the Dioscuri) 103, 111, 115, 146, 179, 214, 295, 297–99, 320–21, 421–22 Temple of Divus Claudius 129, 323 Temple of Hercules Victor 178, 353, 390 Temple of Minerva 196, 280, 294, 338–39, 430 Temple of Minerva Medica (so-called) 159, 186,  208, 381, 383, 460 Temple of Saturn 113, 114, 209, 294, 320, 421 Temple of Vespasian 113, 115 121, 154, 179, 294,  320–21, 421 Templum Serapidis (see Frontespizio di Nerone) Villa Farnesina 84, 100–01, 117 Villa Madama 7, 90, 92, 98, 137, 147, 157, 195,  240, 290, 316, 388, 395, 401, 403 Villa Celimontana 303 Founding of 180 Locations in and near Apennine Mountains 176, 391 Aventine Hill 115, 116, 117, 151, 176, 177, 178,  190, 271, 298, 299, 301, 384, 389, 392, 414 Banchi 360–63 Borgo 73, 289, 360–63, 393, 402 Capitoline Hill 10, 40, 89, 104, 106, 107, 115–16,  121, 131, 151, 179, 300–307, 390, 421, 432, 434 Esquiline Hill 116 Forum Boarium 186, 286, 299, 351–56 Forum Nervae 8, 121, 131, 147, 150, 158, 195, 198,  280, 289, 294, 313, 338–39, 343, 355, 414, 425, 430 Forum Romaum 8, 9, 97, 103–04, 105–107,  110–11, 113–15, 121–22, 131, 136, 143, 145, 153–54, 179, 186, 209, 214, 287, 290, 293–299, 320–21, 325, 329, 352, 343, 390, 392, 397, 420, 435, 439 Janiculum Hill 115, 117, 176–77, 303, 385, 390,  391, 395, 425 Monte Mario 115, 290, 371, 374, 394–95 Monte Testaccio 177, 381, 384–85, 392 Palatine Hill 12, 27, 28, 69, 97, 107, 111, 113, 115,  121, 130–31, 137, 142, 144, 147–48, 151, 167, 177, 189, 193, 200, 202, 214, 236,238, 280, 293–94, 298,307–18, 321, 335, 341–42, 352,355, 390, 392, 414, 418, 419, 420–22 Piazza del Popolo 85, 98, 159, 189, 289, 356–57 Piazza San Marco 105 Quirinal Hill 10, 106, 115, 188, 289, 294, 340–48,  421, 422 Ripa Grande 271, 389–90, 414

522 Tiber River 271, 289, 304, 305, 351, 353, 388, 390, 394, 426 Tivoli 88, 290, 386 Via Sacra 106, 325 Monuments in Apollo Belvedere 43 Arch of Constantine 87, 120, 122, 122, 125, 130,  131, 149–50, 187, 194, 289, 308, 322–23, 324, 330, 331–35, 343, 387 Arch of Janus 178, 179, 186, 189–90, 351–53 Arch of Septimius Severus 194, 195, 294,  296–97, 301, 320, 323, 421, 422 Arch of Titus 19, 107, 110, 121, 136, 151, 153, 178,  194, 279, 289, 301, 319–321, 329, 435 Arco Argentari 150, 214, 351–52, 354–55 Capitoline Obelisk 179, 294, 300–03, 305, 320,  421, 432 Casa Sassi Apollo 89, 207, 208, 255, 408 Chigi Chapel 98, 357 Column of Marcus Aurelius 111, 178, 186, 271,  294, 390, 394, 395, 421 Column of Trajan Equestrian of Marcus Aurelius 303, 378–79 Laocoön and his Sons 83, 259 Pyramid of Cestius 131, 177, 179, 282, 289, 384 Trofei di Mario 28, 152, 160, 179, 289, 292,  294–95, 312, 347, 370, 421 Vatican Obelisk 286, 357, 369–70, 437 Sack of 79, 81–107, 173, 241, 280, 362, 368, 394 Rosselli, Francesco 223, 224 Rubenstein, Ruth Olitsky 95 ruins (see also memory, ruins and) “cult” of 29–35 ruiscapes 33, 75, 183, 205, 211, 235, 286 Saenredam, Pieter 10, 11, 284 Saint Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus) 5, 209, 211–14, 232, 241 Saint Paul (Saul of Tarsus) 254 Salamanca Antonio 33, 231, 109 Salviati, Francesco 31, 79, 100, 103–04 Works by Seated Youth 154, 155 Sanzio, Raphael 1, 30, 97–105, 48, 56, 67, 79, 81, 82, 87, 88, 235, 260 Dürer, Albrecht and 72 Legacy of 97, 103–04 letter to Leo X 27, 99, 128, 352 tapestry and 45

index Works by Baptism of Constantine 106 Chigi Chapel 357 Disputá 227 Donation of Rome 99, 260 Expulsion of Heliodorus 99, 234, 257–60, 262, 267, 269 Fire in the Borgo 73 Galatea 89, 186 Palazzo Branconio d’all Acquila 157, 269, 362 Sala di Constantino 72–4, 98, 106, 252 School of Athens 218, 227, 259 workshop of 72, 73, 98, 153–54, 173 Saul of Tarsus (see Saint Paul) Saunders, Eleanor 272–73, 277, 281 Schedel, Hartmann 115 Weltchronik (Liber Cronicarum) “Destruction of Babylon” 271 Schwartz, Michael 258–59 Scorel, Jan van Attributed to Portrait of a Humanist 220, 222 biography of 17, 48 Circle of Portrait of Anabaptist David Joris 220, 221 Gossart, Jan and 3, 49, 52, 54 In Jerusalem 116 In Rome 32, 47–48, 54–55, 67, 71–76, 81, 87, 249 Maarten van Heemskerck and 4, 17, 22, 23, 31, 37, 48, 51, 67–71 scholarship on 15 Works by Adoration of the Three Kings 67, 70 Bethlehem 32, 69, 69, 113, 145, 295 Entry into Jerusalem (Central Panel of Lokhorst  Triptych) 73, 73, 116, 124, 172 Landscape with the Drowning of the Pharaoh’s  Army in the Red Sea Landscape with Tobias and the Angel Mary Magdalen 60–63, 61 Mountain Landscape with a Bridge Spanning a  Ravine (the Sainte Baume) 62–63, 63 Portrait of a Man 69, 220, 220 Tower of Babel 72, 74, 84, 75, 180, 419 workshop of 4, 22–23, 52, 55, 59–78 Scrovegni, Enrico 185 Serlio, Sebastiano 27, 31, 100, 102, 103, 113, 230, 332 Scena Tragica 102, 103

523

index Socrates 183 Solis, Virgil 226 Speculum Humanae Salvationis 275 Stinger, Charles 98 Stritt, Martin 15, 170 Sustris, Lambert 91, 229, 343 Works by Landscape with Classical Ruins and Women Bathing 231, 231 Temple of Jerusalem 200, 258, 262, 279 Thiry, Leonard 33–34, 224, 226, 230 Thoenes, Christoph 84, 98, 128 Tournai 253 Troy 181 Turner, Richard 103

Valle, Andrea della 89, 92 sculpture collection of 93, 161, 403–06, 403, 405 Vasari, Giorgio 16, 17, 19, 31, 79, 92, 103, 104, 106 In Rome 99–100 Vatican (see Papacy) Velasquez, Diego 242 Veldman, Ilja XIII, 7, 8, 11, 15, 67, 96, 100, 139, 161, 191–92, 204, 277, 291, 436, 438 Vellert, Dirck 45 Veneziano, Agostino 207 Vitruvius 45 Wittenberg 248 Wolgemut, Michael 26 Wood, Christopher 26 Wouk, Edward XIV 230

Uberti, Luciano degli 223, 224

Yates, Frances 25, 184, 252

Vaga, Perino del 98 Valkenborch, Lucas 429

Zuren, Jan van 274 Zurich 248 Zwingli, Ulrich 248