Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500-1700 9789048542987

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Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700

Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Dr. Allison Levy, an art historian, has written and/or edited three scholarly books, and she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, from the N ­ ational Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library of Harvard ­University, the Whiting Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. www.allisonlevy.com.

Women Artists and Patrons in the ­Netherlands, 1500–1700 edited by Elizabeth Sutton

Amsterdan University Press

Cover illustration: Portrait of a Woman, probably a Self Portrait, Catharina van Hemessen, 1548. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Newgen/Konvertus 978 94 6372 140 0 isbn e-isbn 978 90 4854 298 7 doi 10.5117/9789463721400 nur 685 © E. Sutton / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Table of Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements11 1. Introduction: An Historiographical Perspective on Women Making Netherlandish Art History Elizabeth Sutton

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2. Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait: The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette Céline Talon

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3. By Candlelight: Uncovering Early Modern Women’s Creative Uses of Night Nicole Elizabeth Cook

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4. In Living Memory: Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch Saskia Beranek

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5. Louise Hollandine and the Art of Arachnean Critique Lindsay Ann Reid

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6. Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking Amy Reed Frederick

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7. Towards an Understanding of Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx157 Arthur J. DiFuria Index179

List of Illustrations Figures Figure 2.1. Catharina Van Hemessen, Self-Portrait, 1548, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, oil on panel, 32.2 cm x 25.2 cm. Figure 2.2. Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Self-Portrait, 1547, Herzog Anton UlrichMuseum, Braunschweig, oil on panel, 35 cm x 24.5 cm. Figure 2.3. Maerten Van Heemskerck, Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, c.1550, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, oil on panel, 206 cm x 144 cm. Figure 2.4. Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait, c.1556, Museum Zamek, Lancut, oil on canvas, 66 cm x 57 cm. Figure 3.1. Judith Leyster, A Game of Tric-Trac, about 1630. Oil on panel. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, 1983.58 (Gift of Robert and Mary S. Cushman). © Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, USA / Bridgeman Images Figure 3.2. Judith Leyster, Man Offering Money to a Young Woman, 1631. Oil on wood panel, 30.8 x 24.2 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague, inv. no. 564. © Mauritshuis, The Hague Figure 3.3. Judith Leyster, A Woman Sewing, 1633. Current location unknown, previously Collection Guy Stein, Paris, in 1937. Figure 3.4. Gesina ter Borch, A Man Courting a Lady (Heer die een dame het hof maakt), 1658–59. Ink and brush on paper, 313 x 204mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, BI-1890–1952–94(R). © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Figure 3.5. Gesina ter Borch, A Couple Strolling by Moonlight (Wandelend paar bij maanlicht), in or after circa 1654 ‒ in or before circa1659. Ink and brush on paper, d 125mm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, BI-1887–1463–52A. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Figure 3.6. Gesina ter Borch, Night-piece: Couple walking behind a woman with a lantern (Nachtstuk: echtpaar lopend achter een vrouw met een lantaarn, van achteren), circa 1655. Ink and brush on paper, 71 x 98mm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-T-1887-A-1329. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Figure 3.7. Gesina ter Borch, Night: A Couple Walking Behind a Woman with a Lantern, c. 1655. Ink on paper,165 x 212mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-T-00–60. Figure 4.1. Jan van der Heyden, Huis ten Bosch, View of the Garden Façade. Ca. 1668. Oil on Wood, 39.1 cm x 55.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 64.65.2. Figure 4.2. Jan Matthys and Pieter Post, Title page of De Sael van Orange, ghebouwt by haere Hooch. Amalie princesse dovariere van Orange etc. 1655. etching/ book illustration, 29.4 cm x 18.8 cm. Collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-1905–6627

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Figure 4.3. Jan Matthys after Pieter Post., Floor plan of main (second) floor of Huis ten Bosch. From De Sael van Oranje, ghebouwt bij haere Hoocht. Amalie Princesse Douariere van Oranje etc., 1655. Etching, 345mm × 396mm. Collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. RP-P-AO-12–96–4 Figure 4.4. Willem Buytewech, Title page to Merckt de Wysheit vermaert vant Hollantsche huyshouwen en siet des luypaerts aert die niet is te vertrouwen. 1615. Etching with engraved text, 137mm × 176mm. Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam. BI-B-FM-053 Figure 4.5. Jan Matthys after Pieter Post. Algemeene Grond van de Sael van Orange, met haere omstaende Timmeragie, Hoven, Plantagie, etc. 1655. Etching, 295mm × 380mm. Collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-AO-12–96–2 Figure 4.6. Gerard van Honthorst. Allegory on the Marriage of Amalia van Solms and Frederik Hendrik. 1648–1650. Oil on Canvas, 300 x 750 cm. Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch, The Hague. photograph: Margareta Svensson. Figure 5.1. Louise Hollandine, Self Portrait, c. 1640–1655, oil on panel, Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague. Figure 5.2. Louise Hollandine, Self Portrait of Louise Hollandine Palatine as Benedictine Nun, c. 1659–1709, oil on canvas, Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague. Figure 5.3. Louise Hollandine, Portrait of Three Women as the Daughters of Cecrops Finding the Serpent-shaped Erichthonius, c.1635–1709, oil on canvas, Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague. Figure 5.4. Mary Hotchkiss after Louise Hollandine, Called the Prince of Denmark and Elizabeth, Viscountess Mordaunt, as Vertumnus and Pomona, but more probably Henry, 1st Viscount Mordaunt and Miss Taylor, oil on canvas, © National Trust / Peter Muhly. Figure 5.5. Hendrik Jacobus Scholten, Gerard van Honthorst Showing the Drawings of His Pupil Louise of Bohemia to Amalia van Solms, 1854, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 5.6. Gerard van Honthorst, Meleager and Atalanta. c. 1625–1655, chalk drawing, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 6.1. Magdalena de Passe (?) or Willem van de Passe (?), after Hans Holbein the Younger (?), Iana Graya from Heroologia Anglica. 1620. Engraving, 15.7 cm. x 11.3 cm. British Museum, Museum no. 2006, U.776. Figure 6.2. Designed by Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, The Workshop of an Engraver (Sculpture in Aes), plate 19 from Nova Reperta. ca. 1600. Engraving, 20.2 x 27.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 53.600.1823. Figure 6.3. Magdalena de Passe after Adam Elsheimer, Apollo and Coronis. ca. 1623. Engraving. 21.2 cm. x 23 cm. British Museum, Museum no. S.7458.

List of Illustrations

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Figure 7.1. Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Ces Moeurs et fachones de faire de Turcz I, 1553, 30 x 45.9 cm, ink on paper, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Object Number RP-P-OB-2304K) Figure 7.2. Johannes Wiericx, Portrait of Volcxken Diericx, 1579, 15.9 x 12.4 cm, ink on paper, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-OB-67.071). Figure 7.3. Unknown Artist, Portrait of Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Mayken Verhulst, c. 1550, oil on panel, 50.5 x 59 cm, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Figure 7.4. Quentin Massys, The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514, oil on panel, 70 x 67 cm, Louvre, Paris, Inv. no. 1444. Figure 7.5. Johannes or Lucas van Doetechum after Hans Vredeman de Vries, Street with the Print Shop Aux Quatre Vents, 1563, ink on paper, 21.1 x 25.9 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmusum (Object Number BI-1897-A-972–3).

Color Plates Plate 1. Plate 2. Plate 3. Plate 4. Plate 5. Plate 6. Plate 7.

Plate 8.

Catharina Van Hemessen, Self-Portrait, 1548, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, oil on panel, 32.2 cm x 25.2 cm. Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Self-Portrait, 1547, Herzog Anton UlrichMuseum, Braunschweig, oil on panel, 35 cm x 24.5 cm. Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait, c.1556, Museum Zamek, Lancut, oil on canvas, 66 cm x 57 cm. Judith Leyster, A Game of Tric-Trac, about 1630. Oil on panel. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, 1983.58 (Gift of Robert and Mary S. Cushman). © Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, USA / Bridgeman Images Jan van der Heyden, Huis ten Bosch, View of the Garden Façade. Ca. 1668. Oil on Wood, 39.1 cm x 55.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 64.65.2. Gerard van Honthorst. Allegory on the Marriage of Amalia van Solms and Frederik Hendrik. 1648–1650. Oil on Canvas, 300 x 750 cm. Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch, The Hague. photograph: Margareta Svensson. Mary Hotchkiss after Louise Hollandine, Called the Prince of Denmark and Elizabeth, Viscountess Mordaunt, as Vertumnus and Pomona, but more probably Henry, 1st Viscount Mordaunt and Miss Taylor, oil on canvas, © National Trust / Peter Muhly. Hendrik Jacobus Scholten, Gerard van Honthorst Showing the Drawings of His Pupil Louise of Bohemia to Amalia van Solms, 1854, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Acknowledgements This was my first foray into editing a volume of essays. I had heard that editing is more crazy-making than the process of publishing single-author scholarship. However, I have found that rather than feeling as though I were herding cats, editing the essays for this volume has reinforced my belief in the benefits of collaboration. So many people contribute to any published scholarly work; here most of those people, at least, get recognition as authors! First, I wish to express gratitude and acknowledgement to the hard work of the authors who contribute their scholarship here. It has been a pleasure working with you. I am so happy to bring this book to fruition. Second, thank you to Erika Gaffney, editor at Amsterdam University Press. Erika helped me usher in my very first book – my revised dissertation – and has long been a supporter of ambitious projects. Now, as a more experienced writer, I can say that Erika is the best editor with whom I ever have worked. She is prompt, helpful, and supportive. Thank you, Erika! I also want to acknowledge my father, who, as he often does, helped lightly edit my own writing and provided a Latin translation. And many thanks to Noah Doely for converting images to grey scale promptly and with pleasure! As always, many eyes have tried to catch mistakes, but no work is perfect, even as we all do our best.

1. Introduction An Historiographical Perspective on Women Making Netherlandish Art History

Elizabeth Sutton Abstract The introductory essay suggests that Netherlandish art historians need to explicitly utilize feminist theory in scholarship and pedagogy in order to relate content that is temporally and culturally distant to contemporary audiences. Keywords: feminism; feminist historiography; collaborative art history; Netherlandish art; feminist pedagogy

The idea for this volume originated in the Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) affiliated session at the Southeast College Art Conference (SECAC), “Women Artists and Feminist Historiography in and of the Netherlands” held in Columbus, Ohio in October, 2017. Four panelists presented themes related to under-recognized women artists working in the Netherlands circa 1600. The papers shared a common theme of each woman’s prominence during her own time and their subsequent historiographical neglect. The speakers all expressed frustration over the continued promotion of male artists and their work in publications and curricula, the conventional narrative of the myth of the male genius artist and concomitant erasures of women’s contributions and experiences that Linda Nochlin revealed as a function of systemic discrimination over forty years ago.

Collaborative Knowledge-Making As we learn when we come together at conferences, sharing knowledge through collaboration and inclusion is empowering. We learn, grow, and are enriched by difference of thought and manner. As a collection of essays, this volume is a collaboration of a kind – albeit still within the structures of the institutions of academia and publishing. I hope that it serves as a touchstone for future action towards structural change not only in scholarship, Netherlandish art history, and art history as a

Sutton, E. (ed.), Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, Amsterdam University Press 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789463721400_ch01

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WOMEN ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN THE NETHERL ANDS, 1500–1700

discipline, but also in the institutions that support it. While perhaps not radical, all the contributions here are important as we continue to deconstruct and reconstruct a foundation for inquiry. Despite the presence of many female artists and art historians (my own institution boasts eighty percent women undergraduate art majors, and this is hardly an anomaly), the topics of research, courses, and methodologies employed continue to follow canonical (male) artists and the institutionalized norms of valuation, in biographies and monographs. The exhibition devoted to Clara Peeters in 2016 was the Prado’s first ever exhibition devoted to a female artist. Although recently there have been multiple shows and interest surrounding the life and work of Maria Sibylla Merian, and in 2018, the Rubenshuis ran an exhibition on Michaelina Woutier, it is both shocking and striking that the recent Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century contains no category on feminism and Netherlandish art history, and worse, not a single work by a female Dutch artist (although Linda Stone-Ferrier does make mention of feminist contributions in her overview of Dutch genre painting).1 As I write this introduction, Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) has distributed a call for papers for its session at College Art Association 2019 conference under the theme “The Female Impact: Women and the Art Market in the Early Modern Era.” These contributions are important; but they are also not enough. They are, in a word, safe. Lisa Tickner wrote in 1988: feminist art history […] cannot stay art history: first because the c­ onventional premises of the discipline destroy its potential for radical readings; second because ­feminism has to be intersectional and interdisciplinary (since it questions the s­ tructure and indeterminations of existing fields of knowledge it cannot remain simply a new perspective in any of them); and third, because feminism is politically motivated – it examines new tools for their use-value, not for their novelty.2 (emphasis added)

As historians of Netherlandish art, we need to examine more closely – and be honest about – the structures around which this subfield of art history continues to re-invent itself, to reveal the ideologies we are each reproducing to reinforce that structure. Feminism encourages a multiplicity of voices, collaboration, and caring in the variety of ways humans create knowledge and interpret the world.3 Yet these are the very aspects of knowledge-making that are rarely legitimated in doing traditional western art history. We must make history live by finding the threads that tie together these 1 Franits, ed. The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century. 2 Tickner, “Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference,” 94. 3 Broude and Garrard confirm: ‘“Essential to the practice of a feminist art history […] is the postmodernist recognition that works of art can never have a singular meaning at all times […] they become objects of contending and overlapping interpretations.” The Expanding Discourse, 21.

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temporal and cultural spaces. Art, indeed, can do that, as can the ways we think and talk about it together. As scholars and educators, we can talk about our experiences and create openings and invitations for our students and readers to our scholarship and with our own stories, and by elevating the stories of others. This is collaborative and inclusive, and takes conscious and continuous effort. This is a call not only to change which artists are included in surveys and conferences but to be explicit in drawing parallels to the present and modeling for students and colleagues how to do the same. Authors in this volume highlight women from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries and the Southern and Northern Netherlands. They also draw attention to issues of class and accessibility to resources. Catharina van Hemessen (1528-c. 1565), Magdalena van den Passe (1600–1638), and Gesina ter Borch were privileged to be born into artistic families. Leyster and the princesses Amalia van Solms (1602–1675) and Louise Hollandine (1622–1709) had the means to learn art outside the family workshop. Mayken Verhulst (1518–1599) and Volcxken Diericx (active 1570–1600), like the other women, collaborated with their families to find success, and continued that success after their husbands died. Van Solms couched her self-expression in the building of what at first appears to be a mausoleum for her dead husband. Many of these women gave up making to assist their family in other ways – more often than not in the elevation of their respective husband’s work by managing the household as family business. Popular imagery served to connect women’s work, as we see, for example, in Gesina ter Borch’s watercolors influenced by nocturnal printed reproductions by Magdalena de Passe and others. Although little is known specifically about early modern women’s consumption of prints, news broadsides, or news-printed-on night caps (like those by De Passe), we do know that women of merchant and elite status – women artists and patrons – in the Dutch Republic were highly literate and purchased various-sized books and prints, just as their male counterparts did. So-called material, popular, or “visual culture,” was perhaps, as in the nineteenth century, important (and now too often overlooked) for a particularly female model of information-sharing.4 Additional contemporary parallels can be drawn. Nicole Cook particularly notes the parallel of women using the night both to complete the extra labor required of most women in patriarchal capitalism and to find individual freedom for creativity and introspection. Working at night is something many women still are obliged to do. Balancing work and personal life in this product and growth-oriented economy is not easy, as many have pointed out. Domestic labor and other labor in the care economy (labor done by teachers, social workers, counselors, nurses) continues to 4 There were many periodicals published by women within the male-dominated Arts and Crafts movement. See Zipf, Professional Pursuits, 12. See also the consumption by women of chromolithographs in nineteenthcentury United States in Kinsey, Thomas Moran’s West, 8.

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be devalued, and is largely taken up by women. The burdens of caretaking – whether paid or not – often are carried by women. Privilege operates on multiple levels – some women are domestic helpers, or the parent who makes the lunches, does the grocery shopping and laundry, cleans, and pays the bills – while others cannot afford help and have even less time to create.5 In the early modern period, like today, women not born into artistic families or families with means would have neither time nor resources to develop art skills – they would be the additional domestic labor for more well-off women, even as the well-off women were the caretakers of their men and children. Feminist scholarship will be political because it necessarily addresses systems of power and its reproduction. Institutions and individuals reproduce power in multiple ways: approved research topics, methodologies, and corresponding curricula, exhibitions, publications, and pedagogy. As Griselda Pollock has identified, by pretending economic interests, institutional politics, and personal assumptions and privileges are not part of scholarship, a hierarchical dichotomy is set up between “political” (illegitimate) and “scientific” (legitimate) research and knowledge.6 Indeed, this is what we see in current trends towards neuroscience and art history, quantitative analyses of data sets (often economically oriented), focus on materiality, and so on, situating theoretical frames of class, ethnicity, gender (aka identity politics), as “adversarial.” 7 The “Whither Art History” series in the Art Bulletin published in 2014–15 sought to address a “crisis” of disciplinary identity, inclusion, and method, a crisis fraught with the political weight of the reality of living in a globalized world with rampant inequality. Forays into postcolonial scholarship in Dutch art history by Rebecca Brienen, Julie Hochstrasser, and Dawn Odell imply the intersections of race, class, and gender, and sometimes explicitly engage with these issues.8 Multiplicity does not precipitate a crisis, it presents opportunities for re-evaluation. The nature of knowledge and its 5 See especially Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics. 6 “If we quarantine certain kinds of art historical project as a priori political, then others can claim a different cover – science – for what is, from the former position, as ideologically framed as their own. Being ideologically framed, subject to beliefs and disciplinary protocols does not mean that genuine knowledge is not produced; it merely reminds us that there are always limits and pressures.” Pollock, “Unexpected Turns,” 26. 7 I write in solidarity with Griselda Pollock, who wrote in a 2012 article for The Journal of Art Historiography about the “adversarial turn” in art history, and with the other authors in the “Whither Art History” series. Pollock, “Unexpected Turns: The Aesthetic, the Pathetic and the Adversarial in the Long Durée of Art’s Histories,” 1–32; Pollock, “Whither Art History?” 9–23; Mukherji, “Whither Art History in a Globalizing World,” 153; Mattos, “Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History,” 259–264. 8 For example, Hochstrasser fruitfully used phenomenology to integrate historical memory and contemporary global injustice through her presentation of forts on Banda (and included videos in so doing), in her contribution to Kettering’s retirement festschrift. The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA), following inroads in digital collaborative and accessible website and archives by Dutch institutions, is currently sponsoring such scholarship through its online journal, JHNA, and digital projects. Hochstrasser, “The Bones in Banda: Vision, Art, and Memory in Maluku.”

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relation to power, class, and wealth affected what was – and continues to be – consumed, whether popular cheap broadsides and illustrated quartos or lush scholarly treatises.9 As Art DiFuria asserts in this volume: “Although history writing itself may not be the prime mover of historical events, its content – not to mention its gaps – does indeed exert a considerable force on subsequent historical works. It thus determines the formulation, perpetuation, and reformulation of consciousness, which in turn does indeed spark cultural productions.” Productions which, I would add, are subsequently noticed and valued or diminished across and in time. Here is a related issue: that of the often implicit reproduction of valuations of media, often also still associated with gender. Amy Frederick elucidates this further in her essay here on Magdalena van de Passe’s reproductive prints. In 2002, Elizabeth Honig rightly noted that women working in the early modern Netherlands mostly worked in a space between amateur and professional, as Frederick’s and Nicole Cook’s essays elaborate, and that this space allowed them to explore a variety of media and be, perhaps, more creative and innovative than in a specialized market niche that professionalism required. The range of media – from needlework, paper cutting, watercolor, pastel and chalks, and prints on textiles – includes mostly media that the institutionalization and professionalization of art and art history have relegated as amateur and craft (or, visual culture, that which is “popular”). Concurrent with the denigration of femininity (and non-white/western), such art has largely been overlooked, with notable exceptions such as the work on Joanna Koerten by Martha Peacock and the foray into color and gender in seventeenth-century art theory by Thijs Weststeijn.10 Art history continues to privilege painting, sculpture, or prints; to wit, the divide between “visual culture” and art history is perhaps an indication of art history’s continued attempt to create boundaries that distinguish “Art History” as the superior discipline.11 But women did not have the same opportunities that men did to ensure either the endurance of their work or their reputations over time.12 As many feminists have pointed out, the separation of art and craft was institutionalized during the nineteenth century because of the need by (white) men to retain dominion over who makes and what constitutes “fine” art and was concomitant with the construction of and power over “legitimate” knowledge: who was considered to have the capacity for rational intellect.

9 See especially Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa, and Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age; see also Dackerman, et al., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, and De Jongh and Luijten, The Mirror of Everyday Life. 10 Hofrichter, Judith Leyster; Peacock, “Paper as Power: Carving a Niche for the Female Artist in the Work of Joanna Koerten;” Weststeijn, “The Gender of Colors in Dutch Art Theory.” 11 I acknowledge Pollock’s misgivings about some practitioners’ underdeveloped appreciation for intellectual history in “Visual Culture,” but also see this critique as potentially exclusionary itself. Pollock, “Unexpected Turns,” 27–28. See also Kerrin and Lepage, “De-Centering ‘The’ Survey.” 12 Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’: Dutch Women’s Creative Practices in the 17th Century,” 33; 36–7.

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Not only do we still need more research on women and undervalued media (difficult to undertake because the physical products often have not survived), we are still trying to get more information disseminated about the women artists and the work that we do know about. Lynn Jacobs and Els Kloek’s contributions to the Dictionary of Women Artists (1997) provide important summaries of the context for and potential sources – or reason of their lack – on women artists.13 Els Kloek, Catherine Peter Sengers, and Esther Tobé’s edited volume Vrouwen en kunsten in de republiek is, as stated in its subtitle, an overview.14 Signficantly, it provides a list of women artists, and students’ research make up the brief essays, a collaborative approach that is commendable in its difference from the single-author monographs by established scholars. In English, Jane Carroll and Alison Stewart provided a foundation for further studies in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters (2003), also including an index of the essays categorized by time period, theme, and media so that instructors could use the readings to excite their students and encourage wider scholarly research.15 The focus of essays includes not only painting and prints, but also gems, ivories, and tapestries – media historically gendered and associated with class. In his essay, DiFuria uses the examples of Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx to put into relief what was, is, or was not or is not seen or written about shapes history. As scholars and teachers with power to produce and legitimate knowledge, we need to make an effort to be visible and clear about elevating voices that historically have been minoritized, or erased altogether. These are women artists and patrons, but perhaps even more important are today’s voices. Employing inclusive (feminist) methodology and pedagogy is egalitarian and requires us to listen. The networks and mechanisms employed by women artists and patrons in the early modern period leveraged to their advantage are systems of mutuality that we would do well to underscore and reproduce today as a counter model to the hierarchies of capitalism and academe. Contemporary art collectives and contemporary art theory might be additional sources at which to look.16 Pollock has suggested that a double (or multiple) perspective is needed: The tension between the discipline and the field it invents, charts, and possibly deforms through its historically generated and politically effecting protocols requires a double perspective that can draw on the otherness of history to make visible the lineaments of the present and to use the urgencies of the present to elucidate new aspects of the otherness of the historical.17

13 Jacobs and Kloek, “Guilds and the Open Market: The Example of the Netherlands.” 14 Kloek, Sengers, and Tobé, eds. Vrouwen en kunst in de republiek: een overzicht. 15 Carroll and Stewart, Saints, Sinners, and Sisters, xvi-xxiv. 16 Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. 17 Pollock, “Whither Art History?” 21.

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To paraphrase: we need to look back from within – not anachronistically, but acknowledging the space(s) we inhabit at present. History can illuminate current politics, as aspects of the present can enrich and disclose the past. History is strange because of its temporal distance. It is especially strange to those with limited experiences (for example, students). We can become closer with/more intimate with an “other” – be they student, art object, another scholar, or alternative way of knowing – through this coming together. These threads across time – and in our own time – create a complex interwoven matrix that is each object or idea studied. To be sure, I am grateful for scholarship based in archives, on technique, and on materials and other specialized elements that many of us use to support our meaning-making. The object must always be part of the study, be it political, phenomenological, technical, socio-economic, or whatever one’s interpretive framing. But consider Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s argument that art is potentially recursive, where the “idea of art can open up the possibility for looking at past and forward to present.”18 Art has meaning in every moment, its constant being co-creating meaning with each viewer across time: The artwork is made or designed by an individual or by a group of individuals at some moment, but it also points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, perhaps, or to a prior artifact, or to an origin outside time, in divinity. At the same time it points forward to all its future recipients who will activate and reactivate it as a meaningful event.19

Although the object itself is of a moment, it extends outward on either side of that moment of creation. As Nagel and Wood suggest, ‘Art’ is the name of a conversation across time, a conversation more meaningful than the present’s merely forensic reconstruction of the past […] The ability of the work of art to hold incompatible models in suspension without deciding is the key to art’s anachronic quality, its ability really to ‘fetch’ a past, create a past, perhaps even fetch the future.20

Therefore, as Nagel, Wood, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and other theorists recognize, learning to see within historical context and from our own moment are absorbed together within the object.21 This meaning-making is enriching in its inclusivity – of time, people, and perspectives. 18 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 17. 19 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 9. 20 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 18. 21 Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of art is that it is a block of sensations: affects and percepts altogether, the accumulation of all percepts possible from its affective potentiality. See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 163–199.

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The openness of the art object across and in time – an inclusivity that can be daunting because of its complexity, impermanence, and ungraspability – can be a model for scholarship, content presentation in curricula, conferences, and exhibitions, and pedagogy by using the art object to think-with and co-create meaning among and with others. In order to combat assumed foundational structures, perhaps even more important than the content are the methods for how we produce knowledge, acknowledge the bounds in which we operate, and attempt to permeate and dissolve those boundaries to broaden our knowing and share in knowledge-making. This is a call to change our scholarship, curricula, and the way we teach – to listen to our students, to hear, see, and acknowledge their experiences in order to find resonance with others, and with the past. We can reflect the past in the present we acknowledge and show by including various stories and interests in the co-construction of knowledge. We can approve dissertation topics that may seem to be outliers in content or that take methods from other fields. We should question what ­really is important. What do we really want students to know and be able to do when they leave our classes? I want them to see the complexity and interconnectedness of the past with the present, manifest in the phenomenon of the object. I try to model reflective and reflexive scholarship and explicitly validate their interests and experiences. The structural challenges are great, and may vary by degree across institutions and countries. We may be challenged, told that what we are doing is “not art history” – but perhaps a radically inclusive method and pedagogy will be how Netherlandish art history – and art history at all – survives. Perhaps it will be how we evolve and thrive. Each of the authors in this collection highlight the agency of the women in their own time. Scholars today also have agency and now we are able to be explicit about the motivations that undergird whatever our creative products and how we pursue them. A feminist perspective is one of inclusion and is receptive to the diversity of experiences. It is not a monolithic domain, and does not deal only with women, or only gender. Feminism is an egalitarian ethos; I take that ethos to present this brief historiography to address both content and method. First, we need to identify who we are individually, then as “scholars of Netherlandish art.” We must each individually and collectively embrace our ignorance, seek out different ways of thinking, take risks, and challenge ourselves to listen, to grow intellectually and emotionally. Second, in discussion and collaboration we can discover shared resonances. In the essays collected here, authors share how women worked with others – family members, other artists, poets, and advisors – to learn from, teach, and refine their own self-knowledge and self-expression. Collaboration and flexibility, in fact, helped empower them and allowed them to achieve success in their own time. Here I call for collaboration and co-creating knowledge from individuals’ varieties of experience. In that spirit, in addition to elevating the stories of early modern women artists and patrons, this volume aims to include and elevate the early-career scholars,

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contingent faculty, students, and questioners whose carefully-thought out perspectives matter as much as any other honest inquirer’s.

Painters, Princesses, and Printmakers The six essays that follow highlight the creative agency of early modern women artists, patrons, and publishers. Notably, these women often purposefully – and necessarily – used ambiguous visual mechanisms to reference their subjectivity and knowledge, within distinctly visible products. Coding can be complicit, explicit, or implicit, and demonstrating evidence of coding in material culture is necessarily part of the feminist enterprise because coding makes interpretation of women’s work more difficult than that of many male artists. Scholars of nineteenth-century material culture have suggested that handcrafts like needlework (such as quilting or lacemaking) and their designs could convey meaning that evaded detection by those otherwise acculturated.22 The early modern women discussed here “coded” their creative power in allegory by using mythological parallels like Artemisia, Procris, and Arachne as a kind of aegis for creative agency. They veiled their ideas through blending convention and innovation, within scenes of night, or with subtle references in color palette.23 The purposeful layering of and potential for multiple meanings enhanced the appeal of these women’s creations and broadened their audiences. For Verhulst and Diericx, their contributions and collaborative powers became dulled and lost; sublimated, rather than encoded, within the conventions of patriarchal history writing. Male artists’ work has not only survived over the centuries in greater numbers, their corresponding documentation also further legitimates and provides the basis for scholarly reproduction of the notion of male creative superiority. However, women expressed their power and undermined conventional ideas and simple binaries through seemingly self-effacing visual mechanisms. Catherina van Hemessen seems to have hedged her bets, maintaining an overall conservative presentation of herself in her Self-Portrait, but also subtly alerting a careful viewer to notice that she was aware of contemporary innovations and artistic discussion regarding naturalistic representation, via the flesh tones she displayed on the palette in her self-portrait. Judith Leyster created purposefully ambiguous compositions, combining a female protagonist with apparent agency within what otherwise might be a conventional subject of female objectification. Magdalena van de Passe too, layered her work. In her signed Death of Procris/Apollo and Coronis, she seems to identify with Procris as a fertile (reproductive) creator whose legacy will last beyond 22 For coded messages in quilts, see especially Hafter, “Toward a Social History of Needlework Artists,” 25– 29; in crochet and lace, see Maines, “Fancywork: The Archaeology of Lives,” 1–3. 23 Radner, and Lanser, “Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures,” 10–17.

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death. While scholars have long associated Amalia van Solms with the mythological Artemisia, Saskia Beranek suggests how she added further complexity to her self-promoting visual propaganda through the built palace and gardens at Huis ten Bosch. At the same time that Richard Lovelace wrote about her as a modern Arachne, Princess Palatine Louise Hollandine also used allegory to present a place of female acceptance in her paintings, thereby transforming traditional subject matter to echo the feminine intimacy of her court in exile. Because of the visual culture they enacted, each woman was consistently seen, if not always fully heard, in her own time. The authors here continue to elevate the women and help us “listen” and see them as individual people today. In “Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait: The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette,” Céline Telon suggests that Van Hemessen safely depicted herself using conservative, if not old-fashioned, modes to denote her status as painter, but showed her awareness of artistic innovation in her palette. In “By Candlelight: Uncovering Early Modern Women’s Creative Uses of Night,” Nicole Cook shows how Judith Leyster (1609–1660) and Gesina ter Borch (1633–1690) used the night to set the stage for their most innovative compositions. Cook sets these women painters’ experiments within the seventeenth-century rise of nocturnal culture in the Netherlands. Artists investigated the aesthetics of artificial light and night’s associations with creative practice. Leyster’s and Ter Borch’s nocturnal paintings suggest the advantages that night might have held for women creators. Night was a time that offered privacy and refuge from daily labor. Women could use nighttime to be alone: free from suitors, husbands, and children, and free to pursue their own interests, including reading, creating art and poetry, and significantly, personal introspection. Amalia van Solms was a noblewoman. At Huis ten Bosch, she helped commission a formal layout that asserted her status and her identification with fertility and victory during a period fraught with conflict over Dutch national identity. Through a built iconography, she associated herself with the ancient Greek queen Artemisia and the Dutch garden maid that appeared in popular political prints. Saskia Beranek uses historically-grounded phenomenology to form her interpretations of Huis ten Bosch. “In Living Memory: Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch,” explains how the palace became a stage on which Van Solms used both house and garden to construct deliberate views to emphasize her dynastic narrative as guardian of the Dutch Republic. In the microcosm of her palace and grounds, she recasts herself as cultivator of a new Dutch Garden, a fertile and protective mother of the Republic. Lindsay Reid demonstrates how the English poet Richard Lovelace compares Louisa Hollandine, the Princess Palatine, to Ovid’s Arachne in his seldom-remarked “Princesse Löysa Drawing” (first printed in Lucasta of 1649 – a fifty-three line poem about the princess’s Ovidian paintings. Reid describes how the Princess herself may have used her painted creations to show the “communitas of a gyno-centered Bohemian court-in-exile.” In “The Arachnean Artist in Lovelace’s ‘Princesse Löysa Drawing,’” Reid

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sheds light on Hollandine and her work through the poetics of Lovelace and the context of Hollandine’s production. She illuminates Hollandine’s networks of privilege within the English and Dutch courts and then considers how Hollandine’s Ovidian paintings complement Lovelace’s ekphrastic poem, and significantly, how both poem and paintings draw upon Ovid’s Arachne as an empowered female-creator prototype. From two essays on paintresses to two essays on princesses, the last two essays in the volume focus on women printmakers and print publishers. In “Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking,” Amy Frederick recontextualizes reproductive printmaking with a focus on the gendered, but still privileged, status of the individual inventor. She reclaims Magdalena van de Passe within the collaborative space of the print workshop. Frederick asserts De Passe’s successes during her lifetime, both within her family workshop as an engraver, and suggests her signed reproductive prints could also be self-effacing triumphs of emulatory skill and ingenuity, thereby contributing to the family brand and her own identity as a reproductive engraver. Finally, Art DiFuria’s contribution, “Towards an Understanding of Mayken Verhulst and Volkcxen Diericx,” will return readers to the question of historiography by examining the legacies of print publishers Mayken Verhulst (1518–1599) and Volcxken Diericx (active 1570–1600). Scholars have designated Verhulst as adjunct to the endeavors of the famous males in her orbit: husband Pieter Coecke van Aelst and the Bruegels. However, her campaign on the print market after Coecke’s death recommends her as an artistic entrepreneur of the highest order, a woman possessing a nuanced understanding of which subjects and prints would capture the imaginations of erudite collectors. Likewise, Diericx usually is understood in conjunction with her husband, famed Quatre Vents publisher Hieronymus Cock. Diericx’s continuation of their publishing house after his death, however, suggests their collaboration and her mastery of the pictorial and entrepreneurial intelligence was crucial to the operation of a thriving print enterprise. Elaborating the fragmented literary and visual evidence surrounding these two important women against the backdrop of patriarchal Netherlandish art history’s canon of praise and individualism suggests just how open the pathways are for further investigation of their respective entrepreneurial creativity, and indeed, how open the pathways are to do art history differently.

Bibliography Alpers, Svetlana. “Art History and Its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art.” In Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. Eds. Norma Braude and Mary D. Garrard, 182–99. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Briggs, Laura. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Broude, Norma and Mary Garrard. The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Carroll, Jane and Alison Stewart. Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 2003.

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Dackerman, Susan, Claudia Swan and Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. De Jongh, Eddy, and Ger Luijten. The Mirror of Everyday Life: Genreprints in the Netherlands 1550–1700. Trans. Michael Hoyle. Amsterdam and Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaji & Zoon, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Franits, Wayne, ed. The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge, 2016. Hafter, Daryl M. “Toward a Social History of Needlework Artists.” Woman’s Art Journal 2:2 (1981–82): 25–29. Hochstrasser, Julie Berger. “The Bones in Banda: Vision, Art, and Memory in Maluku.” In Midwestern Arcadia: Midwestern Arcadia: A Festschrift in Honor of Alison Kettering, eds. Dawn Odell and Jessica Buskirk, 2015. https://apps.carleton.edu/kettering/hochstrasser/ DOI:10.18277/Makf.2015.14 [accessed December 14, 2018]. Hofrichter, Frima Fox. Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age. Doornspijk: Davaco, 1989. Honig, Elizabeth. “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’: Dutch Women’s Creative Practices in the 17th Century,” Woman’s Art Journal 22:2 (2002): 31–39. Jacobs, Lynn and Els Kloek. “Guilds and the Open Market: The Example of the Netherlands.” In Dictionary of Women Artists. Ed. Delia Gaze, 28–36. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. Kerrin, Melissa and Andrea Lepage. “De-Centering ‘The’ Survey: The Value of Multiple Introductory Surveys to Art History,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 1:1 (2016): 1–15. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/ vol1/iss1/3/ [accessed March 21, 2018]. Kester, Grant. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Kinsey, Joni. Thomas Moran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Kloek, Els and Catherine Peters Sengers, and Esther Tobé, eds. Vrouwen en kunst in de republiek: een overzicht. Hilversum: Verloren, 1998. Maines, Rachel.”Fancywork: The Archaeology of Lives,” Feminist Art Journal 3:4 (1974–75): 1–3. Mattos, Claudia. “Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History,” The Art Bulletin 96:3 (2014): 259–264. Mukherji, Parul Dave Whither Art History in a Globalizing World, The Art Bulletin 96:2 (2014): 153. Nagel, Alexander and Christopher Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art, Ideology. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Peacock, Martha Moffitt. “Paper as Power: Carving a Niche for the Female Artist in the Work of Joanna Koerten,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 62:1 (2012): 239–65. Pollock, Griselda. “Whither Art History?” The Art Bulletin 96:1 (2014): 9–23. Pollock, Griselda. “Unexpected Turns: The Aesthetic, the Pathetic and the Adversarial in the Long Durée of Art’s Histories,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 7 (2012): 1–32. Radner, Joan N. and Susan S. Lanser. “Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures.” Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Ed. Joan N. Radner, 10–17. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Sutton, Elizabeth. Art, Animals, and Experience. New York: Routledge, 2017. Sutton, Elizabeth. Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Sutton, Elizabeth. Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. Tickner, Lisa. “Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference,” Genders 18:3 (1988): 92–128. Weststeijn, Thijs. “The Gender of Colors in Dutch Art Theory,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 62:1 (2012): 176–201. Zipf, Catherine W. Professional Pursuits: Women and the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.

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About the Author Elizabeth Sutton obtained her Ph.D from the University of Iowa and has published widely on Dutch prints, maps, and animals in art. She is Associate Professor of Art History the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls.

2. Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait

The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette



Céline Talon Abstract The Self-portrait by Catharina Van Hemessen (dated 1548) is the oldest surviving example in Western art of a self-portrait showing the painter at work. Because of its theme and transitional position in the history of Renaissance painting, it is a fascinat­ ing example to consider within the history of artists’ social status as well as women’s artistic lives. This article discusses Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait within the broader context of images of painters at work, and considers how the depiction of the tools – especially the palette – can be a source of information on Renaissance painting practice. Comparison with other near-contemporary Self-Portraits of artists at work brings attention to the different ways painters used their image to advertise particular aspects of their art. Keywords: Renaissance self-portrait; woman painter; palette; artistic theory; painting technique

The Self-portrait by Catharina Van Hemessen (1528 – after 1583), signed and dated in 1548 (Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel) is the oldest surviving example in Western art of a self-portrait showing the painter at work (Plate 2.1). Three versions exist and indicate not only an original desire to broadcast the painter’s image and distinctive physical and artistic features, but also to present her awareness of contemporary art theory, as represented visually by the tools, palette, and pose.1 Because of its many-layered meanings, the self-portrait is a fascinating example to consider within the history of painters’ social status as well as women’s artistic lives in the Renaissance. My goal here is to focus on the working part of the self-portrait, the painteress’ tools, as denoting an important aspect of early Netherlandish art theory in visual form. I examine Catharina’s Self-Portrait within the broader context of ima­ ges of painters at work, and then suggest that the depiction of the tools – especially

1 There is an ongoing discussion as to which of the Basel or Cape Town version is actually the original. See De Clippel, Catharina van Hemessen. Een monografische studie, 78–79.

Sutton, E. (ed.), Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, Amsterdam University Press 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789463721400_ch02

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the palette – is not at all random but rather is designed to demonstrate knowledge of contemporary artistic discourses and assert a particular aspect of her status as a painter, a desire that becomes even more obvious when we compare the portrait to similar compositions.

A Woman Painter with an International Career Daughter to Jan Sanders Van Hemessen (c.1500 – c.1556), one of Antwerp’s leading artists of the time, Catharina was twenty when she painted her self-portrait in 1548, the same year her father became Dean of Antwerp’s Guild of Saint Luke.2 Few surviving documents in archives detail her life and little is known about her before her marriage to the organist Kerstiaen de Morijn on 23 February 1553. In 1555, Mary of Hungary invited both spouses to accompany her in Spain, where they remained until Mary’s death in 1558. After that, the only information we have is that the couple returned to Antwerp in 1561 and later took residence in s’Hertogenbosch. Antwerp’s archives of 1583 mention that: “Cat Sanders/1583 Kief & G 1 f 487,488/6 aug. 1583/ Jan van Hove van Hemissen maakt testament,” which means that she was still alive at that date, and had returned to Antwerp.3 Her known oeuvre is not very abundant since her active years seem to date mainly from before her marriage, a feature she shares with many other women artists, and there are no preserved works dating from her Hapsburg period. Catharina’s name does not appear in the archives of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke and – although there could be an omission – there is no historical source to document that she ever sought to establish an independent practice.4 Therefore, it is remarkable that her self-portrait is one of the earliest paintings she produced, at 20 years old, and that she apparently returned to this subject in later compositions. It has been suggested that the self-portrait could be a kind of business card, a way for a young artist to present herself and her abilities.5

2 See Rombouts and Van Lerius, De liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche sint Lucasgild, I, 91. 3 This information was gathered by Droz-Emmert (see Droz-Emmert, Catharina van Hemessen Malerin der Renaissance, 16) and comes from archives S.A.A., P.K.3579. 4 I do not address here the question of the possibility for a woman to have a professional career of her own since this has largely been discussed elsewhere. Let us simply quote as example the careers of Agnes Van den Bossche (c.1440 – c.1505), active in Bruges and registered in the city’s Guild of Saint Luke; and of Lavinia Teerlink (c.1515 – 1567), daughter to the illumination painter Simon Bening and court painter to the Kings of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I and whose income was surprisingly high, barely matched by her successor Nicholas Hilliard. For further discussion, see De Clippel, Catharina van Hemessen. Een monografische studie, 65 and Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society. 5 See De Clippel, Catharina van Hemessen. Een monografische studie, 38–39. The author suggests the hypothesis that the self-portrait might have been a present destined to Mary of Hungary as a demonstration of Catharina’s skill.

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Catharina is mentioned by Lodovico Guicciardini (1521 – 1589) in his 1567 travel accounts of the Low Countries as “Caterina d’Anuersa pittrice” and the humanist specifies that Mary of Hungary took her and her husband to Spain because of their great talent (per la loro rara virtu).6 Vasari mentions her in his 1568 edition, alongside other women artist such as Clara Skeysers of Ghent (de Keysere, c.1470–1545) and Susanna Horenbout (c.1503 – before 1554), all renowned for their work as minia­ turists.7 Van Mander overlooked her, but she is again cited as a famous woman painter by Johan van Beverwijck (1594 – 1647) in his treatise Van de wtnementheyt des vrouwenlicken geslachts (On the Excellence of the Female Gender, Dodrecht, 1643).8 All of this indicates that her qualities were known and appreciated by her contemporaries and that her good reputation endured into the seventeenth century.

Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait in Context Catharina portrayed herself in three-quarter view, seated on a backless chair. She is clothed in a black dress made of a rich-looking material over a white shirt with dark red sleeves tied by elegant fastenings. Her brown hair is covered by a white cap and light veil. On the whole, it is fitting for the modest daughter of a well-off Antwerp burgher. She signed and dated her work with the following text: EGO CATERINA DE/ HEMESSEN ME / PINXI 1548 // ETATIS SVAE/ 20 (“I Caterina de Hemessen painted myself 1548 // her age 20”). In front of her is a wooden easel on which stands an already framed and prepared panel. Her right hand rests on a painter’s stick (mahlstick), whose tip is resting on the upper molding of the frame, and she holds one brush. The tip of the brush has a small quantity of light greyish pink on it, with which Van Hemessen is laying on the first touches of a female figure. More precisely, she is working on the upper right part of the figure’s head. Her left hand, lowered on her left thigh, holds the end of the mahlstick along with five brushes and her left thumb is inserted in a small rectangular palette’s holder. In the course of the sixteenth century, autonomous self-portraits had begun to appear in Western art, and many artists, such as Albrecht Dürer (1493, 1498, 1500), Lucas Van Leyden (1509), Joos Van Cleve (c.1519) or Jacob Cornelisz. Van Oostsanen (1533), depicted themselves looking directly at the viewer with daring confidence. But Catharina’s self-portrait adds a new element: the clear reference to her activity as a painter through the motif of the easel and painting in progress.

6 Guicciardini, Descrittione, 100. 7 Vasari (1568), Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, 269. 8 Droz-Emmert, Catharina van Hemessen Malerin der Renaissance, 15–16.

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Although this composition has no known precedent in easel painting, such an image was not entirely unfamiliar to the Netherlandish tradition, thanks to the traditional depiction of Saint Luke Painting the Virgin Mary. First appearing in prayer books, this iconography was quickly adapted in larger devotional panels. This transfer of media is also a movement from the private to the public sphere.9 As an image then visible to many, it could act as publicity for the town’s Guild of Saint Luke and as a visual promotion of the painter’s status and work.10 A lot has already been said about the extent of either devotional, mercantile, or artistic promotion imagery in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Saint Luke Painting the Virgin subjects, and it is still an ongoing discussion.11 Because of the highly individualized features of nearly all Saint Lukes’ faces in easel painting compositions, it has long been accepted that these are often embedded (self-?) portraits. Whether these (self-) portraits are intended simply to give a more realistic touch to the composition or to act as personal or social promotion is difficult to assess, and the question should be re-evaluated separately for each occurrence, depending on its context. For example, the plea for the recognition of Art’s and the artists’ noble status would inevitably be present at different degrees in the Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) by Rogier Van der Weyden (c.1399–1464) painted c.1435–40, right at the moment when Leon Battista Alberti

9 For early examples, see the Saint Luke painting in the Malet-Lannoy Hours, manuscript, W 281, fol. 17r, c.1420–40, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, and in a Book of Hours illuminated by Simon Marmion, manuscript HM 1173, f. 15v, c. 1425–1489, The Huntington Library, San Marino. Legends about how Saint Luke actually painted the image from memory and not from life plead in favor of an iconography reflecting – or even helping to achieve – a meditative state that would help to remember (in the case of the saint) or summon the spiritual image of the Virgin and Child. For examples in panel painting, see Rogier Van der Weyden, Saint Luke drawing the Virgin, c.1435–40, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dierc Bouts (circle of?), Saint Luke drawing the Virgin, c. 1470, Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd; Derick Baegert, Saint Luke painting the Virgin, c.1485, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster; Master of Saint Augustine altarpiece, Saint Luke painting the Virgin, 1487, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; Colin de Coter, Saint Luke painting the Virgin, c.1500, church of Our Lady, Vieure; Jan Gossaert, Saint Luke drawing the Virgin, c.1520, Kunsthistorrisches Museum, Vienna. 10 Rogier Van der Weyden, Saint Luke drawing the Virgin, c.1435–40, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston may have been painted for the Saint Luke’s guild chapel in Brussels; Quentin Metsys delivered a Saint Luke altarpiece for the guild’s chapel in Antwerp (now lost); Jan Gossaert, Saint Luke drawing the Virgin, Národní Galerie, Prague, c. 1515 was intended for Saint Rombouts cathedral of Mechelen; Maerten Van Heemskerck’s Saint Luke, now in Rennes, was intended for the guild of Delft and another one painted in 1551 – now in Frans Hals Museum – was commissioned by the Haarlem guild; Lancelot Blondeel painted a Saint Luke painting for Bruges’s guild in 1545, Groeninge Museum, Bruges; Frans Floris de Vriendt executed one Saint Luke for Antwerps’s guild in 1556, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; Maerten de Vos painted a triptych to replace Floris’s in 1602, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. See White, Rogier van der Weyden, 39–49. 11 Kann, Rogier’s St. Luke, 15–22.

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(1404–1472) published his De Pictura (1435) or in the Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (Narodni Galerie, Prague) by Jan Gossaert, painted c.1515.12 In a way, Saint Luke is also the first portrait painter and Catharina paints her own verisimilitude painting another image, which is a demonstration of her abilities as portraitist. In the mid-sixteenth century, portrait painting is a genre that was at the center of a typical Renaissance paradox: on the one hand, intellectuals such as Arminini and Van Mander criticize it for being a lower type because even with “mediocre talent” and no personal inventio anyone could paint a portrait. On the other hand the sheer number of portraits commissioned, even by the noblest of clients, bears testimony to the success of the genre.13 Particularly in the context of princely patronage, the addition of a skilled female portrait painter to the entourage of Mary of Hungary could have been seen as a worthy ornament.14 Baldassare Castiglione recommended painting and drawing as suitable pastimes for noble women. And indeed, an upsurge of women painters (and also of women poets) is observable in the middle of the sixteenth century. The fact that Vasari mentions only one female artist in the 1550 version of his Lives, but thirteen in his 1568 edition, suggests that the prospects for women painters had improved, and perhaps, the increasing demand for portraits may have played a role in that.15 If Catharina seems to have been the first female to present herself as an artist, the phenomenon was not isolated for several other, slightly later, self-portraits of painteresses have found their way into modern collections such as Sofonisba Anguissola, whose first self-portrait was painted in 1552 (and was succeeded by many others), and several self-portraits by Lavinia Fontana, dated between 1577 and 1588. Certainly, Catharina painted her self-portrait at a particular time when women’s roles in society were being re-evaluated. After the groundbreaking Cité des Dames by Christine de Pizan in 1405, in the first half of the sixteenth century many scholarly figures such as Thomas More (1478 – 1535) and Erasmus (c. 1466 – 1535) addressed the right for women to benefit from a good education and celebrated the qualities of the 12 This gigantic panel (230 x 205 cm) was commissioned for the chapel of the painter’s guild in Saint Rombouts cathedral, Mechelen. Mechelen was by then Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands’s seat of power and a large painting in the cathedral would inevitably attract a lot of attention from national and international potential clients. In his painting, Gossaert makes every effort to reconcile a tribute to his own artistic tradition and his newly learned Italian discoveries, therefore advertising himself as the most modern of Flemish painters. See Ainsworth, Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures, 150–153. 13 Armenini states that “it is not worth spending time explaining how to do portraits because one can succeed well enough with a mediocre talent,” and Van Mander deems portraiture to be an inferior kind of painting because it is too mimetic and artists then merely imitate Nature instead of subliming it. See Woodall, Honour and Profit, 69–70 and Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 150–153. 14 Because of the long hours spent between a painter and her model, it would for example have seemed more proper that a woman paints the portrait of a respectable Lady or teach her the rudiments of the Art since to pose as a dilettante painter was becoming gradually more fashionable. See De Clippel, Catharina van Hemessen. Een monografische studie, 67–69. 15 See Hall, The Self-Portait, 97–99.

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feminine sex.16 Her decision to paint herself could therefore have been encouraged by contemporary intellectual debate on and curiosity about women’s abilities. Moreover, inside many discussions about women’s qualities, one usually finds – amongst other things – recommendations for women to be modest and pure. Catharina’s deliberately non-ostentatious clothing and un-idealized face could be a declaration of her knowledge of the moral requirements for a respectable young woman from a well-off family.17 In this view, her self-portrait could truly have been a business card, advertising her both as skilled portraitist and as a proper, demure young woman.

A Bold Move Catharina’s self-portrait did not appear ex nihilo: it proceeds from a particular cultural and visual context. I do not believe that the traditional iconography of Saint Luke Painting can be easily ruled out as a model for her composition since it was the most popular way of staging the painter’s profession at the time. Aside from this tradition, other sources must have played a role. Marguerite Droz-Emmert suggests that Catherina largely drew her inspiration from depictions of the antique painter Marcia because Marcia was said to have used a mirror to paint her image and that the use of that particular device linked the two painteresses. Marcia painting her self-portrait with the help of a mirror can be seen in several copies of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris.18 Boccaccio’s text, originally written c.1364, was certainly very successful in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it inspired many writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan. Several manuscripts of the De mulieribus claris are preserved, and a printed version was edited in Bern in 1539.19 Although depictions of famous women painters must have played a role in Catharina’s decision to paint herself facing an easel, I would suggest that the inspiration might not be so much visual, but rather, philosophical. Indeed, the illuminated manuscripts of the De mulieribus claris were luxury objects belonging to princely households and it is difficult to assess to what extent Catharina would have had a direct access to such sources.20 16 The intellectual career of More’s daughter Margaret Roper (1505 – 1544) who became the first non-royal English woman to publish translations of erudite texts is a good example. Around the time Catharina was born, several key texts were published on the subject: the De institutione feminae christianae by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) edited in Antwerp 1524 or Henricus de Nettesheym’s De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus dedicated to Margaret of Austria. See Droz-Emmert, Catharina van Hemessen Malerin der Renaissance, 30. 17 See Droz-Emmert, Catharina van Hemessen Malerin der Renaissance, 93–94, and Périer-d’Ieteren, Le portrait à Bruxelles, 75–79. 18 Droz-Emmert, Catharina van Hemessen Malerin der Renaissance, 53–57. 19 Ioannis Boccatii de Certaldo insigne opus de claris mulieribus, Bernae Helvet, excudebat Matthias Apiarius, 1539, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, 4-QE-11. 20 The two Marcia mentioned by Droz-Emmert are in the Giovanni Boccaccio, De Claris mulieribus, anonymous translation in French « Livre des femmes nobles et renommees », 1403, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms Français 598, which was commissioned by Jean de La Barre, squire and chamberlain to the

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Moreover, Marcia is not the only woman painter cited by Boccaccio, who largely drew from Pliny’s account of antique celebrated painteresses. In his Book 35, Pliny identifies no less than four female painters: Timarete (often transcribed “Thamaris” or “Thamyris” in Boccaccio’s text) daughter to Mycon (another painter) was famous for having “painted a Diana at Ephesus, one of the very oldest panel-paintings known.” Irene “daughter and pupil of the artist Cratinus, painted a figure of a girl.” Aristarete “daughter and pupil of Nearchus, painted an Æsculapius,” and Laia or Iaia of Cyzicus (who became Marcia in the Boccaccio’s text) who “always remained single, painted at Rome, in the youth of M. Varro, both with the brush, and with the graver, upon ivory, her subjects being female portraits mostly.”21 Three of these four women were remembered in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris. In the 1539 printed edition of the text, the index includes the following entries: “De Thamyri pictrice Myconis filia” (“On Thamyri the painter, daughter to Mycon”), “De Hyrene Cratini filia” (“On Hyrene daughter to Cratinus”) and “De Marcia Varronis uirgine perpetua” (“On Marcia daughter of Varro, forever Virgin”). Boccaccio mainly retains Pliny’s descriptions, embellishing the story a little. Of the three mentioned painteresses, two are specifically referred to as filia (“daughter”) to a famous male painter, something they would have had in common with Catharina Van Hemessen, daughter to and trained by Jan Van Hemessen, her father. Of Thamyris, Boccaccio says “she scorned the duties of women and practiced her father’s art,” and adds “she should be praised even more if we consider the spindles and baskets of other women.”22 Of Irene, pupil of her own father, Boccaccio says that she “surpassed her master in art and fame” and that she “had unusual talent […] proof of her skill lasted […] in the painted figure of a girl

Duke Jean de Berry for his master; the other comes from yet another French version of the text, written in 1401 for Audice de Accioroles de Florence, Countess of Haulteville, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits Français 12420. 21 Pliny, Natural History, 35; 40: “Pinxere et mulieres: Timarete, Miconis filia, Dianam, quae in tabula Ephesi est antiquissimae picturae; Irene, Cratini pictoris filia et discipula, puellam, quae est Eleusine, Calypso, senem et praestigiatorem Theodorum, Alcisthenen saltatorem; Aristarete, Nearchi filia et discipula, Aesculapium. Iaia Cyzicena, perpetua virgo, M. Varronis iuventa Romae et penicillo pinxit et cestro in ebore imagines mulierum maxime et Neapoli anum in grandi tabula, suam quoque imaginem ad speculum.” 22 Boccaccio, chapter LVI: “De Thamari Myconis filia. Thamaris mulier evo suo pictrix egregia fuit; cuius virtus, etsi forsan veternositas plurimum abstulerit, nomen tamen egregium nec artificium adhuc abstulisse potuit. Volunt igitur hanc nonagesima olympiade filiam fuisse Myconis pictoris; verum cuius, cum duos fuisse Mycones et ambo pictores et eodem tempore Athenis floruisse legamus, non distinguunt, nisi his paucis verbis eam filiam fuisse Myconis cui minoris cognomen additum ferunt. Sane cuiuscunque fuerit, tam miro ingenio, despectis muliebribus officiis, paternam artem imitata est ut, regnante apud Macedonas Archelao, singularem picture gloriam adepta sit, in tantum ut Ephesi, apud quos honore precipuo Dyana colebatur, eiusdem Dyane effigiem, in tabula quadam mano eius pictam, tanquam celebrem servaverint diu. Que cum in longissimam etatem perseverasset, artificii huius testimonium tam grande prebuit, ut in hodiernum usque memorabile videatur: equidem laudabile plurimum, si prospectemus fusos et calathos aliarum.”

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which could be seen in the city of Eleusis.”23 Of Marcia, Boccaccio praises her purity and maidenhood and adds: [S]he is to be lauded no less for the power of her intellect and the skill of her hands. It is unknown whether she learned from a teacher or whether she was gifted by nature, […] but what is certain is that, scorning womanly occupations, she gave herself up completely to the study of painting and sculpture […]. […] some pictures she painted […] were more precious than those of other artists […] her hands were so swift in painting that no one else’s were ever their equals. Remarkable examples of her art lasted for many years, among others her portrait which she painted on a tablet with the aid of a mirror […]. She used to reproduce especially images of women.24

Naturally, the account of Marcia painting her self-portrait using a mirror, a device endorsed by many sixteenth-century artists, is a very compelling echo to Catharina 23 Boccaccio, chapter LIX: “De Yrene Cratini filia. Yrenes utrum fuerit greca mulier, aut qua floruerit etate, non satis certum est; greca tamen creditur constatque eam Cratini cuiusdam pictoris fuisse filiam atque discipulam. Quam tantum laudabiliorem existimo quantum arte et fama videtur superasse magistrum, cum eius adhuc in pluribus nomen vigeat, existente patre nisi per eam fere innominato, excepto si is fuit de quo legitur qui frondes atque radices herbarum omnium, ad earum prestandam notitiam, in forma descripsit propria, esto hic Cratinax non Cratinus ab aliquibus nuncupetur. Huius autem Yrene celebre fuit ingenium et artificium memorabile; cuius quidem magisterii in longum argumenta fuere: puella quedam apud Eleusinam civitatem diu tabula visa est; sic et senex Calipso, preterea et gladiator Theodorus neenon et Abstitenes, suo tempore saltator egregius. Que, ideo quod officium est a femina, ut plurimum, alienum nec absque vi maxima ingenii consecutum, quod in eis tardissimum esse consuevit, dignum aliqua celebrari laude ratus sum.” 24 Boccaccio, chapter LXVI: “De Martia Varronis. Martia Varronis perpetua virgo Rome iam dudum reperta est; cuius tamen Varronis invenisse non memini, nec etiam qua etate. Hanc ego, ob servatam virginitatem, tanto egregiori laude extollendam puto, quanto sui iuris femina, sua sponte, non superioris coactione, integriorem servaverit. Non enim aut Veste sacerdotio alligatam aut Dyane voto obnoxiam seu alterius professionis implicitam, quibus plurime aut cohercentur aut retinentur, invenio; sed sola mentis integritate, superato carnis aculeo, cui etiam prestantissimi non nunquam succubuere viri, illibatum a contagione hominis corpus in mortem usque servasse. Verum etsi hac tam commendabili constantia plurimum hec laudanda sit Martia, non minus tamen ingenii viribus et artificio manuum commendanda est. Hec equidem, seu sub magistro didicerit, seu monstrante natura habuerit, nobis incertum est, cum hoc videatur esse certissimum, quod, aspernatis muliebribus ministeriis, ne ocio tabesceret, in studium se picture atque sculpture dederit omnem; et tandem tam artificiose tanque polite pinniculo pinxisse atque ex ebore sculpsisse ymagines, ut Sopolim et Dyonisium, sue etatis pictores famosissimos, superarit; eiusque rei fuit notissimum argumentum, tabulas a se pictas ceteris preciosiores fuisse. Et, quod longe mirabilius, asserunt eam non tantum eximie pinxisse, quod et non nullis contigit aliquando, verum adeo veloces ad pingendum habuisse manus, ut nemo usquam similes habuerit. Fuerunt insuper diu eius artis insignia, sed, inter alia, eius effigies, quam adeo integre, lineaturis coloribusque servatis et oris habitu, in tabula, speculo consulente, protraxit, ut nemini coetaneo quenam foret, ea visa, verteretur in dubium. Et inter ceteras, ut ad singulares eius mores deveniamus, ei fuisse mos precipue asserunt, seu pinniculo pingeret seu sculperet celte, mulierum ymagines sepissime facere, cum raro vel nunquam, homines designaret. Arbitror huic mori pudicus robur causam dederit; nam, cum antiquitas, ut plurimum, nudas aut seminudas effigiaretur ymagines, visum illi sit oportunum aut imperfectos viros facere, aut, si perfectos fecerit, virginei videatur oblita pudoris. Que, ne in alterum incideret, ab utroque abstinuisse satius arbitrata est.”

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Van Hemessen’s own portrait, also probably painted using a mirror. I would like to draw attention to the fact that all three women painters mentioned by Boccaccio (and Pliny) hold important similarities with Catharina’s Self-Portrait: all are daughters to famous figures (two of them are daughters of renowned painters) and all three were celebrated for painting female figures (Timarete/Thamyris a figure of Diana, Irene a girl in Eleusis and Marcia her own portrait and portraits of other girls). The theme of the “father/teacher” relationship must be important because Catharina took the trouble of quoting her filiation to Jan Van Hemessen in at least three of her later paintings where she signed them: CATHARINA.FILIA.IOANNIS.DE.HEMESSEN.PINGEBAT.25 Perhaps, through those multiple references, she meant to honor her father and the training he gave her in the very year he was appointed Dean of Antwerp Saint Luke’s Guild.26 On Catharina’s “metapainting,” we see the first outlines of a female face with large eyes, high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and full red lips. One could almost doubt that this is Catharina’s own image because the shape of the face does not really seem to match the painteress’ own soft oval face with slightly drooping cheeks. The point here is not to debate whether Catharina’s panel really is a self-portrait or not – indeed, the clear direction of the sitter’s gaze towards the viewer is a forceful argument for it – but rather to incorporate new ramifications in the painting’s interpretation. In the intellectual context of the late Renaissance, a single obvious textual reference would rarely satisfy a learned audience. With her background, Catharina probably knew that. I suggest that she designed her own representation to be at the crossroads of several literacy and cultural references of her time and milieu, including the Saint Luke tradition and the references in Boccaccio cited above. Another source of inspiration for Catherina Van Hemessen could have been the life and works of Saint Caterina de Vigri of Bologna (1413–1463). Caterina de Vigri, the daughter of an upper class family, was first lady-in-waiting to Laura Malatesta (1404–1425) in Ferrara and later became a Clare nun. A learned woman, she wrote extensively and even illustrated her own breviary.27 She is especially known for her Seven Spiritual Weapons Necessary for Spiritual Warfare, a text written between 1438 and 1456, first printed in 1475, and that was frequently reprinted and translated into

25 These are the Portrait of a Man, National Gallery, 1552, London, NG10042; Portrait of a Man, private collection, current location unknown and Flagellation of Christ, 1555, William A. Rudd coll., Ohio, respectively catalogue entries A8, A9 and B4 in De Clippel’s catalogue. See De Clippel, Catharina van Hemessen. Een monografische studie. 26 Droz-Emmert, Catharina van Hemessen Malerin der Renaissance, 87–89 argues that Catharina had known about Timarete and Irene through Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames, 1405. But de Pizan mentions the antique painteresses – along with another contemporary woman artist – precisely without the reference to their respective fathers as did Pliny and Boccaccio. In the hypothesis that the fatherly connection is indeed operative in Catharina’s choice of composition, de Pizan would not therefore be a major reference. 27 Arthur, Images of Clare, 177–192.

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Latin, French, Portuguese, English, Spanish, and German. She was beatified in 1524 and canonized in 1712. Legend has it that she painted several devotional panels herself and although Kathleen G. Arthur seriously questions the veracity of this legend, the fact remains that she was a highly popular figure of a holy female painter, bearing the same name as our Catharina Van Hemessen.28 To conclude this first overview of Catharina’s Self-Portrait in context, we could say that the painting’s reading is much less straightforward than one might first imagine. The deliberately unspecified composition can be interpreted as Marcia painting her self-portrait, Irene painting a girl (and we as viewers, are positioned in the place of her model), Thamyris painting Diana, and Catharina looking at herself in the mirror. It could also allude to the figure of another Catherine, Caterina of Bologna, perhaps then painting a Virgin and Child (the disposition of the female figure on the fictional painting certainly allows some room to paint such a composition). The symbolic superimposition of all those layers of (sometimes indirect) meaning was, I believe, part of what could have made the portrait appealing and legitimate to a Renaissance audience. Finally, to create this synthetic image of the woman painter, Catharina reinvented one of the most popular images associated with the activity of painting, an image that would act both as reference and legitimization: the figure of the patron saint of painters, Saint Luke, whose figure Painting the Virgin she must have seen many times in the cathedral of Antwerp.

Talkative Tools In a way, it could therefore be said that Catharina Van Hemessen literally took over Saint Luke’s palette and brushes. I will now focus on those represented tools and suggest how they visually bear testimony to contemporary painting techniques and painting theorization. The high realism characteristic of Flemish ars nova prompted artists to use existing, physical models from life in order to create their compositions. We have seen how it was true for the face of Saint Luke. What is true of human faces is also true of the portrayed painter’s surroundings and, of particular interest to us, of his tools. This has already drawn some attention and raised the question as to whether or not the Bildgenese could have been the actual subject of the painting.29 As discussed earlier, it is very possible that part of this theme was embedded in the Saint Luke images to various degrees, depending on each specific commission but we should not lose sight of the fact that these paintings all depict a staged reality. Indeed, each composition has been designed using carefully selected elements from the painter’s real life, but if we can conclude that whatever is represented in the painting really existed and was 28 Arthur, Women, Art and Observant Franciscan Piety, 86–118. 29 Filedt Kok, De heilige Lucas, 8.

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used, we are not looking at an exhaustive image. It is but a selection of all the materials a painter thought would best represent herself, her position, goals, and practice. At the time Catharina painted her portrait, art theoretical discourse was still very much an Italian phenomenon and a genre in the making. The written sources we have to give voice to the aims, aesthetics, concepts, and techniques of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish masters are either peripheral sources or manuscripts in the tradition of recipe books that are often quite laconic and adulterated by many decades of copies.30 Not until Karel Van Mander’s Den grondt der edel vrij schilder-const (1604) do we have an actual written theory of Netherlandish art. However, to a certain degree, the images of painters at work may operate as a preliminary visual theory of art. Therefore, the examination of tools such as the palette, the colors on it, the brushes, and the painter’s stick – all the material actors of the painting process – can speak about the silent theory dormant in practice even before painters started to put into words the principles that guided their hand. The very function of self-portraits as objects of self-advertisement supports the notion that the tools displayed in them are carefully chosen to reflect ideas and convey meaning. Let us consider the details of Catharina’s technical set up: first, she is working on a small, already framed panel. Getting a panel from the joiner already assembled with its frame was possible from the beginning of the fifteenth century and remained the most common practice until c. 1520.31 The type of assembly of Catharina’s fictional panel is unfortunately not decipherable, but its small size would suggest it being an integral frame, in which the entirety of the panel and frame are carved in the same unique piece of wood or an applied frame, in which the frame moldings are either glued or pegged on the surface of the panel, or a semi-integral frame (a combination of the integral and applied frame where the moldings carved in the panel follow the wood grain and the applied moldings come from another piece of wood, also following the wood grain).32 Generally, paintings produced in the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries were prepared with a ground layer and painted when already mounted in their frame.33 This technique leaves the edges of the panel with an unpainted strip and a characteristic accumulation or bulge of ground material at the junction of the frame with the panel’s surface called a barb. Whatever assemblage Catharina depicted on

30 Although the field is rapidly evolving with more and more transcriptions, translations and in-depth studies available for academic research, see for example: Clarke, 2011, on the Montpellier Manuscript. 31 Verougstraete, Frames and Supports, 66–67. 32 Verougstraete, Frames and Supports, 64–67. This kind of assembly has been identified on many small Flemish panels, many of them portraits, such as Jan Van Eyck’s Annunciation diptych, c.1436, Museo ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid. 33 Such a panel, mounted in its frame and ready to be painted is visible in the background of Hugo Van der Goes’ Saint Luke drawing the Virgin, painted c. 1470–80, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. There we see that the ground on the panel has a slightly warmer tonality than the ground applied on the frame.

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Figure 2.1. Catharina Van Hemessen, Self-Portrait, 1548, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, oil on panel, 32.2 cm x 25.2 cm.

her “painting in the painting,” the presence of a white ground layer on the moldings and the panel would have created this barb. It so happens that real barb and unpainted edges are observable on the genuine panel of Catharina’s Self-Portrait, indicating that the technique she depicted is the technique that was actually used, at least support-wise.34 This detail is interesting because since c. 1520, rebate frames gradually replaced grooved, applied, or integral frames. First designed for larger altarpieces, rebate frames were easier to produce, more economical, and adapted to 34 The white ground has been applied on the frame but only on the front of the moldings, not on the sides. That is an interesting detail which probably shows a desire to save time and energy while applying the ground and that the painter(ess) considered the sides of the panel to be of secondary importance. Cases where the frame’s sides are just covered by a layer of paint directly on the wood are known for the early sixteenth century but not enough original frames are preserved to assess if it was a common practice.

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standard-size production. With the introduction of rebate frames, the practice of getting an already assembled panel-in-frame from the joiner decreased and it became more common to paint the panel separately. This method would no longer produce unpainted edges and a barb. We find visual testimony to this practice in Maerten Van Heemskerck’s Saint Luke Painting the Virgin painted c.1550 for the Saint Luke guild of Delft (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes) (figure 2.3). There, the Saint works on a small, unframed panel with the white ground layer covering the entire surface of the panel. This first observation stresses that, in 1548, the practice depicted in Catharina’s portrait regarding the panel/frame build-up and the application of ground layers is deeply rooted in – an almost archaic – tradition. Catharina’s right hand rests on a mahlstick, holding a brush. In her left hand, she holds a palette and five pointed brushes. The use of the painter’s stick is probably concomitant to the introduction of oil as a binding medium for panel paintings. The slow drying properties of oil that allow the painter to keep on working for some time on her surface before the medium dries (creating the marvelous effects proper to oil, such as wet-in-wet blending) also requires the painter to be very careful and not to lean a hand on the still-wet surface.

Palettes & Brushes The painter’s palette and brushes are her most representative tools. As a transitional item between the painter, her choice of colors, brushes, and the painting in progress, the palette is one of the first places where the painter’s ideas will come into material being. Focusing on the palette and brushes the painteress is holding on her self-portrait therefore sheds light on her artistic goals as well as on her painting technique. The palette is a difficult tool to study, especially those used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, because back then no one really seemed to care about it enough to write about it (in other words, it was so commonplace, writers did not mention it). To my knowledge, no advice on how to set a palette is to be found in Italian sources or in more technical texts such as Cennino Cennini’s Libra dell’Arte or the Montpellier Manuscript, and I could find no indication that palettes were produced according to pre-defined criteria.35 Therefore, visual occurrences of Renaissance palettes are highly significant testimonies. In her Self-Portrait, Catharina holds a small rectangular palette. Compared to other palettes depicted in manuscripts and paintings between 1400 to 1550, it appears that this kind of palette is one of a least four popular types: rectangular palettes, 35 The Montpellier Ms, the Liber diversarum arcium, is a technical text whose core was written c.1300 and draws largely from the De diversis artibus by Theophilius, but with a last phase of reworking dating from the early fifteenth century, making it a privileged source of information on painting practice just before Van Eyck’s time. See Clarke, Mediaeval Painters’ Materials and Techniques.

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some with a handle, others with a thumbhole, a few flattened-oval palettes and a last category of variously shaped palettes displaying complex carvings that remind one of a recycled piece of furniture. Rectangular palettes with handle or thumbhole represent about the half of all occurrences. The absence of a standard shape and the possibility that some palettes were recycled material show that it had not yet become the emblematic tool of the painter it would be in the eighteenth century. In Charles de Bovelles’s Liber De differentia vulgarium linguarum et Gallici sermonis varietate (1533), the palette is described as a “petite raquette en bois pour jouer au volant” (“a small wooden paddle to play shuttlecock”).36 The recycling of the palette from other activities, like sports or furniture making, may explain its various shapes – especially the handle, which cannot have been very handy for a painter’s use of the tool. The common feature of all palettes from the early fifteenth century until the second half of the sixteenth century is that a great majority of them display only a few pats of color (generally four to six) scattered on their surface, leaving no available area to mix colors on it. Catharina’s palette is one of these: nine heaps of color dot the small wooden rectangle’s surface but there is no indication that the colors could or would be mixed during the painting process. This is quite surprising given our usual understanding of the palette’s function. If we consider the history of the palette’s use in Netherlandish painting, we see that its emergence has less to do with the intention to mix colors on it than with the desire to have several colors at hand simultaneously. This distinction is crucial to understand the shift from a technique dominated by the use of a quick-drying binding media (such as egg tempera) to a slow-drying, oil-based binding media. Indeed, when working in tempera, by the time one lays six or eight shades on a palette, the runny colors drip from the palette and within a few minutes, everything is dry and the costly colors wasted. Only colors bound in oil can achieve the right creamy consistency to hold themselves on a palette and remain usable long enough to justify putting several different shades on a palette. But then, why not mix the colors on the palette? Catharina’s palette set-up, allowing no room for color mixtures, is actually consistent with a very traditional way of painting, deeply established in medieval conventions.37 This technique is clearly described by Cennini:

36 Bovelles, Ch. de, online resource http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/palette. 37 Amongst the most important imperatives of the Medieval attitude towards color is that it would be as pure as possible and as luminous as possible. Purity, on top of being an important spiritual symbol, guarantees readability, a very important topic in medieval aesthetics. Luminosity does not imply a light shade, close to white, but quite the opposite, a luminous color in medieval terms is a color full of claritas, which is the manifestation of God’s Divine Light. In terms of color, it translates not so much by a light shade but by a deeply saturated color, close to what we find in stained glass-windows. To achieve purity and claritas, mixtures must be avoided as much as possible. This aspect has already been approached by Pastoureau, Bleu, 44–47 and Gage, Colour and Culture, 72 and will be developed further here.

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[Y]ou always need to bind your pigments with egg yolk and bind them thoroughly, always as much egg yolk as the pigment that you are binding; […] leave the first shade in its colour and take two parts lacca pigment, the third lead white and from this, once it has been bound, grade three shades from it which differ barely the one from the other, thoroughly bound as I explained to you and always lightened with thoroughly mulled lead white. Then, set your ancona up in front of you […] Then take up quite a blunt vair brush and start to apply the dark colours.38

Cennini describes the exact same technique to work with oil: [G]o back to mulling […] except that where you used to mull them in water, now mull them with this oil. And when you have mulled hem […] get little lead or tin pots to put the pigments in; […] Put them away in a box to keep them tidy. Then, when you want to do an item of drapery in three shades in the way that I described to you, separate them and put them in their place with vair brushes, joining one color thoroughly with another, with the colors completely solid.39

The author of the Montpellier Manuscript also describes distinct sequences using ready-to-use colors, each providing a different value of a given object’s modeling. This technique, using a system of pre-established colors, was defined by Mark Clarke as “formulaic modeling”. It starts by filling a given area with a mid-tone, then shading or outlining with a darker version of the mid-tone and finally highlighting with a lighter version of the mid-tone.40 This technique is precisely what is depicted on Catharina’s palette: three grades of already mixed flesh color, one black, two browns, a white, a burnt sienna and vermilion. All the color values needed to model and shade a face without having to resort 38 Cennini & Broecke, Il Libro Dell’arte, 186–7: “ [L] aseconda / chosa sie che tti conviene tenperare I tuoi colori senpre con rossume / duovo e ben tenperati senpre tanto rossume quanto ilcolore […] lascia il primo grado del suo colore e ttogli le due / parti colore dilaccha il terzo dibiaccha e da questo tenperato che / glie ne digrado tre gradi che poco svarii luno dall altro tenpe / rati bene chome to detto e dichiarati senpre conbiaccha ben / triata poi ti recha latua ancona […] poi piglia un penello mozetto di vaio e inchomincia / a dare ilcolore schuro”. 39 Cennini & Broecke, Il Libro Dell’arte, 129: “[R]ritorna a rritrarre overo macinare di cholore in colore […] salvo dove triavi / chon aqua tria ora con questo olio e quando li ai triati coie […] dove mettere idetti / colori di piombo o di stangno e sse non ne truovi togli delli in / vetriati emettivi dentro i detti colori macinati ripogli in / n una chassetta che stieno nettamente poi con penelli di / varo quando vuoi fare un vestire de tre ragioni sic home / to detto conpartiscili e mettigli neluoghi loro conmettendo / bene l un colore con l altro ben sodetti I colori poi sta alchun.” 40 Clarke, Mediaeval Painters’ Materials and Techniques, 190–191. This can be described using simple color terms, pure pigments or mixtures. In some prescriptions this is further sophisticated by intermediate tones as described here such: 1. Apply the base color; 2. Outline and define with something a little darker than 1; 3. Apply shadows, lighter than 2; 4. Apply first highlights, lighter than 1; 5. Apply second highlights, lighter than 4; 6. Optionally apply a third highlight, lighter than 5.

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to any more mixtures, since, as Cennini puts it, the painter can “join one color thoroughly with another” directly on the panel. Thanks to the properties of the oil, it was possible to blend the colors seamlessly on the painting itself. Although she was painting in 1548, Catharina displayed a remarkably conservative attitude towards painting technique, a conservatism that also applied to her choice of traditional frame. Could that have to do with her being a woman and not being allowed the same innovations as her fellow male painters? Or is it a visual embodiment of contemporary artistic ideals? I would suggest that it may refer to the characteristic type of painting women artists are associated with in the sixteenth century, namely miniature painting. Derived from the practice of book illumination, very popular in France, Flanders and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, miniature painting is the one specialty often connected to the name of Netherlandish female artists: Clara Skeysers of Ghent (de Keysere, c.1470–1545), Susanna Horenbout (c.1503 – before 1554), and Lavinia Teerlink (c.1515 – 1567). All were celebrated for their skills in miniature painting. The most popular technique of sixteenth-century miniature painting was watercolor on vellum and seems to have largely relied on hatchings. That is logical since a miniature’s binding media is gum and an attempt at wet-in-wet blending in watercolor would be very messy, especially on a such a small and refined image. Pre-prepared colors would be possible with a gum-based binding media since a painter can re-dilute your colors at will, even after they have dried whereas egg tempera becomes useless after drying. Those ready-made colors would be very handy to work in small hatchings (which are also used by artists in tempera paintings). Nicholas Hilliard (c.1547 – 1619), the much appreciated miniature painter of Elizabeth I, explains how to set up a palette in his Arte of Limning (c. 1600): [T]ake a pretty large shell of Mother of Pearlle or such like and before you begin to worke you must temper certaine littlle heaps of severall shadows for the face wich as the oyle Painters lay on ther woden Pallats in like maner you must lay them ready prepared in order by themselves about the border or Circomferance of the shells.41

This is a remarkable passage as it is one of the few preserved written sources bearing testimony as to the late sixteenth century Northern painting practice and clearly discussing the palette and how to set it up. Its mention of “several shadows” may be a reference to working with different grades of a certain hue – Hilliard clearly states each hue must be prepared in advance, just as oil painters did. We find the very same passage slightly reworked by Edward Norgate in his own later treatise Miniatura or The Art of Limning (c.1648) where he advises: 41 Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, 102.

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[L]ay severall small heaps of Colours taken out of your shells and dispose them a decent order, one by another, to serve in a readiness to temper your shadowes in imitation of the Oyle painters pallets whereon their colours are laid as these of yours must bee about the border or Circumference of your large shell. There are Some that temper the shadowes as they worke them, but I conceave this the more expedite way, and more methodicall then any other can be.”42

The added comment that you could mix your colors as you work but that is not the best way to proceed is also quite significant. The shape and size of Catharina’s palette, her mahlstick, the framed panel; all the self-portrait’s technical details inform us that she is working in oils. But if we consider her known oeuvre, a great majority of her signed or attributed paintings actually are small-scale portraits.43 For these small paintings – or large miniatures – a technique of small hatchings or thin touches of color that would be “joined thoroughly with the brush” directly on the panel, would probably have been a logical choice. So by the examination of the painteress’ palette, we find an echo to Vasari’s comment on Catharina being a talented miniature painter.

Palettes in Perspective To go further with our study of Catharina’s palette and tools, we will compare it with three other known Self-Portraits of artists depicting themselves either “at work” or “at the easel.” These paintings were selected for their chronological and compositional proximity with Catharina’s: the Self-Portrait of the Münster master Ludger tom Ring the Younger, 1547, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig (Plate 2, Figure 2.2); the Saint Luke Painting the Virgin by Haarlem artist Maerten Van Heemskerck, c.1550 (Figure 2.3), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes; and Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait of c.1556, Museum Zamek, Lancut (Plate 3, Figure 2.4). Ludger tom Ring the Younger’s Self-Portrait, painted in 1547, predates Catharina’s Self-Portrait by only one year and presents many similar features. It features no fewer than two inscriptions: the first, in Latin “NATVS ANO 1522 19 A ITER 8 ET 9 H. DEPICTVM ANNO 1547. 31 A” tells us the exact time of the artist’s birth (19 July 1522 between 8 and 9 hours) and the date of the painting’s execution (31 July 1547) and the

42 Norgate, Miniatura, 22. I am very grateful to Paul Taylor who very kindly brought this passage to my attention. 43 See for example the Portrait of a woman, 1548, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. SK-A-4256, 23 cm × 15.2 cm; the Portrait of a 42-year-old man and the Portrait of a 30-year-old woman, both 1549, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. 4156 & 4157, 22 cm x 17 cm; the Portrait of a woman with a dog,1551, National Gallery, London, inv. NG4732, 22.9 cm x 17.8 cm.

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Figure 2.2. Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Self-Portrait, 1547, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, oil on panel, 35 cm x 24.5 cm.

other, this time in German, engraved on the stone parapet, is a prayer to God and a celebration of Art.44 The young artist looks directly at us from behind a parapet on which rest his palette and a book. One brush lays underneath the palette, its tip dotted in yellow. Ludger holds another brush with a red tip in his right hand and turns it upwards in an oddly twisted gesture. 44 “LOFF PRYS EER SI GODT ALLEIN / VAN WEM VNS ALLE GVET MOET SCHEIN / DORCH SINE GNAD HEB ICK MICH EVEN / GECONTERFETET AFF NAET LEVEN / EIN FIGVER / GLYCK ICK LEIT IN TIDEN / RECHT BOVEN STEIT TOR LVCHTREN SIDEN / IN KVNSTEN STEIT ALL MYN BEGEER / VAN RINGE MALEN ICK MI ERNEER.” “Praise, praise and honor be to God alone, from whom all the best must come. By His Grace I just painted myself from life. A figure, as I looked at this time, which is up here on the left side. After the art, all my desire is, from the Ring-paintings, I feed myself” (personal translation).

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The palette is quite complex: no less than eighteen pats of colors, neatly organized in three rows await the artist’s brush on a small rectangular palette. Between five and eight of these colors can be identified as grades for flesh modeling and the other colors are again black, grays, browns, white, vermilion, ochre, sienna and a bright yellow that may well be a lead-tin yellow. This almost obsessively clean and organized palette still does not allow any room for mixtures. Since the Münster master was especially renowned for his very precise still-lives and miniature portraits, it is likely that we find here the same kind of connection between the displayed palette and the actual practice of the artist that we saw in Catharina’s self-portrait.45 The book on the artist’s left could also be a reference to his activity as a miniature painter.46 This portrait gives us several important elements: first, that the artist’s self-representation with his tools, acting as an assertion of his profession and a statement of his commitment to Art, was a budding idea in the late 1540s. He had not gone as far as depicting himself “in the act” but proudly advertised his skills and declared his pledge to Painting. Second, that the depiction of tools were indeed used to enrich the artist’s image and complete it with extra meaning. Another painting with a painter at work, also produced in the Low Countries and quite close in date to Catharina’s Self-Portrait, is the Saint Luke Painting the Virgin by Haarlem artist Maerten van Heemskerck and painted c.1550 for the Saint Luke Guild of Delft. Like Catharina, Van Heemskerck’s Saint Luke holds a rectangular palette and brushes in his left hand and paints with his right. No less than thirteen heaps of colors are visible on the palette, including five values of ready-made flesh tones, black, some browns, vermilion, ochre, burnt sienna, probably a red lake and a very big pile of white. On a small area next to his left thumb are some traces of smudged paint that indicate some mixing was done or that the painter rubbed his brush there to remove the excess of paint. Either way, Van Heemskerck’s palette looks like an extended version of Catherina’s: more colors with a very small area for mixing (if any), all of which suggests that Catherina was not the only painter of her time to still use the old technique of color grades. The many brushes both Catharina and Maerten van Heemskerck’s Luke hold in their left hand might also echo this practice. Indeed, while painting, it is very convenient to work with one brush for each shade of color. This way, not only does one save time and pigments by avoiding having to clean one’s brush for every change of hue, but reserving a brush for each color preserves the purity of the shade. On the tip of each of Catharina van Hemessen’s brushes is a tiny dot a different color, ranging from grey to light pink and corresponding to the different grades on the palette. 45 For further consideration on Ludger tom Ring, see Lorenz, Die Maler tom Ring, vol. 2, 224–227. 46 Droz-Emmert, Catharina van Hemessen Malerin der Renaissance, 69 describes the book as a sketch book but it may also be either a reference to the artist’s intellect or a book of illumination.

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Figure 2.3. Maerten Van Heemskerck, Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, c.1550, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, oil on panel, 206 cm x 144 cm.

The size of the heap of white on Van Heemskerck’s palette is also very informative: it echoes an evolution of painting practice confirmed by modern scientific examination, that is the increasing amount of lead white used by Northern masters for modeling volumes. This change was the result of a simplification of the traditional Eyckian technique in order to accelerate the work speed by reducing glazing in favor of a more direct, wet-in-wet modeling.47 Also contrary to Catharina’s painting, Van Heemskerck’s depicts his painter without a mahlstick, perhaps an indication that he is working with ease and swiftness, without needing to steady his hand on a support. With his omission of a most emblematic tool, Van Heemskerck, who traveled to Italy in 1532 and endeavored to infuse his art with as much Italian flavor as possible, may 47 Dunkerton et al, Dürer to Veronese, 237.

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have tried to appropriate Baldassare Castiglione’s notion of “studied carelessness” or sprezzatura, defined in his Libro del Cortegiano (1528) as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”48 Finally, Sofonisba Anguissola signed many self-portraits. Unlike Catharina, Sofonisba lived the full life of a professional painter: apprenticed to Bernardino Campi (1522–1591), she went to Rome to refine her training and there met the greatest artists of her time (including Michelangelo). In 1559, she became court painter to Elisabeth of Valois, Queen of Spain and third wife of Philip II, and then to King Philip himself. When visiting Palermo in 1624, Anthony Van Dyck met her and drew her portrait. In his notebooks, the young Flemish artist speaks with great respect of the venerable painteress.49 In her large production of self-representations, two of them are in close chronological proximity to Catharina’s. The first is the Self-Portrait of the Uffizi, painted in 1552, when the young woman was just 20 years old, the same age Catharina was when she painted her image.50 This painting is quite similar to Ludger tom Ring’s, with the artist looking at us from behind a table, a scroll of paper in her right hand and 2 brushes in the left hand (the inversion may be due to the use of a mirror). On the table, rests a rectangular palette with a thumbhole, comparable to Catharina’s. On it, the colors are not very discernible but we see that the dots of paint are organized on one-half of the palette, leaving the area near the thumbhole empty. Dots of brown, black, and ocher on one side, red, and a bigger dot of white and another of yellow on the other side, and in between, intermediate colors, more indistinct but ranging in the light browns. On the palette, three more brushes are arranged. This portrait achieves the same goal as Ludger’s and advertise Sofonisba’s image as a (woman) painter. The reduced palette is set with the colors of flesh tones, the use of several brushes indicates a delicate technique but this early work does not elaborate further. Sofonisba’s other Self-Portrait c.1556 (Museum Zamek, Lancut) (Plate 2, Figure 2.2) shows the painteress seated in front of her easel, right hand holding a brush to the metapainting’s surface and resting on the mahlstick. This time, her left hand steadies the end of the stick, something perhaps necessary because the painting in Sofonisba self-portrait is not framed, and therefore offers no grip to the mahlstick on the painting’s side.51 48 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book I, chapter XXVI, 32: “[U]sar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte e dimostri ciò che si fa e dice venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi.” 49 Bianchini, Les autoportraits de Sofonisba Anguissola, online resource, np. 50 This is the Self-Portrait, 1552, oil on canvas, inv. A29, Uffizi, Florence. 51 There is an ongoing discussion regarding the potential influence of Catharina Van Hemessen’s SelfPortrait on Sofonisba Anguissola’s. See Droz-Emmert 82–92 or Woods-Marsden, 204–210. I would be inclined to believe that a direct influence is unlikely given the restricted nature of Catharina’s career. On the other hand, the emergence of this composition in Germany, Flanders and Italy on a time span of barely ten years is an indication of a larger European artistic preoccupation.

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Figure 2.4 Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait, c.1556, Museum Zamek, Lancut, oil on canvas, 66 cm x 57 cm.

Sofonisba’s palette is placed on the easel’s shelf, along with a knife and a quill. It is again a small and rectangular palette, with a thumbhole. Nevertheless, the setting of the palette is quite different from what observed before: four large dots of color (a grayish tinge on the far left side, then black, brown and vermilion) are arranged along the side, dividing the palette in two rows. Remarkably, the bottom row is this time not a lineup of color pats, but a long uninterrupted smudge grading from a dark color, almost black to red, then flesh color and finally white. This particular type of shading seems like a visual transposition of Alberti’s recommendations on how to apply light and shadow to a painted object: [C]olours take their variations from light, because all colours put in the shade appear different from what they are in the light. Shade makes colour dark; light,

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where it strikes, makes colour bright […] when light is lacking colour is lacking […] white and black [are] the two extremes of colour. [T]here are four genera of colours [lat. genus colorum], and these make their species [species ipsas creat] according to the addition of dark or light, black or white. 52

With her gradual shading from a dark gray to a red middle tone and finally to bright white, Sofonisba gives a clear visual interpretation of Alberti’s conceptualization of modeling in which a color type (genus colorum) is modified by the extremes of light and shadow (white and black) to create different species (we could say values) of the same color type. By the time Anguissola painted the Lancut Self-Portrait, Alberti’s De Pictura was becoming more popular and there is a good chance that, as a daughter from a well-to-do family, an artist who had contacts in the best scholarly circles, Sofonisba had the opportunity to study this text. As a young painteress eager to make a name for herself, it would have been a good strategy to broadcast an image emphasizing her theoretical understanding of painting. As for Catharina, her tools were exploited to give the viewer information about the principles that guided her hand.

Theory in Flesh What the palettes of Catharina Van Hemessen, Maerten Van Heemskerck, Sofonisba Anguissola, and to a lesser extent, Ludger tom Ring, have in common is that they all display colors and ready-made grades of mixtures to paint flesh, and only flesh. No blues or greens are visible and it is something they share with the vast majority of palettes depicted in paintings from the second half of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. That is quite a change from tradition because until c.1520, the large majority of palettes showed a set to paint blue draperies and the painter (Saint Luke) is portrayed painting Mary’s blue robe. Given the cost of the ultramarine pigment and the manifold symbolism that blue color carries, painters might have thought blue was the obvious choice of color to put in the hands of 52 Alberti, On Painting, 49. Recent research suggests that Alberti first wrote in Italian then reworked his text in latin. The Italian version of the passage reads: “Questo luogo m’amonisce a dire de’ colori insieme e de’ lumi. Parmi manifesto che i colori pigliano variazione dai lumi, poi che ogni colore posto in ombra pare non quello che è nel chiarore. Fa l’ombra il colore fusco, e il lume fa chiaro ove percuote. Dicono i filosafi nulla potersi vedere quale non sia luminato e colorato. Adunque tengono gran parentado i colori coi lumi a farsi vedere, e quanto sia grande vedilo, che mancando il lume mancano i colori, e ritornando il lume tornano i colori. Adunque parmi da dire prima de’ colori, poi investigheremo come sotto il lume si varino. Parliamo come pittore. Dico per la permistione de’ colori nascere infiniti altri colori, ma veri colori solo essere quanto gli elementi, quattro, dai quali più e più altre spezie d colori nascono. Fia colore di fuoco il rosso, dell’aere celestrino, dell’acqua il verde, e la terra bigia e cenericcia. Gli altri colori, come diaspri e porfidi, sono permistione di questi.. Adunque quattro sono generi di colori, e fanno spezie sue secondo se gli agiunga oscuro o chiarore, nero o bianco.”

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their patron saint. Of course, the fact that the very theme of the artist at work, once released from the religious sphere of the Saint Lukes, was first exploited as a (self-) portrait, with its logical emphasize of the face, would lead to a preference in showing the artist working with flesh colors. I believe this re-evaluation of the choice in palette setting in the middle of the sixteenth century suggests the dawn of a more important shift of paradigm. Painting flesh is an important item of artistic literature and the painter’s ability to create a seemingly live-colored flesh is among the first things celebrated in written art theory – and here, in art theory visualized. Vasari wrote about Giorgione “many of the most skilful artists […] agreed he had been born […] to reproduce the freshness of living flesh more than any other artist who had ever painted.”53 Apparently, there could be no higher praise than that. By the time Karel Van Mander wrote the Den grondt der edel vrij schilder-const (1604), flesh painting had become the example to demonstrate a painter’s skill at good coloring.54 In view of the rising predominance of the human figure and body as the noblest subject of painting, the ability to paint flesh well became one of the most – if not the most – important skill for a painter. Therefore, these palettes’ set up for flesh painting distinctly present the larger evolution in art theory where the values of costly and symbolic materials such as blue pigments and gold were gradually replaced by the new value of artistic skill and realism. Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait is a complex object of study. Its theme and transitional position in the history of Renaissance self-portraits suggests many levels of reading, in accordance with contemporary intellectual tradition. The examination of the tools and especially the painter’s palette reveal its potential as a source of information on Renaissance painting practice and painting conceptualization since observations on the visual evidences could be linked both to material information and written sources. The different comparisons discussed here underline several facts: first, there is little doubt that artists exploited their image “at work” to convey certain meanings. There was apparently no norm as to how the painter depicted his/her tools, which left room to express more personal opinions. Second, there is no uniformity in the way they used this freedom: Ludger tom Ring advertises his overzealous precision, Sofonisba Anguissola distinguishes herself by demonstrating knowledge of Alberti’s view on light and color, and Catharina Van Hemessen reconciles past and future, tradition and innovation in a composition that is bold and conservative at the same time.

53 Vasari (1550), The Lives of the Artists, 300: “[C]h’e’ fu cagione che molti di quegli che erano allora eccellenti confessassino lui esser nato per metter lo spirito ne le figure e per contraffar la freschezza de la carne viva più che nessuno che dipignesse.” 54 This is largely developed in Lehmann, Fleshing out the Body, 101–103.

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Filedt Kok, J.P. De heilige Lucas tekent en schildert de Madonna. Vossiuspers UvA, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006. Gage, J. Colour and Culture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. Gettens, R.J. & Stout, G.L. Painting Materials – A Short Encyclepedia, Lancaster: Lancaster Press. 1942. Guicciardini, L., Descrittione di tutti I Paesi Bassi, Antwerp, 1567. Accessed June 2018. https://www.ub.uniheidelberg.de/helios/digi/digilit.html Hall, J. The Self-Portait. A Cultural History. London, Thames & Hudson, 2014. Hawthorne, J.G. & Smith C.S. Theophilius, On Diverse Arts: The Foremost Medieval Treatise on Painting, Glassmaking, and Metalwork. New York: Dover Publications, 1979. Hilliard, N. The Arte of Limning. Ed. R.K.R. Thornton & T.G.S. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992. Kann, A. “Rogier’s St. Luke: Portrait of the Artist or Portrait of the Historian?” In Rogier van Der Weyden, St. Luke Drawing the Virgin: Selected Essays in Context. Ed. Carol J. Purtle, 15–22. Brepols, Turnhout, 1997. Lehmann, A-S. “Fleshing out the Body: The ‘Colours of the Naked’.” In Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 58. Eds. A. Lehmann & H. Roodenburg, 87–109. Zwolle: Waanders, 2008. Lorenz, A.(editor). Die Maler tom Ring. Münster, Westfälischen Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, 2 vols, 1996. Malet-Lannoy Hours, manuscript, W 281, c.1420–40 Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD. Manuscript HM 1173, c. 1425–1489, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Martens, D. “Du Saint Luc peignant la Vierge à la copie des maîtres: la ‘norme en acte’ dans la peinture flamande des XVe et XVIe siècles.” In Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, 3–50. Académie Royale d’Archéologie de Belgique, Bruxelles, vol. 74, 2005. Pastoureau, M. Bleu – Histoire d’une couleur. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Périer-d’Ieteren, C. “Le portrait à Bruxelles au tournant du XVe siècle.” In L’héritage de Van der Weyden – La peinture à Bruxelles 1450–1520. Ed. Bücken, V. & Steyaert, G., 67–80. Tielt, Lannoo, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles, 2013. Pliny, Natural History. Accesssed February 2019. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/ Pliny_the_Elder/home.html Norgate, E. Miniatura or The Art of Limning. Ed. Martin Hardie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919. Raynor, R.E. In the Image of Saint Luke: The Artist in Early Byzantium. PhD thesis in Philosophy, University of Sussex, 2012. Rombouts, Ph. & van Lerius, Th. (editors). De liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche sint Lucasgilde van 1453–1615, Antwerpen, 1872–1876. Accessed June 2018. https://archive.org/stream/deliggerenenand00lukagoog/deliggerenenand00lukagoog_djvu.txt Turner, N. The J. Paul Getty Collections – European Drawings .4 – Catalogue of the collections. Los Angeles: Getty Institute, 2001. Vasari, G. (1550) The Lives of the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Vasari, G. (1568) Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects Volume IX. De Vere, G. (transl.). Warner, P.L. (Publ.), London, 1915. Verougstraete, H. Frames and Supports in 15th and 16th Century Southern Netherlandish painting. Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage & Getty Foundation Panel Initiative, Brussels, e-book. Accessed June 2018. http://org.kikirpa.be/frames/ Wadum, J. “Historical Overview of Panel-Making Techniques in the Northern Countries.” In The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings: Proceedings of a Symposium at the J. Paul Getty Museum April 1995, 160. Los Angeles, Getty, 1995. White, E.M. “Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, and the Making of the Netherlandish St. Luke Tradition.” In Rogier van Der Weyden, St. Luke Drawing the Virgin: Selected Essays in Context. Ed. Carol J. Purtle, 39–49. Brepols, Turnhout, 1997.

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Woodall, J. “Honour and Profit. Antonis Mor and the Status of Portraiture.” In Nederlandse Portretten. Bijdragen over de portretkunst in de Nederlanden uit de zestiende, zeventiende en achttiende eeuw. 69–89. Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, VIII, 1989, ‘S-Gravenhage, SDU Uitgeverij. Woods-Marsden, J. Renaissance Self-Portraiture. New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1998.

About the Author Céline Talon is an independent painting conservator and instructor of Art History at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.

3. By Candlelight

Uncovering Early Modern Women’s Creative Uses of Night1



Nicole Elizabeth Cook Abstract This essay poses the question of how night was uniquely important for early modern women by examining the nocturnally-themed artwork of Dutch painters Judith Leyster (1609–1660) and Gesina ter Borch (1633–1690). Their artwork indicates that both Leyster and Ter Borch used night practically to study nocturnal visual effects. In addition, their imagery resonates with the period’s emerging concept of night as a romanticized time for creative labor and private introspection. Comparing Leyster’s and Ter Borch’s depictions of night alongside relevant literary examples and cultural contexts highlights the pragmatic advantage of nocturnal work for creative women and the growing connection between night, emotion, and inspiration in early modern Europe. Keywords: Dutch Baroque art; The Netherlands; night, nocturnal imagery; women artists

Night gained practical and philosophical importance in early modern Europe as lighting technologies became increasingly affordable and urban growth stimulated habits of staying up later and doing more after dark. This study poses the question of how night might have been uniquely important for early modern women throughout this process of nocturnalization.2 I propose that the nighttime was a period when women were freer to engage in personal creative activities and that many artistically inclined women were inspired by the growing connection made in the early modern 1 This essay is an expanded version of a conference paper developed for the panel “Women Artists and Feminist Historiography in and of the Netherlands,” organized by Elizabeth Sutton for the Southeast College Art Conference in October 2017. I would like to thank Elizabeth for her conception and organization of that stimulating panel and for her efforts with transforming the panel into this publication. I also thank Elizabeth for her perceptive feedback as an editor and my thanks as well to all of the book contributors, especially to Amy Frederick and Arthur DiFuria, for productive conversations on the topic of women artists and patrons in the early modern Low Countries. My colleagues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in particular Christopher Atkins, Matthew Affron, Alexander Kauffman, Mark Castro, and Alexandra Letvin, also offered helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 Craig Koslofsky discusses this process of the turn toward the night in early modern European culture in depth, naming the trend nocturnalization. Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 1–18. Sutton, E. (ed.), Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, Amsterdam University Press 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789463721400_ch03

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period between night, emotion, and creativity. Today, women still must work longer hours to make the same pay as their male peers and women continue to take on a larger burden of household labor.3 Looking backward, women in the 1600s were already attuned to night’s ability to extend the day and provide a refuge for personal creativity. When I began this research two prominent examples emerged from the visual art of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century: the nocturnal imagery of Judith Leyster (1609–1660) in the first part of the 1600s and that of Gesina ter Borch (1633–1690) later in the century. My larger research delves into the expanding nocturnal experiences of urban societies in seventeenth-century Northern Europe and how artists and writers reflected and informed this new nighttime culture. For artists in the 1600s, tales of lost masterpieces of nocturnal art from antiquity coincided with new innovations in chiaroscuro lighting and explorations of nighttime imagery by Caravaggio, Rubens, and their artistic circles.4 Women were often the subjects of seventeenth-century nocturnal paintings made by men, for instance in the intimate scenes of women lit by candles and oil lamps painted by Gerrit Dou, Frans van Mieris, and Godefridus Schalcken. These paintings play on the titillating appeal of allowing the presumed male viewer into the interior private spaces of women during the hushed quiet of the midnight hours. However, women’s actual experience of night – in particular their potential use of night for creative activities – is still seldom discussed. Leyster and Ter Borch are now two of the most well-known female artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Yet they are rarely included in scholarly work on nocturnal art, which speaks to the tendency to separate their work away from the trends of the period and treat their art as exceptional.5 Initial research indicates that both Leyster and Ter Borch used night practically to study nocturnal visual effects. In addition, their imagery resonates with the period’s emerging concept of night as a romanticized time for creative labor and emotional introspection. Leyster and Ter Borch also act as productive counterpoints through the key differences in their historical moments, personal lives, economic standings, and approaches to artistic practice. Leyster sought out and established a career as a professional guild-affiliated artist who produced oil paintings for the art market and engaged with the artistic trends that guided her male peers. Ter Borch – who has often been referred to in art historical literature as Gesina to differentiate her from her artist brothers – in contrast, was confined to the position of a well-off lady “amateur” whose greater economic position allowed her the time and freedom to 3 On the wage gap, see for instance, AAUW, “The Simple Truth.” On the unequal breakdown of household labor, see Gershuny, “Gender Symmetry.” 4 I examine this trend in my forthcoming book manuscript, Nocturnal Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age: Godefridus Schalcken and the Rise of Candlelight Painting (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2020); see also Müller Hofstede, “Artificial Light in Honthorst and Terbrugghen: Form and Iconography,” 13–44. 5 Important exceptions are Frima Hofrichter’s and Anna Tummer’s discussions of Leyster’s avant-garde use of nocturnal lighting effect. See Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, 24–25, 47; and Tummers, Judith Leyster, 12–15.

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make art yet also hindered her early training and prevented a public artistic career.6 Despite these differences, the interest in night and nocturnal imagery are noteworthy in both Leyster’s and Ter Borch’s bodies of work. An attraction toward night, moreover, emerges in the work of female writers in the Netherlands during the same era, including Anna Roemers Visscher (1584–1651) and, later, Katharyne Lescailje (or Catharina Lescaille) (1649–1711). Collecting and comparing textual and visual depictions of night by seventeenth-century Netherlandish women highlights the pragmatic advantage of working into the late hours for creatively oriented women and these women’s affinity for the ethereal beauty of night.

Written Accounts of Women Using Night for Creative Activities My interest in how early modern women turned to the late hours to make creative work was sparked by the letters and diary entries of Italian writer Laura Cereta (1469– 1499). Cereta wrote regularly about her rare freedom at night. Throughout her letters, she developed a concept of her practice of reading, writing, and producing needlework at night as her vigiliae, her night watches, or vigils.7 She confided in a friend that “I have no leisure time for my own writing and studies unless I use the nights as productively as I can.”8 Referring in one letter to an ambitious needlework project, she wrote that “my firm rule, of saving night for forbidden work, has allowed me to design a canvas that contains a harmonious composition of colors. The work has taken three months of sleepless nights.”9 Cereta also connected her needlework with “higher” creative activities like painting and writing. She compared herself with classical examples of creative women, such as Arachne of Colophon, the famed weaver and orator who challenged the skill of the gods.10 Cereta’s reference of saving “night for forbidden work” points toward the practical necessity of using night to produce her personal creative projects.

6 In this paper I shorten my references to Gesina ter Borch as Ter Borch, her last name, following the convention of male artists. When referring to her father or brothers, I use their full names or first names to avoid confusion. 7 “[C]hartas vigils…” Cereta uses the term vigiliae for her nocturnal work sessions throughout her letters. Cereta, Laura Cereta, 75 and note 38. 8 “Nullum a me dari potest omnino litteris ocium, nisi sub vegetissimo somno, dormiam minimum: Tanta est parsimonia temporis apud eos, qui suis aeque ac sibi solertiae non minus, quam laboris impendunt.” Cereta, Cereta and Tomasinus, Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis, 13. As translated in Cereta, Laura Cereta, 31. 9 “Sed furatrix horarum vigilantia divisium die toto spatium inuenit, in quo, post noctis multae lucernam, tursus matutina me agam; Nunquam enim primae labentis diei tenebrae litter as fallunt; Redeuntis aute orientis prim a fax, illuso acu picta veliculo, datur. Sic tenax laboris improbi ratio telam hanc interfilari colorum reciprocatione distinxit. Opus trimestris lucubrationis hoc fuit…” Cereta in Cereta and Tomasinus, Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis, 13. As translated in Cereta, Laura Cereta, 32–33. 10 Diana Robin, in Cereta, Laura Cereta, 31.

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Crucially, Cereta’s descriptions also allude to her special sensory experience of creating after dark, examining colors by the glow of a candle. Although she writes about feeling conflicted that she is crafting sumptuous “decadent” decorations, she clearly felt great pride in her visual, as well as her written work, ending her letter by stating “these then are the things that I have made with my own hands before the first rays of the dawning day [emphasis mine].”11 In this early morning pre-dawn darkness, Cereta’s needlework shawl must have shimmered and shone by candlelight as she gradually built up its intricate details including a “writhing crested dragon” with “fiery eyes” and a “Golden Phoebus, high above all, illuminat[ing] a silvery, crescent moon with his streaming beams of light.”12 Cereta’s nuanced discussion of the shawl’s visual details and her inclusion of a moon-lit sky subtly suggest that her experiences of working at night, her vigiliae, informed as well as facilitated her creative work. Moving forward in time, the writing of seventeenth-century Netherlandish women also reveal a bond between the quiet and freedom that the late night afforded and women’s creativity. Looking to women’s writings in the Netherlands supplements what we know about the practices of visual artists and the scarce evidence that we have about women’s working habits and intellectual interests. In general terms, seventeenth-century women writers in the Netherlands came from the upper classes, where their elite economic status allowed for the education and free time necessary for developing a literary practice. This echoes the situation of women visual artists – both professional and amateur.13 Judith Leyster is exceptional in that she came from a merchant class family and pursued economic gain in the market from her art. However, Leyster largely gave up her public painting career after her marriage, which is consistent with evidence that many women writers and other creative types drastically reduced or stopped their artistic practices post-marriage. Several of the best known and most prolific female writers married later or remained unmarried throughout their lives. Gesina ter Borch followed this pattern of the unmarried creative woman. While she had a close friendship and possible courtship with Amsterdam-based merchant and poet Hendrik Joris early on in her life, she remained unmarried and lived her entire life in her parents’ house on the Sassenstraat in Zwolle, where she died on 16 April 1690. Although it is impossible to know the details of why Ter Borch ultimately did not marry, her single status allowed her increased personal time and the ability to develop a sustained creative practice. In poetry written by women during this period, a recurring theme is the tension between writing and the demands of

11 “Haec ea sunt, quae anto illucescentes diei radios meis manibus feci: Quas aute ante primam quietem recensuerim Musas, testis est Epistolarum grande volumen, quod libraria nune elementatim format impressio.” Cereta in Cereta and Tomasinus, Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis, 16. As translated in Cereta, Laura Cereta, 34. 12 “…Sed aureus in summon Phoebus argenteam corniculatamque Lunam intercursantibus radiis illustrat…” Cereta in Cereta and Tomasinus, Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis, 16. As translated in Cereta, Laura Cereta, 34. 13 Diana Robin, in Cereta, Laura Cereta, 31.

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domestic responsibilities, which echoes Cereta’s earlier writings about her need to use the night to “steal time for her intellectual and creative work.14 Women’s creative activities in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, as emphasized by Elizabeth Honig, should be considered in the context of the broadly creative and artistically sensitive culture that thrived during this era.15 Honig stresses that the divisions between professional artists and amateur artists were porous in the Netherlands during the 1600s and amateurs were not dismissed in the ways that they would be in the modern era. While major barriers existed for women who wanted to have creative pursuits, a wealth of alternative systems existed for learning about, making, and appreciating art and women’s artistic endeavors were also appreciated by their social circles, and, at times, by the market as well. As Honig emphasizes, the roadblocks that creative women faced in the early modern period resulted in Dutch women valuing and pursuing ingenuity and “inventive diversity” in their creative work.16 Singing, songwriting and playing music, crafting intricate paper cutouts, and etching decorative elements into glass, like the needlework that Cereta discusses, were not traditionally in line with the “higher” professionalized and monetized arts of painting and poetry. Yet, early modern Netherlandish society had begun to value these creative skills as cultural and social currency, which sometimes carried monetary value as well. With regard to nocturnal writing practices specifically, Amsterdam-based writer Anna Roemers Visscher reveals her practice of sitting up at night to craft her poetry.17 In several poems, Roemers Visscher used the trope of writing well into the night and only stopping when her exhaustion overtook her. One such poem is dedicated to her friend Jacob Cats.18 These poems underscore the practical and philosophical importance of night for Roemers Visscher’s creative process. Despite the encumbrances of night, Roemers Visscher was drawn to use the quiet late hours to write to her friends and acquaintances. Moreover, she recreated her experience of night for her readers by using evocative and sensory-rich descriptions. After she remembered that she owed Cats a poem one evening, by then after darkness had fallen, she took her notebook, pen, and ink, and put herself to writing (“zette mij tot schrijven”). But, as she 14 See discussion by Grootes and Schenkeveld-Van Der Dussen in Hermans, ed., A Literary History, 287–88. See also the example of Dutch poet Catharina Questiers (1630–1669) who wrote in a poem addressed to her companion Cornelia van der Veer on the occasion of her marriage in 1664. Questiers states that marriage and freedom cannot coexist and that she will stop writing. Questiers follows this up by writing that her decision is not a sad one because she will receives sweet love in return. Questiers, whether out of choice or not, apparently wrote almost nothing after her wedding. Van Gemert, “Hiding Behind Words?” 17–18. 15 Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’,” 31–39. 16 Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’,” 37. 17 Anna Roemers Visscher, “To the Highly Learned and Renowned Poet Daniel Heinsius. After Reading on the Previous Evening his Hymn to our Lord Jesus Christ,” in van Gemert, et. al. Women’s Writing, 236–37. 18 Anna Roemers Visscher, “To the Learned Gentleman Jacob Cats,” in van Gemert, et. al. Women’s Writing, 238–39.

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recounts with humor, nothing went right. She writes that her book kept falling shut and that then her quill tip dulled and started bleeding ink through the page: I had no way to trim my candlewick, No snuffers that would help me keep its low flame fed. Death’s sister then appeared and dragged me off to bed.19

In both Cereta’s letters and Roemers Visscher’s poems, they describe the night as particularly suited to their creative work because of its quiet and seclusion, despite the difficulty of working at night, fighting exhaustion and being hampered by the inadequate lighting of candles and oil lamps. Or, as each woman’s writing seems to suggest, because of this difficulty, their fruits of their nocturnal labors are all the more pleasurable and impressive. Written accounts of early modern women’s choice to take advantage of the still hours of night for creative endeavors is equally applicable to female painters. Nocturnal labor and the link between night and diligent learning were pervasive ideas in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. Gerrit Dou’s depictions of “night schools,” or lessons taking place in the evening, feature both girls and boys learning alongside one another by the glow of candles, oil lamps, and lanterns.20 In Dou’s Night School, created in 1664 or early 1665, a schoolmaster guides a young girl in her reading by the glow of a large candle, which displays Dou’s skill with artificial light and alludes to the conceptual light of understanding. Elsewhere in the painting, an older girl holds another candle and takes over as the teacher for a boy sitting beside her. Dou explicitly linked his scenes of nocturnal study and labor with his erudite ideas about the importance of artistic study and labor. Earlier in the 1600s, when artists were still actively experimenting with the types of subjects best suited to nocturnal settings, Leyster explored the contrasts between using night for pleasure-seeking versus for productive, contemplative, and creative acts.

Judith Leyster as an Early Innovator in Artificial Light Leyster linked herself with the night in developing her monogram of a “J” crossed with a star, a pun on her family name, which comes from the word for a lodestar or comet. Leyster’s monogram referenced her family (her father owned a brewery called 19 “[‘K] En had geen snuiter, en mijn kaars die branded duister. / De zuster van de dood die sleepte mij naar bed…” Anna Roemers Visscher, “To the Learned Gentleman Jacob Cats,” in van Gemert, et. al. Women’s Writing, 238–39. 20 Baer, et al., Gerrit Dou, 120–21.

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“de Leystar”), and alluded to her as a “leading star” of the artistic scene.21 As a savvy painter and businesswoman, Leyster emulated and explored variants of already-popular nocturnal themes.22 Her nocturnal paintings demonstrate her engagement with the new interest in artificial light that was sweeping through Europe’s artistic communities in the early 1600s, from Italy to France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Paintings such as Leyster’s Serenade of 1629 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. 2326), with its hidden light source and unusual effect of lighting the boy’s face from below, demonstrate her engagement with the concept of using nocturnal lighting to create innovatively realistic effects. She may have looked to Haarlem artist Pieter de Grebber’s experimentation with similar lighting effects in the early 1620s, to the Utrecht Caravaggisti, or to other Haarlem artists working with night scenes, such as Dirck Hals, Jan Miense Molenaer (her future husband), and Adriaen van Ostade. Leyster probably considered as many sources as she could find to stay competitive on the market and to advance and challenge her artistic abilities. Leyster often heightened the ambiguity of positive versus negative behavior at night, leaving viewers to determine a work’s meanings through a contemplative process of looking. In Leyster’s nocturnal paintings, men appear almost exclusively as nocturnal revelers. Women sometimes join in the fun but more often use their nights to work productively. Leyster’s nocturnal paintings, while stylized, reflect her artistic practice of studying the visual effects of night and artificial lighting. She developed her sensitivity to the aesthetics of nocturnal light and darkness to advance her interest in creating hushed moments of suspended time and narrative ambiguity – a subtheme distinct from her self-fashioning as a painter of boisterous scenes of merry-making. Leyster and Molenaer, like their artistic peers in the Netherlands, were intensely interested in optical effects and in the creation of convincing depictions of reality in paint, and this included the unique mode of viewing at night. In the house inventory created at the time of Molenaer’s death in 1668, there was a telescope (een verrekijker) listed among the objects in her painting studio, along with paintings, frames, plaster casts, painter’s tools, a violin, and a screen (een schut).23 While it is impossible to know exactly how Molenaer and Leyster used their telescope, it is within the realm of possibility that it marks their interest in the night sky and with the newly fashionable activity of star-gazing during the era. While no nocturnal landscapes by Leyster are known, her portrayals of a spectrum of nocturnal activities and of the visual effects of created by night should be viewed in the context of her own artistic practice. Her interest in the heightened effects of light and shadow created by artificial light and 21 Hofrichter, “The Eclipse of a Leading Star,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 115–16. 22 See Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’,” 31–39. 23 The inventory is preserved in the Haarlem Municipal Archives, Notary W. Kittensteyn, vol. 313. See Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, 87–103; Hofrichter, “A Telescope in Haarlem,” in Schneider, Robinson, and Davies, Shop Talk, 114–17.

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Figure 3.1. Judith Leyster, A Game of Tric-Trac, about 1630. Oil on panel. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, 1983.58 (Gift of Robert and Mary S. Cushman). © Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, USA / Bridgeman ­Images.

the mysterious atmosphere of night scenes clearly show her dedication to studying, recording, and modulating the optical effects of night for its aesthetic effect and narrative power. Leyster’s A Game of Tric-Trac (Figure 3.1/Plate 4) presents a woman and two men smoking and drinking while they enjoy a late night game of cards. For this painting, Leyster was innovative in her treatment of both the stylistic and narrative elements. While A Game of Tric-Trac portrays a woman out late at night, indulging her senses in the company of men, nothing specifically marks her as a sex worker. On the contrary, she wears the modest clothing of an average middle-class young woman. The woman also takes on an active role as a player in the game of tric-trac, a variant of backgammon. She and the man in blue sit closest to the light of the oil lamp

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and are thus most likely the active players, while the man in the middle spectates.24 When viewed in tandem with literary evidence about young people socializing at night by the early 1600s, Leyster’s painting depicts a woman who could potentially be virtuous enjoying the new freedoms of nighttime culture. Leyster also continued her aesthetic exploration of artificial light, here giving over a large portion of her painting to complete darkness and visually translating the artificial lighting’s effect of creating shallow pools of bright artificial light that quickly falls away into shadow. The painting plays on traditional tropes of sexually available women as among the many vices facing young men, which also included game playing, tobacco, and alcohol. However, A Game of Tric-Trac also depicts its female character as fully enjoying her sensual indulgences, perhaps picturing night as a state of exception for women as well as for men. Leyster’s picturing of merry late-night carousing is similar to and yet distinct from her depictions of exclusively masculine arenas of nocturnal revelry. In The Last Drop (Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection), the two young men are visibly drunk, one having drained his tankard of beer while his companion chugs a larger vessel in an ill-defined stage-like space.25 With their festive costumes pulled over their regular clothes, they are celebrating vastonavond, the night before Lent. Their unseen companion, a skeleton holding a skull, raises an hourglass behind them. Leyster’s use of artificial lighting in The Last Drop is ambitious and she devotes a major portion of the canvas to the abstracted shadow patterns cast onto the floor and walls. The strong highlights outlining the figure’s faces, almost in silhouette, adhere to the advice of Netherlandish painter and art writer Karel van Mander. Van Mander wrote in his book on painting, published in 1604, that candlelight is a “rare thing” and “difficult to fashion” in paint. He recommended that it is most successful when the painter places the entire figure in shadow and then allows “candlelight to rake only the exposed edge of hair or clothing.”26 For A Game of Tric-Trac, Leyster creates a more complex composition and thrust the figures into deeper darkness than in The Last Drop, using the light of the oil lamp on the table to occlude the figure into almost black shadow. The woman’s presence in A Game of Tric-Trac also presents a more complicated and ambiguous narrative than in The Last Drop.

24 Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, 50; and Kortenhorst-Von Bogendorf Rupprath, “A Game of Tric-Tric,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 174. 25 The painting was attributed to Frans Hals until 1903 when someone finally noticed Leyster’s monogram “JL” on the tankard. Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, catalog no. 10. See also Atkins, “The Last Drop (The Gay Cavalier) by Judith Leyster (cat. 440),” in Atkins, ed., The John G. Johnson Collection, accessed 15 September 2018, https:// doi.org/10.29075/9780876332764/102220/1. 26 Karel van Mander, quoted in Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 71–72.

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Scholars have argued that the woman in A Game of Tric-Trac is most likely a prostitute, based on her presence in what is apparently the front room in a tavern and her active participation in the group’s drinking and smoking.27 At this period in the 1620s and 1630s, a woman risked ruining her modest reputation if family and friends caught her frequenting public places late at night.28 Unlike the women in the candlelit tavern scenes that Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick ter Brugghen made in the 1620s, who wear extremely low-cut bodices, this woman wears a dress with full-length sleeves and the kind of demure short white cape often seen in domestic settings. If this woman is a prostitute, Leyster has depicted her as playing the very specific role of a apparently proper woman. In reality, people in the early modern Netherlands often commented on the frisson between prostitutes’ fashionable clothing and other aspects that revealed their position among the poor and working classes.29 In Leyster’s painting, the woman’s appeal stems instead from the juxtaposition of her modest dress with her suspect location and behavior. She blushes deeply as she hands the pipe, rife with sexual connotations, to her male adversary. The woman’s blush, enhanced by the lamplight, also physically signals her enjoyment of her nighttime antics. The complex interplay of light and shadow on the figures and their dynamic poses suggest that Leyster drew from her own careful observations of nocturnal lighting effects as well as from other artists experimenting with nocturnal imagery in same years, such as Molenaer and Amsterdam-based Willem Cornelisz Duyster.30 Leyster’s experimentation with depicting a woman’s enjoyment of nocturnal socialization is another example of her interest in artistic risk-taking and innovation. Leyster’s use of narrative ambiguity to suggest that a woman might be virtuous and yet could also participate in nighttime recreation, possibly to her own detriment, speaks to her recognition of her and other women’s use of night for diverse personal endeavors, including both amusement and creative work.

Depicting Female Creativity in Leyster’s Paintings of Women Sewing at Night Leyster’s paintings of women engaged with needlework at night are among her most intriguing works and portray female characters deeply concentrated on creative labor. The mood in these works is often mysterious with narratives that, like the one in A Game of Tric-Trac, are purposefully open-ended. 27 See Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, 50; and Kortenhorst-Von Bogendorf Rupprath, “A Game of Tric-Trac,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 174–75. 28 Van der Pol, “The Whore, the Bawd, and the Artist,”; and van der Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, 2011. 29 See note 14 in van der Pol, “The Whore, the Bawd, and the Artist.” 30 Kortenhorst-Von Bogendorf Rupprath, “A Game of Tric-Trac,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 174–81.

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Figure 3.2. Judith Leyster, Man Offering Money to a Young Woman (The Proposition), 1631. Oil on wood panel, 30.8 x 24.2 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague, inv. no. 564. © Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Leyster’s painting now often titled The Proposition (figure 2) depicts a woman sewing by lamplight while a man looms behind her, offering coins. Frima Fox Hofrichter has argued that the painting represents Leyster’s critical response to brothel scenes of the period by showing a virtuous woman turning away from a man trying to bribe

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her with money for sex.31 Wayne Franits has suggested that the painting instead follows traditions of unequal love, with the man attempting to buy the love and marriage of a younger woman.32 I believe that the narrative content of The Proposition is purposefully ambiguous, as it is in A Game of Tric-Trac. Leyster’s use of ambiguity in many of her paintings highlights her active participation in the intellectual debates of the period amongst groups of liefhebbers van de Schilderkonst (“lovers of the Art of Painting”), learned amateurs who studied the art of painting in order to converse with other art lovers and artists. Liefhebbers valued the sustained process of looking at a work of art and discussing its potential meanings with one another. Leyster’s complex, sometimes mysterious imagery was suited to just such a process. Several scholars have highlighted the image’s suspended sense of time and Anna Tummers notes that over half of the composition is given over to studying the interplay of light and dark.33 Leyster exploited the dramatic shapes of the cast shadows from the figures and contrasted the brightest yellow-hued highlights in the painting with her subtle depiction of the red glow of the foot warmer. The precise relationship of the two figures is unclear largely because of the woman’s complete self-contained state. Her thoughts are impenetrable by either the man at her shoulder or the viewer. Thus her work and her thoughts both remain uninterrupted. The Proposition also fits into a genre of images of women working diligently, while men attempt to distract them.34 In contemporary travel accounts, visitors often commented on the business savvy and work ethic of Dutch women.35 In William Mountague’s travel guide The Delights of Holland, published in 1696, he writes that Dutch women were more commonly found in shops and businesses than their male counterparts because of their education, diligence, and “genius” for commerce: The Men take all the Pleasure, they go to Coffee-Houses, Taverns and Treats, walk or ride in Chases abroad, play much at Cards, sit up Gaming and Feuding greatest part of Night; and all is well, the good Wife gets and the Husband spends the Money […] they let the Boys shift for themselves, they say they can best do it.36

Leyster’s depictions of female nighttime revelry show that the social reality was more complex. However, the contrast between male desire and female industry in The Proposition and the male world of foolish excess in The Last Drop seem to point toward 31 Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, 26–27; 47. 32 Kortenhorst-Von Bogendorf Rupprath, “A Game of Tric-Trac,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 168–69. 33 Tummers, Judith Leyster, 12–15. Tummers also thanks Arthur Wheelock for his observations about Leyster’s bold use of shadow in The Proposition. 34 Wieseman, Vermeer’s Women, 44; 55–56. 35 Wieseman, Vermeer’s Women, 44; see also Kloek, “The Case of Judith Leyster: Exception or Paradigm,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 55–67. 36 Mountague, The Delights of Holland, 183–84.

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Figure 3.3. Judith Leyster, A Woman Sewing, 1633. Current location unknown, previously Collection Guy Stein, Paris, in 1937.

such observations. Whether Leyster was commenting on a perceived reality of shiftless Dutch men and industrious Dutch women, or whether she was painting to assert herself as a professional artist and appeal to her potential market of art buyers is far more difficult to determine. One known fact is that Leyster took on a managing role for Molenaer’s artistic career after their marriage in 1636, exercising just this kind of professional acumen.37 Hofrichter has also recently suggested that the rediscovery of a flower still life signed and dated by Leyster, “Judith. molenaers 1654,” indicates that she might have continued painting, but shifted her focus to refined still lives as 37 Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’,” 3; Kloek, “The Case of Judith Leyster: Exception or Paradigm,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 55–67.

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a way to divvy up the market with Molenaer.38 This would also explain the decline of nocturnal imagery in her later career. Leyster’s images of figures sitting at home sewing were both artificial ideals of Dutch motherhood and reflections of lived reality.39 In a small, now lost, painting known as A Woman Sewing (Figure 3.3), probably from around 1633, she depicted the kind of close-up, intimate access to a woman in the private act of sewing at night that male artists would explore decades later in the 1660s and 1670s. Images of women sewing or engaged in needlework frequently emphasize the connections between sight, aesthetics, and night. In Geertruyd Roghman’s engraving of two women sewing from a decade later, for instance, two women are sewing beside one another as the late afternoon sun hits them.40 However, they have a large free-standing candlestick waiting for them as dusk approaches. In these and other images of women sewing, the figures often seem to be in caught in a state that mixes intense concentration and internal rumination. Leyster’s women sewing at night capture this same mixture of focus on the task at hand and contemplative visual experience. Leyster’s women sewing depicts them in a similar state of creative distraction as that seen in the nocturnal images of male scholars and artists that grew popular during the 1630s, and which Dou would focus on in works such as his A Young Artist Drawing by Lamplight, from ca. 1650–55 (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). The state of being caught between active creative labor and passive imagination is manifest in the act of needlework as well as the act of drawing. In the same way that Anna Roemers Visscher’s poems about her act of writing at night serve as entry points into her nocturnal creative practice, Leyster’s portrayals of women’s meditative work at night should be viewed in the context of her own artistic practice as a painter of night scenes. The paintings are evidence of Leyster’s process of looking closely and thinking deeply at night to study the effects of light and dark that she so deftly recreated. Moreover, in these works she affirmed her position as a master of nocturnal imagery through lived experience, similar to the way that she presented herself as a master of humorous scenes of merry-making through the painting-within-a-painting in her Self-Portrait of about 1630 (National Gallery, Washington D.C.).

38 Frans Hals Museum, “Unique painting by Judith Leyster rediscovered, to be shown in the upcoming exhibition,” press release, published 12 December 2009 on CODART. 39 Wieseman, Vermeer’s Women, 55–59; and see Medick, “Village Spinning Bees,” 334. 40 For a discussion of Roghman’s larger series of women’s activities, see Peacock, “Geertruydt Roghman,” 3–10.

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Gesina ter Borch’s Interest in Nocturnal Aesthetics and Nighttime Social Narratives Roughly two decades after Leyster participated in the surge of nocturnal imagery that appeared in the 1620s and 1630s, Gesina ter Borch took up nocturnal subjects in several of her small-scale drawings and watercolors in the 1650s. Three interrelated nocturnal scenes focus primarily on the theme of nocturnal romance and the new possibilities for courting at night that arose during the seventeenth century (figures 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6). Ter Borch grew up in a highly artistic family in Zwolle that included her brother, painter Gerard ter Borch. Her books of collected drawings, watercolors, and writings present her broad artistic engagement with her immediate social world. While Leyster produced her large-scale oil paintings primarily for the market, Ter Borch produced her intimate watercolors and drawings to be bound in books, thereby encouraging private, intimate viewing in small groups, possibly just her and one other friend or family member. Moreover, Ter Borch’s nocturnal scenes reveal her sensitivity to the expanding social possibilities of night, in particular for women, which had perceptibly expanded between the 1620s and the 1650s.41

Gesina ter Borch’s Oeuvre and Artistic Training Ter Borch’s father, Gerard Senior, took great care with the artistic training of his sons, as evidenced by the scores of annotations and corrections that he made to their drawings. However, only two of Gesina ter Borch’s drawings contain her father’s notes. This indicates that Ter Borch did not receive the same kind of dedicated training from her father. She probably learned to draw alongside her younger brothers Harmen and Moses while she acted as their mentor and critic.42 Because she was not seen as a potential professional artist-in-training but rather as a future wife and mother, Ter Borch began her artistic study relatively late, as a fourteen or fifteenyear-old. In contrast, her brothers all began drawing as small children. Ter Borch’s oeuvre consists of three large illustrated book projects, with each one more ambitious than the last. Her first album, titled the Materi-boeck, was begun while she was a teenager and grew out of her study of calligraphy. She began her Poetry Album on the eighteenth of November 1652, a few days after she turned twenty-one. She completed the book about eight years later. She started her last known project, the large Art Book (Konstboek), in 1660 and continued to compile both her own drawings and 41 On the complex gendered dimensions of the rise of nocturnal culture, see, for example, Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 174–197. 42 Kettering, Drawings, vol 2, 362–63.

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Figure 3.4. Gesina ter Borch, A Man Courting a Lady (Heer die een dame het hof maakt), 1658–59. Ink and brush on paper, 313 x 204mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, BI-1890–1952–94(R). © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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watercolors and the works of other artists. Ter Borch explored nocturnal imagery in successive stages throughout her artistic development. Ter Borch organized her Poetry Album around preexisting poems, most of which would have been sung aloud and were popular song lyrics at the time. Generally, poets of the seventeenth century Netherlands set their songs to preexisting melodies, which were well known and reused again and again.43 Ter Borch seems to have focused on songs already familiar to her and probably popular with her friends and family. Akin to earlier creators of illuminated manuscripts, Ter Borch carefully composed each transcribed text with a corresponding composition. While her books contain a range of narrative content, love poems featuring Petrarchan tropes of temperamental young men yearning after inaccessible young women abound.44

Poetic Narratives of Nocturnal Romance and Aesthetic Stylization of ­Nocturnal Imagery In Ter Borch’s Poetry Album on folio 94, she illustrated a poem about a Spanish Brabander, a man from the southern Spanish-controlled Netherlands, courting Elisabeth, a northerner, or Hollander, with a grisaille ink wash drawing of a foppishly dressed young man bowing before a young woman at the edge of her family’s doorway (Figure 3.4). In the poem, the Brabander greets Elisabeth in a mishmash of Dutch and French: “Good evening, Betty, love, I say, I, I, I am your slave…ready tout jour to do your pleasure.” Elisabeth pokes fun at her suitor’s “droll speech and inflated compliment.”45 The central narrative of the young lovers verbally sparring is full of lively yet light provocation. Elisabeth’s suitor begs “his Betty” for a kiss, but she finally sends him away, telling him to go back to his “Venus-birds” and to leave her alone. In Ter Borch’s illustration, the monochromic palette is an intriguing contrast with her more common use of bright, pure colors. Folio 94 also comes later in the Album, after a period between 1654 and 1658, when Ter Borch appears to have temporarily stopped work on the project. These later illustrations are distinctive because they are more fully rendered then her earlier scenes. She transitioned from figures floating on a page with minimal backgrounds to richly detailed miniature paintings in which the figures and their surroundings are completely integrated.46 In the scene of Elisabeth and the Brabander, the silhouette of a Dutch town appears in the distance, while three other groups of people promenade in the middle distance to the left of the

43 Veldhorst, “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul,” 231. 44 See discussion of Gesina ter Borch and Gerard ter Borch’s joint interest in Petrarchan themes in Kettering, “Ter Borch’s Ladies in Satin,” 95–124. 45 Kettering, Drawings, folio 94. 46 Kettering, Drawings, vol 2, 417.

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Figure 3.5. Gesina ter Borch, A Couple Strolling by Moonlight (Wandelend paar bij maanlicht), in or after c. 1654 – in or before c. 1659. Ink and brush on paper, d 125mm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, BI-1887–1463–52A. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

main couple in the foreground. A star-filled sky stretches out above the town and the moon, anthropomorphized as a sweetly cartoonish man in the moon, looks down on the evening from the top left of the composition. For a work that is so stylized and composed, Ter Borch’s ink study also evokes the sensation of standing outside on a moonlit night. Even the monochromatic palette seems to recreate the limited perception of color after dark. The small bursts of lantern light in the distance appear like tiny islands of illuminated activity in the larger darkness. It is difficult to experience today the same visual effect of pre-gaslight Europe at night, in which lanterns and candles provide the only illumination aside from the distant moon

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and stars.47 Ter Borch’s sensitivity to the effects of cast shadows, sharp points of brightness, and silhouetted buildings is all evidence for her concentrated attention of nocturnal visual experience, in keeping with her wide-ranging artistic training. During the mid-1650s Ter Borch was experimenting with depicting couples courting into the late hours as well as the best methods for evoking the heightened visual experience of night. She also varied her style in these works, ranging from the highly stylized illustrative effects in a Couple Strolling by Moonlight (Figure 3.5) to almost abstracted studies of light piercing into vaporous nocturnal air. Ter Borch probably produced Couple Strolling by Moonlight, a round, tondo-esque watercolor, between 1654 and 1659. She later included this watercolor as part of folio 52 in her large Art Book, in which she placed her painting beside a round daytime scene of similar size by her father Gerard Senior. In Couple Strolling by Moonlight, a couple walks together through a Dutch town, followed by their dog and proceeded by another couple visible in the distance. Here, Ter Borch chose a limited palette of browns, grays, and blues, but included pops of bright color in the yellow moon and stars, the red and yellow details of the couple’s clothing and the dog’s red collar. That Ter Borch produced the song illustration of Elisabeth and the Brabander and the round Couple Strolling by Moonlight, along with other images of people experiencing the night out-of-doors, in the span of a few years and using different techniques and palettes, indicates that she saw the theme as a rich one in terms of both narrative and visual effect.

Women and Nighttime Socializing in Context The tiny groups of fashionably dressed people in Ter Borch’s watercolors reflect the new vogue for going out for walks and social visits at night across Europe. In the scene of Elisabeth and the Brabander in folio 94, the position of the couple at the doorway, the threshold between the home and the outside world, is especially provocative. Period writers warned men against the potentially corrupting effects of women who might be allowed to linger at street-facing windows and doorways. Simon Stevin, a Flemish engineer, quartermaster, and eminent city planner, cautioned men that they should build a forecourt in front of their houses in order to avoid allowing “their wife or daughters to sit at windows to be seen and called at by people passing by in the street” and to prevent would-be lovers from entering the house during the midnight hours through windows exposed to the street.48

47 See Ekirch, At Day’s Close, and Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire. 48 “[S]ijn die plaetsen goet voor mans die niet en begeeren dat hun Vrouwe, of Dochters voor den veinsters ten thoon sitten, en besocht worden vande ghene die langhs de strate voorbygaen. Oock me so en connen de Vreyers haer lieden s’nachts deur de veinsters die ande straet staen.” Simon Steven, Het burgherlijke leven [1590], H. Stevin, Materiae Politicae, 57; also see discussion in Wieseman, Vermer’s Women, 29–30; 61 n. 35.

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In contrast to accounts like those of William Mountague, which juxtaposed Dutch men’s gallivanting with Dutch women’s industriousness, many local and foreign accounts mention the growing tendency of young Dutch women and men to use the evening and late hours for parties and leisurely outdoor mingling. English Tourist Fynes Moryson commented that when he visited the Netherlands in the late 1590s he was surprised to see young couples “dancing all night,” after “their fathers, mothers, and all other were gone to bed.”49 By the 1640s, Vlieland preacher Frans Esausz. den Heussen complained about young people staying up too late and reveling at night in his Den christelijcken jongeling (The Christian Youth): In the late evening and, aye, till past midnight, what a wild commotion, bustle, running around, singing and jumping about there is by the young, who pass the night crying out, rushing around, yelling, roaring, cursing, swearing, damaging houses, demolishing, befouling, etc., and take great pleasure and delight in it.50

As the seventeenth century progressed, an increasingly number of critics throughout Western Europe commented on the dangers of nightlife. In 1710, Irish writer and playwright Richard Steele declared that, “Who would not wonder at this perverted relish of those who are reckoned the most polite part of mankind, that prefer seacoals and candles to the sun, and exchange so many cheerful morning hours for the pleasures of midnight revels and debaucheries.”51 These complaints by older generations about the supposed new heights of licentious behavior of the young should be taken with a grain of salt. They demonstrate more than anything how common it was for young people to walk around with one another visiting friends, singing, and courting in the evening hours and how increasingly affordable candles and lanterns facilitated the rise in nocturnal activity. These criticisms of the supposedly dangerous new habit of “outstar[ing] the sun,” along with more matter-of-fact accounts of nocturnal sociability in diaries, letters and printed sources, attest to the cultural shift toward staying up later and doing more at night among women and men of differing social stations.52 Women even began to use make-up to create enhancements that accommodated nocturnal social practices. In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote about staying at the Court of 49 Fynes Moryson, in Hughes, ed., Shakespeare’s England, 380. 50 “Wat isser dickwils in den laten avont, ende tot, ja over den middernacht, al dertel gewoel, gejaegh, gedraef, ghesingh en ghespringh van jonghe lieden, die met roepen, rasen, tieren, beeren, vloecken, sweeren, huysen schofferen, raseren, bevuylen, &c. den nacht passeren, ende daer in groot playsier en vermaeck stellen.” Heussen, Den christelijcken jongeling (The Christian Youth 1644), 76. As translated in Veldhorst, “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul,” 271. 51 Richard Steele, The Tatler, 14 December 1710, in The Tatler, ed. George Aitken (1899; rpt. Edn., New York, 1970), IV, 337, 339; also quoted in Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 304. 52 Quotation from a preacher in Leeds, Dr. Sharp, as recorded by one of his congregants, a merchant named Ralph Thoresby in 1680. Handley, Sleep, 150–51.

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Hanover and commented on the practice. She noted, “All the women here have literally rosy cheeks, snowy foreheads and bosoms, jet eyebrows, and scarlet lips, to which they generally add coal black hair. These perfections never leave them till the hour of their death and have a very pretty effect by candlelight, but I could wish they were handsome with a little more variety.”53 As evidence for special make-up practices to suit the nighttime highlights, many of these nocturnal activities revolved around the aesthetic experience of night, in particular the visual beauty of effects like moonbeams and lamplight. Moreover, heightened aesthetic adornment for the late hours, such as make-up and glittering threads in clothing, was a criticism most often connected with women. This aligns with the link between feminine make-up practices as deceptions and painting itself as a form of seductive deception during the period, an association that grew during the late seventeenth century and carried into criticisms of the overly feminine and adorned nature of Rococo painting in the eighteenth century.54 Female artists thus were seen as having the potential to deceive their admirers as well as viewers of their art through layers of paint, with the nighttime adding another layer of potential obfuscation.

Gesina ter Borch’s Poetry Album, Songbooks, and Female Sexuality Ter Borch’s depictions of young people’s starlit courting and flirting habits, as with her daytime scenes of romance, create a tension between the public and social nature of the groups of young people interacting and the intimacy needed to engage with the works themselves. Ter Borch’s citing of the well-known format of the Dutch song book, albeit in an unusually luxurious mode of production, creates an opportunity to examine how these books spoke to female audiences. Dutch song books as a larger genre often pronounced their therapeutic goals and their special appeal to female readers in their prefaces. Ter Borch’s three volumes can be considered in relation to alba amicorum, collections of short inscriptions, jokes, and poems written by the friends of the owner of the book, who was usually male. Women’s alba amicorum, which are less common, often collected vernacular songs and poems along with friends’ inscriptions. In contrast, songs rarely appear in men’s alba amicorum.55 Women’s alba amicorum are thus unique in their frequent goal of serving as personal song collections, just as Ter Borch seems to have intended with her Poetry Album.

53 Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 115. 54 See Weststeijn, “The Gender of Colors in Dutch Art Theory,” in Chapman, et. al., Meaning in Materials, 1400–1800, 176–201. See also Melissa Hyde’s work on the gender bias and the feminizing of both make-up and Rococo painting in eighteenth-century art criticism. Hyde, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise,” 453–475; Hyde, Making Up the Rococo, 2006. 55 Veldhorst, “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul,” 236.

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The Netherlands produced more printed songbooks, in which poems of all kinds are set to preexisting or new melodies, than any other country in Europe in the early modern era.56 Mass-produced books of love songs and poems often specifically called out their function as providing “information” about love and its trials to young female readers. In Johan van Dans’ preface for his Thyrsis Minnewit, a book that was reprinted numerous times until well into the eighteenth century, he noted that while parts of his book might seem a little lewd or naughty, that it was important for young people to know all that love entailed. Many songbooks of the period note that early modern women used singing and other communal activities at night as a therapeutic emotional practice. For instance, the Amsterdamsche vreughde-strrom (Amsterdam Stream of Joy), published in 1654, suggested that its contents were meant to help “sweet Amsterdam maidens,” by “serving [them] in these long evenings by dispelling the sadness of the same.”57 Van Dans noted that he specifically chose a tiny size and typeface – the book is roughly 3.5 by 5.5 inches – for the benefit of young female readers who could easily secret the book “beneath the apron,” “lest you be surprised by your parents.” If, on the other hand, the reader is an “orphaned daughter” living with a grandmother or an aunt, “they would barely be able to read it even if they found it because the letter is so small, which would succeed even better if you had hidden their spectacles beforehand.”58 Preachers of the seventeenth century also decried the common tendency of song books to alternate amorous and spiritual topics, as Ter Borch’s Poetry Album does. Reverend Willem Sluiter likened the practice to the “wanton” behavior of drunkards who “unscrupulously mix in two or three psalms of David or other spiritual songs and then add to them a whore’s song or some other wanton farce or simple rhyme that comes into their heads.”59 It is entirely possible that Ter Borch might have used her Poetry Album for nighttime viewing, reading, and singing with close friends in the same tradition that printed song books were used to facilitate late-night socializing. Despite criticisms of women’s engagement in public nightlife, women were encouraged to use the night as a private time for reflecting on and lingering in powerful emotional states, both secular and spiritual. The concept of night as intensely introspective is clearest in the aesthetic traditions of Benedictine and other monastic traditions. Catholic women were encouraged to visualize themselves as a figure such as Mary Magdalene to experience a transformative journey from sin, represented by the dark night around them, toward the internal illumination of God.60 The language in these poems and songs about nocturnal prayer is often intensely passionate 56 Veldhorst, “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul,” 279. 57 “[I]n dese Langhe Avonden te dienen, de verdrietelijckheyt van deselve te verdrijven.” Amsterdamsche vreughde-stroom (Amsterdam Stream of Joy 1654). As translated in Veldhorst, “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul,” 220. 58 Veldhorst, “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul,” 274. 59 Willem Sluiter, Psalmen, sig. C3v, as translated in Veldhorst, “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul,” 274–75. 60 Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 77–79.

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and emotionally wrought. In the manuscripts of the Benedictine Sisters in Cambrai (Flanders), a seventeenth-century devotional poem describes Mary Magdalene’s ascetic nocturnal vigil. As she sits in her noiseless dark cell: In silent mourning I resolve to dwell, With thoughts of death Ile hang my walls about All windows close, Faith shall my taper be.61

For both Catholics and Protestants, night was considered a time during which the body and soul were fragile and potentially in danger of diabolical influences. Nocturnal prayer was thus a crucial performance for all Christians to combat the dark night of the senses.62 Secular romantic accounts are similarly focused on gripping emotions that are so strong that they prevent sleep and keep the protagonist up late at night. Katherina Lescailje (1649–1711) wrote several poems in which she took on the guise of a sleepless lover, tormented by their beloved’s absence. In one poem, “On a Different Note [or Otherwise]: To Love” (Onrust der liefde), Lescailje uses the poetic convention of adopting a persona, “I”, to describe the sensation of how thinking of her beloved conjured the person in her mind’s eye as a “sweet intruder in [her] sleep” (O zoete stoorder van mijn slaap).63 In a line comparing her persona to Mars and the addressed lover to Venus, she also subtly links evocations of the burning passion of their love with the blazing stars in the night sky. In “Restlessness of Love,” Lescailje, again using the first person, writes of how she is so exhausted by grief that she finally falls asleep, only to be interrupted in her dreams. Cupid intrudes forcing her to dream of her beloved’s death. She awakes from the dream to realize that the dream is a metaphor for the thousand deaths that she must endure from the never-healing wound of love.64 In Ter Borch’s watercolors and collected texts, her captivation with related Petrarchan themes of love and desire indicate her interest in the ability of this type of poetry to act as a cathartic and emotionally rich experience of internal contemplation, enhanced by the night’s aestheticized effects.

Ter Borch’s Techniques and Experimentation with Nocturnal Visual Effects While Ter Borch’s hand-illuminated Poetry Album and her other manuscripts were clearly meant to be used by the Ter Borch family, this connection between miniaturization and women’s private experience provides an intriguing context for her 61 Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 79. 62 Handley, Sleep, 107. 63 Katherina Lescailje, “On a Different Note: To Love,” in van Gemert, et. al., Women’s Writing, 312–13. 64 See discussion of the evidence of Lescailje’s erotic and romantic life, in van Gemert, “Hiding Behind Words?” 24–27.

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Figure 3.6. Gesina ter Borch, Night-piece: Couple walking behind a woman with a lantern (Nachtstuk: echtpaar lopend achter een vrouw met een lantaarn, van achteren), circa 1655. Ink and brush on paper, 71 x 98mm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-T-1887-A-1329. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

miniature style of painting. Ter Borch’s attention to the tiny, finely detailed, and often romantically charged watercolors and drawings allow for a similar kind of intimate viewing experience to these contemporaneous song books, confined to the individual reader through their smallness and complexity. A final aspect of Ter Borch’s nocturnal imagery is the opportunity that nocturnal darkness and artificial light provided for the type of artistic problem-solving and experimentation that the entire Ter Borch family of artists clearly appreciated. In a related watercolor (Figure 3.6), Night-piece: Couple walking behind a woman with a lantern, Ter Borch depicted a young man and woman holding hands and walking with a dog behind another woman holding a large lantern. The upper classes hired lantern-bearers sometimes called moon-cursors or linkboys, yet these figures were almost exclusively male.65 The position of the woman with the lantern in Ter Borch’s watercolor indicates that she is chaperone or a friend who has stepped ahead to give her companions a moment alone. Intriguingly, Ter Borch made a variant line drawing of Night-piece: Couple walking behind a woman with a lantern, in which she flipped the 65 Lower classes could not afford their own lanterns, let alone hire people to carry a lantern for them. Ekirch, At Day’s Close, 125.

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Figure 3.7. Gesina ter Borch, Night: A Couple Walking Behind a Woman with a Lantern, c. 1655. Ink on paper,165 x 212mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-T-00–60.

composition to portray the figures frontally and stripped away the effects of light and shadow (Figure 3.7). Either she or her brother also inscribed this variant with a moral sentiment: perseverance in dark times that will lead to light. However, in the original watercolor, Ter Borch includes no such interpretive aid and the figures are seen from behind, leaving the figures’ destination and their emotional states mysterious. The striking visual quality of Night-piece: Couple walking behind a woman with a lantern is supported by Ter Borch’s use of a limited palette and subtle tonal modulations of light and dark. Kettering suggests that Ter Borch was inspired by popular book illustrations of the era, which often used tenebrism to enhance mythological and religious narratives.66 The family workshop of Crispijn de Passe produced nocturnal prints as illustrations for publications such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis, including prints attributed to his daughter Magdalena de Passe, that feature comparable juxtapositions of deep shadow and piercing points of light.67 Ter Borch, however, borrowed the strong chiaroscuro effects seen in prints like those of de Passe to portray a romantic yet anonymous scene that purposefully avoids a clear narrative. Ter Borch’s Night-piece: Couple walking behind a woman with a lantern instead offers an 66 Kettering, Drawings, vol. 2, 378 67 Similarly dramatic lighting effects are also present in Magdalena de Passe’s Death of Procris engraving, discussed by Amy Frederick in this volume.

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example of her artistic experimentation, facilitated by night’s known connections with romance, mystery, and emotional longing. Ter Borch’s picture seems to focus on the very experience of the visual perception of night, as figures (and perhaps their emotions) emerge from and disappear into the vaporous darkness around them. Ter Borch’s older brother Gerard ter Borch II, with whom she seems to have shared a close and creatively stimulating relationship, had a limited but distinct interest in depicting night and nocturnal lighting effects, most strikingly in his Procession of the Flagellants (Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam). Gerard’s Market at Evening in Zwolle (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) is another example of the family studying nocturnal effects, as well as their shared interests in depicting nocturnal habits and culture during the period.68 A small study by Ter Borch’s brother Harman shows a woman, seen from behind, working by the light of an oil lamp (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-T-1887-A-1291). Kettering dates this work to 1651 based on Harman’s use of extensive washes to evoke the dark of night, which was a method that he used in a dated 1651 drawing of a group of men huddled around a table that also seems to feature artificial light.69 In the drawing of the woman, it is unclear what activity she is engaged. She could be sewing or making lace, as she might hold something that looks like a pillow on her lap. Ter Borch’s Night-piece: Couple walking behind a woman with a lantern, however, far surpasses any of these works by her father and brothers in its purposefully ambiguous narrative, with young lovers on a journey to an unknown destination, and its equal focus on evoking the physical and visual sensations of night without depicting them literally.

Conclusion: Night, Women, and Creative Work On one hand, Judith Leyster and Gesina ter Borch’s explorations of artificial light and nocturnal imagery are evidence of the period’s broader turn toward the night in Northern Europe, both culturally and artistically. However, the prominence of nighttime in the work of each artist is noteworthy in a period in which evidence of female creative output of any kind is limited and difficult to find. Moreover, the correlating written accounts in which early modern women describe their own practices of writing and creating at night points toward the creative potential of the later hours. While early modern people increasingly linked night to the creative process broadly, the qualities behind this bond – namely the quiet seclusion of night and the alluring visual experiences that the quiet afforded time to focus on – appealed to women and specifically to women who had artistic and intellectual interests and goals.

68 Kettering, Drawings, vol. 1, 130–31. 69 Kettering, Drawings, vol. 1, 262–63.

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In the United States today, even with the progress toward equal gender rights accomplished in much of the West between then and now, women still rely on late night hours to keep up with their professional and personal projects. In anecdotal conversations with my female colleagues and friends in museums and academia, common experiences quickly emerge. Many of us set an alarm to wake up well before dawn to grade a few papers before the rest of the household gets up, while others get up during the night to care for a child and use the resulting insomnia to work on edits for an article. Sheryl Sandberg, in her privileged and yet still galvanizing look at women professionals in Lean In, writes about how unfair it is that mothers who stay at home “are frequently expected to work long into the night while fathers who work outside the home get the chance to relax from their day jobs.”70 Elsewhere she notes that, even in her happy and equitable relationship with her husband, one of the reasons that their partnership works so well currently is that their young children go to sleep early, leaving her “plenty of time to work at night.”71 For women writers and visual artists, too, common threads appear. Eleanor Coppola, a writer who was married to Francis Ford Coppola, has spoken about male artists’ privileged ability to have a studio where they can do their work, indulging in whatever rituals of preparation they want, while female artists more often have to find time for art “in 20-minute snatches” and be ready to jump into the work whenever the moment of freedom arrives.72 Returning to the collective patriarchal mindset of Europe in the seventeenth century, women writers and visual artists, had to “steal time,” in the words of Laura Cereta, in order to creatively produce or express themselves. Night clearly functioned for some early modern women as a kind of metaphorical “room of one’s own,” in the sense of Virginia Woolf’s famous 1929 essay and her proposal that women writers need a room of their own (that they can lock) and money to support themselves in order to write. Night could not remove the barriers that women faced, the same barriers that eventually caused Leyster to reduce her professional artistic career and that prevented Ter Borch from training seriously in art. However, night could provide the dedicated private time needed to make progress with one’s work. Moreover, for artists and writers interested in nocturnal imagery, it also allowed for close visual study and sensory experience, as well as inspiration. In Leyster’s images of women sewing at night, industry is present, and that work, like the ambiguity in her images of men and women together, affords the viewer a contemplative process of looking and thinking. Ter Borch’s pictures point toward the growing conception of night as a foil for both romantic yearning and creativity. Each artist’s work communicates both the special aesthetic effects of nocturnal viewing and night’s layered allegorical meanings. 70 Sandberg, Lean In, 118. 71 Sandberg, Lean In, 112. 72 Eleanor Coppola, interview with Muriel Murch on her podcast series Living with Literature, episode 4, released 2 May 2008.

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Both Leyster’s and Ter Borch’s innovations in nocturnal imagery were almost immediately lost to history. Leyster continued to use her family name after her marriage, yet she was also often referred to as, and sometimes went by, Judith Molenaer of Juffrow Molenaer. Her use of a monogram further complicated identifying her signature in her paintings. She was not included in Arnold Houbraken’s expansive account of Netherlandish artists, nor in the artists’ lives of Jacob Campo Weyerman and J. van Gool. Her works and remarkable career were only rediscovered at the turn of the twentieth century.73 Ter Borch’s watercolors, including her nocturnal works, never received interest outside of her immediate social circle during her lifetime or in the centuries following. This changed only in 1882 when Abraham Bredius rediscovered the family’s albums that she had so carefully compiled and preserved.74 Even then, it took another hundred years before Ter Borch’s artworks, thanks to the work of Kettering and Ger Luijten, received serious scholarly recognition and public interest. Ter Borch’s romantic scenes of nocturnal courtship, however, are distinctive when compared with other nocturnal imagery of her era and thus worthy of further research because of their sheer difference. Young contemporary couples, wandering the urban landscape at night point to both the artistic and poetic formulas that Ter Borch was interested in, as well as the changing patterns of nocturnal life in the second part of the 1600s. Art historians, primarily women, have worked hard to reintegrate female artists, including Leyster and Ter Borch, back into the narrative of seventeenth-century Netherlandish art. Literary scholars have worked equally hard to unbury the accomplishments of Dutch women writers. While it is important to consider these creative women in relation to their male peers, newer research directions emphasize that it is also vital to look more closely at the specifics of female creative practices. My proposal that early modern women were drawn to working at night and thus especially attuned to evoking night in their work is thus also an attempt to look for productive connections between women’s historical positions and their creative work while not limiting the conversation to outmoded ideas of an innately feminine artistic style.

Bibliography The American Association of University Women (AAUW). The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap. D.C.: AAUW, Spring 2018 Edition (first printing 2011). Washington, https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simpletruth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/. Accessed 1 July, 2018. Atkins, Christopher D. M., ed. The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017. https://doi.org/10.29075/9780876332764/102220/1. Baer, Ronni, Arthur K. Wheelock, and Annetje Boersma. Gerrit Dou 1613–1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2000. 73 See Hofrichter, “The Eclipse of a Leading Star,” in Biesboer and Welu, Judith Leyster, 115–121. 74 Bredius, “Die Ter Borch Sammlung,” 370–73.

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Biesboer, Pieter and James A. Welu, editors. Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World. Exh. cat., Frans Hals Museum, Worcester Art Museum. Zwolle: Waanders, 1993. Bredius, Abraham. “Die Ter Borch Sammlung.” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 18 (1883): 370–73. Cereta, Laura, and Jacobus Philippus Tomasinus. Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis Epistolae jamprimum e Ms. in lucem productae a Jacobo Philippo Tomasino, qui ejus vitam [et] notas addidit. Patavii: Sardi, 1640. Cereta, Laura. Laura Cereta: Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Transcribed, translated, and edited by Diana Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Cook, Nicole Elizabeth. Nocturnal Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age: Godefridus Schalcken and the Rise of Candlelight Painting. Under contract with Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2020. Coppola, Eleanor. Interview with Muriel Murch, Living with Literature podcast series. Episode 4, released 2 May 2008. Accessed through iTunes 15 September 2018. Ekirch, A. Roger. At Day’s Close: Night in Time Past. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. Frans Hals Museum, “Unique Painting by Judith Leyster Rediscovered, to be Shown in the Upcoming Exhibition,” press release, published 12 December 2009 on CODART. Accessed 15 September 2018. https://www.codart.nl/ museums/unique-painting-by-judith-leyster-rediscovered-to-be-shown-in-the-upcoming-exhibition/. Gemert, Lia van. “Hiding Behind Words? Lesbianism in 17th-Century Dutch Poetry.” Thamyris 2 (1995) 1: 11–44. Gemert, Lia van, et. al., eds. Women’s Writing from the Low Countries 1200–1875: A Bilingual Anthology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Gershuny, Jonathan. “Gender Symmetry, Gender Convergence and Historical Work-time Invariance in 24 countries.” Working paper. Center for Time Use Research, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, February 2018, https://www.timeuse.org/node/10840. Accessed 1 July, 2018. Handley, Sasha. Sleep in Early Modern England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Haarlem Municipal Archives, Notary W. Kittensteyn, vol. 313. Hermans, Theo, ed. A Literary History of the Low Countries. Rochester NY: Camden House [Boydell and Brewer], 2009. Heussen, Frans Esausz. Den. Den christelijcken jongeling: Dat is, Een stichtelycke onderwysinge, hoe de jongelinghen ende alle jonge lieden haer in leven ende wandel hebben christelijck te dragen. Amsterdam, 1644 (3rd edition). Hofrichter, Frima Fox. “A Telescope in Haarlem.” In Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive: Presented on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. Seymour Slive, Cynthia P. Schneider, William W. Robinson, and Alice I. Davies, 117–144. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995. Hofrichter, Frima Fox. “The Eclipse of a Leading Star.” In Biesboer, Pieter and James A. Welu, editors. Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World. Exh. cat., 115–122. Frans Hals Museum, Worcester Art Museum. Zwolle: Waanders, 1993. Hofrichter, Frima Fox. Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age. Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers, 1989. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’: Dutch Women’s Creative Practices in the 17th Century.” Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 2 (2001): 31–39. Hughes, Charles, ed. Shakespeare’s England: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the 16th Century, being Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617). New York, 1967. Hyde, Melissa Lee. Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006. Hyde, Melissa Lee. “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette.” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 453–475. Kettering, Alison McNeil. Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate. 2 vols. ‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1988. Kettering, Alison McNeil. “Ter Borch’s Ladies in Satin.” Art History 16, no. 1 (March 1993): 95–124. Kloek, Els. “The Case of Judith Leyster: Exception or Paradigm?” In Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World. Exh. cat., ed. Pieter Biesboer and James A. Welu, 55–68. Frans Hals Museum, Worcester Art ­Museum. Zwolle: Waanders, 1993.

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Kortenhorst-von Bogendorf Rupprath, Cynthia. “A Game of Tric-Trac (catalogue entry).” In Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World. Exh. cat., ed. Pieter Biesboer and James A. Welu, 174–81. Frans Hals Museum, Worcester Art Museum. Zwolle: Waanders, 1993. Koslofsky, Craig. Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Medick, Hans and David Warren Sabean. Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship. Cambridge, New York, and Paris, 1984. Melion, Walter. Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Mountague, William. The Delights of Holland: or, A three months travel about that and the other provinces With observations and reflections on their trade, wealth, strength, beauty, policy, &c. together with a catalogue of the rarities in the anatomical school at Leyden. London, 1696 (http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ A51180.0001.001, accessed 24 June 2018). Müller Hofstede, Justus. “Artificial Light in Honthorst and Terbrugghen: Form and Iconography.” In Rüdiger Klessmann, Jan Białostocki, Justus Müller Hofstede, and Ernst van de Wetering, Hendrick ter Brugghen und die Nachfolger Caravaggios in Holland: beitrage eines symposions aus anlass der ausstellung, 13–44. Braunschweig, Herzog Anton-Ulrich-Museum, 1988. Peacock, Martha Moffitt. “Geertruydt Roghman and the Female Perspective in 17th-Century Dutch Genre Imagery.” Woman’s Art Journal 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1993 – Winter 1994): 3–10. Pol, Lotte C. van der. “The Whore, the Bawd, and the Artist: The Reality and Imagery of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prostitution.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, no. 1–2 (Summer 2010). DOI: 10.5092/ jhna.2010.2.1.3. Accessed 1 July, 2018. Pol, Lotte C. van der. The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Sandberg, Sheryl. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Schneider, Cynthia P., William W. Robinson, and Alice Ingraham Davies. Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive: Presented on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995. Stevin, H. Materiae politicae, burgherlicke stoffen, vervanghende ghedachtenissen der oeffeninghen des Doorluchtichsten Vorst en Heere Maurits Prince van Orangie. Leiden: ter druckerye van Justus Livius, tegen over d’Academie, [1649]. Veldhorst, Natascha. “Pharmacy for the Body and Soul: Dutch Songbooks in the Seventeenth Century.” Early Modern History 27 (2008): 274–75. Tummers, Anna. Judith Leyster (1609–1660): de eerste vrouw die meesterschilder werd ( Judith Leyster (1609– 1660): the first woman to become a master painter). Exh. cat., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Haarlem, 2010. Weststeijn, Thijs. “The Gender of Colors in Dutch Art Theory.” In Meaning in Materials, 1400–1800 (Materiaal en betekenis), ed. H. Perry Chapman, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, and Frits Scholten, 176–201. Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 62. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Wieseman, Marjorie E., with H. Perry Chapman, and Wayne E. Franits. Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence. Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2011.

About the Author Nicole Elizabeth Cook obtained her Ph.D from the University of Delaware, writing about the functions of nocturnal scenes in Dutch art. She works as Coordinator for Academic Partnerships, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

4. In Living Memory

Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch



Saskia Beranek Abstract This essay proposes an interpretation of Huis ten Bosch as a dynamic built portrait of Amalia van Solms. The architect Pieter Post, responsible for both building and garden designs, presented staged vistas to mobile viewers that incorporate all visual components – including the living body of the resident herself – to position the Princess as a central figure in Dutch national independence and identity. While the site does celebrate the lost Prince, it also leverages his identity to promote and prolong the social role of the Princess. By re-centering the narrative around Amalia van Solms, I attempt to secure her place as one of the great underacknowledged art patrons of the seventeenth century. Keywords: Amalia van Solms; Huis ten Bosch; Oranjezaal; Pieter Post; garden history; portraiture; patronage; House of Orange; Dutch classicism

In 1645, Amalia van Solms, Princess of Orange, was faced with a dilemma. Her husband, stadholder and Prince of Orange, Frederik Hendrik, was in failing health. Amalia knew that following his death she would lose both her political influence and her right to reside in the palaces that she and Frederik Hendrik had built and decorated during their twenty-two years of marriage. Her solution to both problems was the construction and decoration of the palace now called Huis ten Bosch. The palace, built and decorated between 1645 and 1652, is a small brick villa suburbana outside of The Hague. Designed by the architect Pieter Post, Huis ten Bosch is one of the major monuments of Dutch Classicism. The best known component of the complex is the Oranjezaal, a central cruciform reception hall covered in a cycle of paintings celebrating the life and virtues of the Prince of Orange, ostensibly in funereal tribute.1 The author would like to thank the curators and staff of the Koninkjlijk Verzameling and Huisarchief for their assistance in early stages of research as well as for arranging my visit to the Oranjezaal. In addition, the keen insights of Christopher Drew Armstrong were essential to the development of this project, for which the author remains deeply grateful. 1 The recent restoration has produced two important scholarly sources: Eikemma Hommes and Kolfin, De Oranjezaal in Huis ten Bosch and a digital catalogue, http://oranjezaal.rkdmonographs.nl/verantwoording-1. Sutton, E. (ed.), Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, Amsterdam University Press 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789463721400_ch04

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The rest of the building and its surrounding gardens have been significantly altered over time and no longer exist in their seventeenth-century forms.2 As a result, the scholarship on the site is overly focused on the paintings at the expense of an examination of the spatial experience of the site. Considered together with the garden as a holistic experience for a mobile viewer, the paintings and palace not only commemorate the Prince, but more importantly, emphasize the critical role of the fidelity and fertility of the Princess in the Dutch Republic more broadly. By integrating the components of the site and refocusing analysis on the Princess as a new Artemisia, widow of Mausolus, we can see how the designers created a stage on which Amalia van Solms could play out her desired role as matriarch and caretaker in a microcosm of the nation. Considered as a whole, Huis ten Bosch became a built portrait of its resident, expressing her agenda and values. The design team used staged views defined by architectural components such as doors, fireplaces and garden trellises to create visual experiences that underscored Amalia’s desired role within the new, independent Dutch Republic. Huis ten Bosch is distinct from other Orange building campaigns because Amalia was the sole patron: although Frederik Hendrik was consulted in the early stages of the design before his death, Huis ten Bosch unquestionably was her domain. The land was granted directly to her, precipitated by the failing health of the Prince.3 The Princess and her design team altered their plans following his death in 1647 and arrived at the decorative program that was installed – although the precise timeline of the design process is virtually impossible to trace. It is also difficult to accurately document the nature and extent of Amalia’s agency beyond the commission. However, extant letters and plans suggest that the iconographic and stylistic programs overseen by Jacob van Campen in collaboration with Post and the Princess’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens, served the Princess’s needs in negotiating the turbulent political waters of the third quarter of the seventeenth century.4 As patron, Amalia crafted a message that moved beyond mere commemoration to leverage the grandiose narrative of the Oranjezaal canvases for her own ends. A central aspect of the design of Huis ten Bosch was that it was to be a new Mausoleum. It thereby connected Amalia as widow and patron to the legendary Artemisia of Caria, wife of Mausolus. Amalia’s role as the new Artemisia was invoked in decorative decisions, such as the display of van Honthorst’s painting of Artemisia (now at Princeton) over a fireplace in the west apartment, and was deliberately foregrounded 2 Loonstra, Het Huis int Bosch, 67–69. Marot added two long wings; as a result, the only truly intact space is the central hall, though several of the rooms in the apartments resemble their initial volumes. 3 ARA 3.01.27 Grafelijk Rekenkamer 1645, appointment book 15, fol 21. Copy in Nassause Domeinarchief: ARA 1.08 12 nr 1422–2. The grant of land specifies that it is for her use and enjoyment. 4 In addition to Eikemma Hommes and Kolfin, the two seminal sources on the iconography remain Brenninkmeyer de Rooij, “Notities Betreffende de decoratie van de Oranjezaal” and Peter Raupp, Die Ikongraphie des Oranjezaal.

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Figure 4.1. Jan van der Heyden, Huis ten Bosch, View of the Garden Façade. Ca. 1668. Oil on Wood, 39.1 cm x 55.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 64.65.2.

in the dedication of Post’s printed plans.5 The story of Mausolus and Artemisia would have been familiar to an educated seventeenth-century Dutch audience through the 1614 Dutch-language translation of a text by Valerius Maximus.6 Valerius Maximus recounts that Artemisia wished herself to become a living tomb: as Artemisia drank the ashes of her husband’s cremated corpse mixed with wine, the body of the widow took on added significance as a living temple.7 Although the association between the two widows is readily apparent and is part of the body of scholarship on the site, the implications of the association have not been extended to an integrated study of the components of the complex. Beyond the display of one painting or the dedication in one publication, Huis ten Bosch and its gardens served as a venue to present Amalia’s body as the living vessel of hope for the Orange dynasty. During her lifetime, Amalia corresponded with and received gifts from Cardinal Richelieu, played hostess to Marie de’ Medici during her tour of the Low Countries, and was visited by Cosimo III de’ Medici, all while perpetuating a powerful Protestant network through the advantageous marriages of her five children to elite r­ ulers.8 Huis ten Bosch provided her with a venue in which to continue her political engagement

5 In the laudatory introduction to his publication of the plans of the text, Pieter Post wrote that it was his intent to present Amalia as “another Artemisia,” (“als een andere Artemisia heeft uytgevoert”). Post, De Sael van Oranje. 6 Gaehtgens, “L’Artémise de Gérard van Honthorst,” 15. 7 Valerius, Mirkinius, and Berewout, Negen boecken, f 251. 8 The Princess of Orange’s relationships with notable European elites can be traced through letters as well as in the diaries kept by her contemporaries. See Groen van Prinsterer, Archives; Visser Gloria Parendi; Borkowski, Memoires. Her own letters are digitized at http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ collections/?catalogue=amalia-von-solms.

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until she died in 1675. The architect and designers integrated the painted and architectural elements into the broader garden landscape to create a politically active stage for the promotion of enduring dynastic agendas, not just a tribute to a dead husband. In combining references to Artemisia, deliberately staged views that emphasized dynastic narratives, and the living garden, the site recast the resident as a protector of the Dutch Republic. Her house was a unified realm that spoke to the essential intertwining of family and state and allowed her to compete with those among whom she wished to be ranked on the European stage while framing her as a keystone of the newly independent Dutch Republic. While scholars have always acknowledged Artemisia and the Mausoleum as central symbolic components of Huis ten Bosch, they have largely focused on their role in mourning the dead. In contrast, I argue that what was living at the palace – both the blossoming garden and the mobile, vibrant body of the widow – was what activated the site and provided the core of its meaning. Artemisia was invoked not because she mourned, but because she lived.

The House of Orange in the Dutch Republic While the Prince and Princess of Orange were not sovereign rulers, they were essential players in the delicate negotiation of international affairs throughout the century. Amalia needed a space that spoke to international power brokers as well as to the delicate balances with the Republic. Therefore, Huis ten Bosch must be read against the background of contemporary events in the Dutch Republic and in Europe at large. The life of the Princess of Orange had been shaped by her fortuitous marriage. Daughter of a German count, Amalia married Frederik Hendrik in 1625 following her arrival in the Low Countries as a lady-in-waiting in the retinue of Elizabeth of Bohemia. The twenty-two years of Amalia’s marriage parallel a crucial moment in the Dutch struggle for independence. As stadholder, Prince Frederik Hendrik was the head of Dutch military forces, as was his half-brother before him. Following the footsteps of their father, Willem the Silent, both Maurits and Frederik Hendrik were instrumental figures in the war for independence from Spain, and it was the family’s success in that endeavor that secured their ongoing social prominence and financial prosperity. Yet the stadholder was still subservient to the States General: he did not make laws or treaties and was not a sovereign body. The only realm in which he could act directly was in military affairs that necessitated a swift and secret response.9 His political capital was enhanced by the fact that foreign monarchs were potentially loath to negotiate with the merchants and regents who made up the republican government, making the Prince’s aristocratic pedigree essential for foreign policy. While 9 Israel, Dutch Republic, 493; 525–527.

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Frederik Hendrik and Amalia wished to maintain and enhance their elite status, the republican government was anxious not to replace the Spanish king with a new type of domestic monarch. Tensions between the republican States party and the House of Orange defined the political landscape of the seventeenth century, with powerful cities like Amsterdam playing a leading role in attempts to limit the influence of the aristocracy in order to preserve their own privileged position. While the role of the Prince of Orange as stadholder was well defined, his consort had no official function and little immediate precedent for expected behavior. Her husband’s predecessor Maurits had not married, which meant the most recent model for a Princess of Orange was Frederik Hendrik’s mother, Louise de Coligny. Amalia probably never met her mother-in-law. She died in France in 1620 after navigating a complex widowhood following the assassination of her husband, Willem the Silent, in 1584. Despite the powerful legacy left behind by Louise, the lack of an official consort to the stadholder for the thirty-six years preceding Amalia’s marriage left both Amalia and her husband free to develop a new kind of court culture that adequately responded to the changing needs of both the family and the Dutch Republic. Together, the Prince and Princess of Orange sought to elevate their own social standing in the eyes of their international peers by incorporating elements both from Amalia’s background at the court in Heidelberg and Frederik Hendrik’s youth. The Prince spent time in Paris at the court of his godfather, King Henry IV, which laid the foundation for his own cultivation of court culture in The Hague and exposed him to the architectural models that he would mimic in his numerous building projects.10 The deliberate invocation of French and Italian components in court ritual, social hierarchy, and artistic and architectural projects served to resituate the Prince and Princess for a new era of Dutch international diplomacy. Another component of this “internationalizing” agenda for Amalia was the extension of the Orange realm of influence through deliberate marriage negotiations for their offspring. The five surviving children of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia entered into diplomatic marriages intended to integrate the House of Orange into an international Protestant elite: Willem II married Mary Stuart in 1641, and the four princesses married important Dutch and German nobles, securing alliances and connecting the Dutch court internationally. In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia recognized the Dutch Republic as a sovereign nation. The Prince of Orange, who had died in 1647, posthumously became a national hero. Yet it was not long before the standing of the House began to slip as the newly independent government came into conflict with Frederik Hendrik’s son and heir, Willem II. Effectively cut out of political life, Amalia watched her son jeopardize 10 Ottenheym, “Possessed by Such a Passion for Building,” 107–108. Following their marriage, building progressed at palaces at Honselaarsdijk, Buren, Huis ter Nieuburch in Rijswijk, Paleis Noordeinde, and the Stadhouder’s Quarters at the Binnenhof in The Hague. See Tucker, “His Excellency at Home”; Slothouwer, De Paleizen van Frederik Hendrik.

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everything she had worked for. Willem II’s risky decisions included sending an army against Amsterdam in an attempt to prove his greater authority.11 He was also fiscally reckless: Amalia complained that he was ruining the family by excessive borrowing and spending.12 For Amalia, the balance of power was at stake and the social and political advancement of her family hung in that balance. With the country no longer at war and no longer immediately in need of the influence of the House of Orange on the battlefield and in negotiating treaties, both her status and the status of the House of Orange were unclear. Her palace needed to make a powerful statement about why she mattered to the House of Orange and why the Orange dynasty mattered to the Republic. Like her marriage, her widowhood coincided with a significant shift in the balance of powers within the Dutch Republic.

An Integrated Plan for House and Garden A carefully composed, framed birds-eye view on the title page of Pieter Post’s published plans introduces a reader to the site and allows armchair travelers from all centuries to imagine their movement through the palace complex. Surmounted by putti and Amalia’s personal coat of arms, the frame itself is adorned with floral and auricular decorations that also appear throughout Post’s designs for fireplaces and frames within the house. Just as the reader’s view is encapsulated within this frame, the house and garden are contained within a canal, which served practical purposes of drainage but also symbolically separated the domain of Amalia from the wilderness beyond. The house is situated at the center of the plot at the intersection of cardinally-oriented axes. North of the east-west axis, a forecourt contains carefully laid out beds and regularly planted trees while outbuildings perpendicular to the villa house the kitchen and stables. A high brick wall running across the east-west axis bisects the complex; beyond it, the enclosed formal southern garden contains small fruit and herb gardens placed close to the house. Beyond this are four parterres de broderie, framed between two small “green cabinets,” octagonal pavilions that mimic the form of the house itself. The title page stresses the centrality of the house while subordinating it within a larger geometric system, a symbolic landscape reflecting the Republic in miniature.13 11 Israel, Dutch Republic, 604–608. 12 Visser, Gloria Parendi, 554. Willem Frederik records: “HH beklaechde ooch dat SH het huys rouineerde endat hij hiet voor duysent gulden kredijt had en gheen gelt kont krijgen.” (“Her Highness also complained that his Highness [Willem II] had ruined the house and that he had taken on more than a thousand gulden of debt and could not get any money”). (Translation mine). 13 Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 112–120. The only study of Orange gardens in the first half of the seventeenth century is Vanessa Sellers’ Courtly Gardens in Holland, in which she convincingly established that the gardens at Orange palaces such as Honselaarsdijk and Huis ter Nieuwburch were symbolic landscapes over which the House of Orange held sway. She established the geometric logic of the garden at Huis ten Bosch, dissecting the mathematical relationships that link interior and exterior realms.

Plate 1. Catharina Van Hemessen, Self-Portrait, 1548, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, oil on panel, 32.2 cm x 25.2 cm.

Plate 2. Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Self-Portrait, 1547, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, oil on panel, 35 cm x 24.5 cm.

Plate 3. Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait, c.1556, Museum Zamek, Lancut, oil on canvas, 66 cm x 57 cm.

Plate 4. Judith Leyster, A Game of Tric-Trac, about 1630. Oil on panel. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, 1983.58 (Gift of Robert and Mary S. Cushman). © Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, USA / Bridgeman Images.

Plate 5. Jan van der Heyden, Huis ten Bosch, View of the Garden Façade. Ca. 1668. Oil on Wood, 39.1 cm x 55.2 cm. ­Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 64.65.2.

Plate 6. Gerard van Honthorst. Allegory on the Marriage of Amalia van Solms and Frederik Hendrik. 1648–1650. Oil on ­Canvas, 300 x 750 cm. Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch, The Hague. photograph: Margareta Svensson.

Plate 7. Mary Hotchkiss after Louise Hollandine, Called the Prince of Denmark and Elizabeth, Viscountess Mordaunt, as Vertumnus and Pomona, but more probably Henry, 1st Viscount Mordaunt and Miss Taylor, oil on canvas, © National Trust / Peter Muhly.

Plate 8. Hendrik Jacobus Scholten, Gerard van Honthorst Showing the Drawings of His Pupil Louise of Bohemia to Amalia van Solms, 1854, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

In Living Memory

Figure 4.2. Jan Matthys and Pieter Post, Title page of De Sael van Orange, ghebouwt by haere Hooch. Amalie princesse dovariere van Orange etc. 1655. etching/book illustration, 29.4 cm x 18.8 cm. Collection Rijksmuseum ­Amsterdam, RP-P-1905–6627.

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In the early modern period, gardens made power and leisure manifest even to those not permitted inside the palace while creating a symbolic narrative that unfolded for visitors as they moved through space. Although the garden plays a pivotal role on the title page, it has been the least studied part of the complex. Michel Conan has noted that there is no reason to doubt that Post designed the gardens, and even seventeenth-century documents indicate his authorship by identifying him as the teyckenaer of the garden plans.14 Despite its alteration in 1686 and almost total destruction in 1734, the original form of the garden was documented by the architect on three pages of the 1655 publication.15 It also was recorded in six surviving paintings of the house and gardens from the latter half of the seventeenth century by Jan van der Heyden, presumably made for an open market (Figure 4.1/Plate 5) as well as numerous other landscapes and watercolor studies.16 The small paintings corroborate the layout of the garden while communicating further information about decorative details, such as the obelisk-shaped trellises that flank the major axes and a central group of four figural statues. For most visitors, the garden may have been the only accessible part of the complex. Should a reader peruse Post’s plans further, he would be taken on an imaginary tour of the house, a tour that could be supplemented with other printed descriptions of the paintings that appeared in subsequent centuries. Inside the house in the central Oranjezaal, a painted triumphal procession weaves through fictive architecture, culminating in a colossal painting of the apotheosis of Frederik Hendrik by the Flemish master Jacob Jordaens. In this main room, the upper registers extend into the vaulted cupola and contain allegories on the life, virtues, and victories of the Prince. Amalia and Van Campen selected twelve artists to showcase the artistic excellence of the Netherlands, including Jacob Jordaens, Pieter Soutman, Gerard van Honthorst, and Cesar van Everdingen.17 Each was permitted to paint in his own manner, but was provided with specific instructions regarding subject matter and compositional elements such as the desired height of the horizon.18 These instructions included information on where in the hall the canvas would be hung. The scenes are unified by a 14 Conan, “Postface,” 111; Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 287. 15 The plans include the birds-eye view (RP-P-1905–6627), a plan of the complex (RP-P-AO-12–96-2), and the octagonal pavilions in the formal garden (RP-P-AO-12–96-12). 16 Van der Heyden’s paintings include two in the Metropolitan Museum, one each in the National Gallery in London, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Canon Hall Museum, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and formerly of the Buchenau Collection, Niendorf, near Lubeck. Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, 158–163; Liedtke, Dutch Paintings, 335–340; and Dumas and van der Meer Mohr, Haagse Stadsgezichten, 323–329. 17 There were twelve artists in total, coming from both the northern Protestant republican Netherlands and the southern Catholic Spanish Netherlands. They included: Salomon de Bray, Jacob van Campen, Christiaan van Couwenburgh, Cesar van Everdingen, Pieter de Grebber, Gerard van Honthorst, Jacob Jordaens, Jan Lievens, Pieter Soutman, Theodoor van Thulden, and Thomas Willeboirts-Bosschaert. 18 One of the surviving sketches, sent to Jacob Jordaens, is preserved in the Koninklijk Huisarchief. Reproduced in Eikemma Hommes and Kolfin, Oranjezaal in Huis ten Bosch, 49.

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Figure 4.3. Jan Matthys after Pieter Post., Floor plan of main (second) floor of Huis ten Bosch. From De Sael van Oranje, ghebouwt bij haere Hoocht. Amalie Princesse Douariere van Oranje etc., 1655. Etching, 345mm × 396mm. Collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. RP-P-AO-12–96–4.

consistent lighting scheme corresponding to the placement of windows in the south wall.19 The disparate hands were further unified by a shared ground layer: artists were provided with the primed canvases. Beatrijs Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij demonstrated that the cycle followed classical rules for mourning, including the elements of introduction, praise, mourning, and consolation.20 The sophistication of the Oranjezaal and the role of each image within the larger whole indicates the deliberate agenda driving the design: decisions made about every space were likely made with the same attention to detail. The cycle did not exist in a vacuum: the Oranjezaal is situated between two symmetrical five-room apartments typical of elite European residential space arranged to the east and west, reminiscent of Scamozzi’s Villa Badoer.21 (Figure 4.3) The greatest 19 Eikemma Hommes, “As if it Had Been Done by Just One Master.” 20 Brenninkmeyer de Rooij, “Notities,” 157. 21 Terwen and Ottenheym, Pieter Post, 65.

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asset to the architectural historian remains the plans, sections, and elevations published by Post himself in 1655.22 Architectural historians Terwen and Ottenheym have established how the plan and elevation related to Italian and French models, revealing the debt owed by the architect to sixteenth and early seventeenth-century architectural treatises.23 Although fragmentary, construction progress appears in letters from Post to Amalia as well as in the letters and diaries of the court secretary, Constantijn Huygens.24 Unlike other Orange palaces, Post seems to have been responsible for all aspects of the built environment including designing the floorplan and overseeing the leveling of the site and the digging of canals. 25 He also designed decorative stucco components so that they related to the content of the paintings they surrounded, further demonstrating how the integrated approach to detail and display so thoroughly demonstrated by Eikemma Hommes in the Oranjezaal is applicable in the design of the house more broadly.26 Substantive seventeenth-century written commentaries from visitors are unfortunately lacking. There are firsthand accounts, but their utility is limited: Elmer Kolfin has argued that although visitors commented on the princeliness of the painted cycle, none of them commented in writing on any specific political agenda.27 The only specific observation made by Samuel Pepys during his visit in 1660 was that there was a portrait of Amalia in the dome, itself a telling indicator of what contemporary viewers understood and valued about the site.28 The commentaries are slightly more revealing when the site is regarded as a whole. Like Van der Heyden’s paintings, contemporary commenters directed attention to the gardens: the de Bovio brothers, for example, marveled over the trees and commented on the lack of water features while staying comparatively silent about the building.29 The presence of the garden in both written and visual documentation of the site emphasizes the

22 Post, De Sael van Oranje. The pages were available for purchase either individually or as a set, resulting in some variation between the editions in Amsterdam and Leiden. The plates were purchased and republished in the eighteenth century by Pieter van der Aa, who also appended French captions for an international market. The images cited here are in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and individual accession numbers are noted for relevant images. 23 Ottenheym, “Possessed by Such a Passion”; Terwen and Ottenheym, Pieter Post; Slothouwer, Paleizen van Frederik Hendrik. 24 Terwen and Ottenheym, Pieter Post remains the only extensive discussion of Post’s career. 25 Both André Mollet and Simon de la Vallée were garden architects at Honselaarsdijk, while the architecture was overseen primarily by Van Campen. See Tucker 2002, The Art of Living Nobly, passim. 26 van Gelder, “Rubens in Holland,” 108. In one case, he adapted the mantelpiece in Amalia’s voorkamer to accommodate an Annunciation by Pieter Paul Rubens. Post unified the subject of the painting with the stucco by incorporating matching cherub heads. 27 The accounts are surveyed in Kolfin, “Overtuigen door Overweldingen.” Notable visitors included Samuel Pepys (1660), Cosimo III de Medici (1661), and Giulio and Guido de Bovio (1677). 28 Pepys, Diary, vol. 1, 144. 29 Brom, “Een Italianse Reisbeschrijving,” 119.

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essential role it played and how it was carefully and deliberately integrated into the site’s programmatic unity. The seventeenth century witnessed a new intersection of majestic architecture, manicured landscape, and decorative ensembles that created a theater of power in which patrons enacted narratives of legitimacy. For Hilary Ballon, writing about Vaux le Vicomte outside of Paris, it was the “programmatic unity” of landscape and built environment that made the agendas and ambitions of the patron visible and which revealed the significance of the site.30 The movement of a visitor through such synergistically planned environments activated staged narratives. For example, Chandra Mukerji has shown how visitors to Louis XIV’s gardens at Versailles would experience the gardens as a miniature of France and her accomplishments, while Luke Morgan has argued that the garden design and sculptural program installed by the Winter King and Queen of Bohemia at the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg foregrounded their power and status.31 In the context of Roman palaces, Gail Feigenbaum has argued that it was partly up to the attentive visitor to assemble narratives of identity as they navigated space.32 Collectively, these scholars of French and Italian sites have demonstrated how an observant visitor incorporated disparate visual and experiential elements into a single experienced reality of their host’s identity. Applying a comparable methodology to Huis ten Bosch aligns Amalia’s patronage strategies with the elites across Europe by whom she would have liked to have been regarded as a peer, particularly women such as Marie de’ Medici, Henrietta Maria, or Anne of Austria. The palace can be read as a site that employs baroque strategies of display to generate a nuanced and audience-specific evocation of its patron. In this way it becomes a built portrait that integrates architectural, painted, and landscape components. Depending on whether a visitor viewed the exterior, interior, or both, the portrait “painted” of Amalia might vary: the garden frames her as the living vessel of memory for the deceased prince while the interior focuses on her role as the mother of future generations of Orange princes.

The Hollandse Tuin, or Outside Looking In According to the architectural theorists on whom Post’s design strategies are based, such as Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio and Vincenzo Scamozzi, the garden was an essential component of elite residences. For Alberti, the house and land reinforced and communicated the noble status of the resident.33 In L’idea dell’architettura 30 Ballon, “Vaux le Vicomte,” 273. 31 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions; Morgan, Nature as Model. 32 Feigenbaum and Freddolini, Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 2. 33 Leon Battista Alberti, The Ten Books of Architecture, 292.

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universal (1615), Scamozzi suggested that a country house is more ennobling than one in town precisely because of its relation to the land.34 He stressed the significance of situating a noble house within a cultivated landscape, even describing precise layouts for “distinguished and magnificent houses” within sculpted terrains.35 The garden, then, was well established as an important aspect of the elite residence intended to express the nobility of the resident. In the Dutch context, gardens could also function as symbols for collective identity. During the war, the image of the garden had gradually transformed into the hollandse tuin, an emblem representing the United Provinces as a unified whole, protected from external enemies.36 This emblem usually consisted of a fence encircling a woman – the Dutch maid – and defended by a lion. It may have originated in the medieval hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden that symbolized Mary’s virginity, but several noble families later appropriated it for use in personal devices. It also became a component in civic emblems.37 Simon Schama dated the first use of the garden as a symbol for the emerging Dutch Republic to a medallion struck in 1573, on which a maid brandishing a sword was seated within a closed garden.38 The motif appeared widely in print culture, including on a broadsheet on the occasion of the death of Prince Maurits of Orange in 1625. The emblem linked the image of the cultivated garden with the broader rhetoric of physical land reclamation from the encroaching water and a politically charged reclamation of the Republic from the Spanish crown. When a female patron as astute as the Princess of Orange chose to build her house within an enclosed garden, it was therefore both an issue of architectural propriety and a statement within this narrative of proto-national self-definition. Perhaps the most compelling and relevant representation of the hollandse tuin emblem appeared in pro-Orange print culture surrounding the Twelve Year Truce in the Allegory on the Untrustworthiness of Spain, engraved by Willem Buytewech in 1615 as the title page to a political pamphlet.39 (Figure 4.4) A well-dressed, enthroned woman labeled as Vitoria – a variation on the Dutch Maid recast as Victory – is seated in a triumphal arch emblazoned with the crests of the United Provinces at the far side of an enclosed garden. She is attended by governmental officials while two gardeners, labeled as Might and Reason, tend a garden laid out in orderly beds. A pyramidal form stands at the center, shielded from those entering the garden by 34 Scamozzi was extensively translated into Dutch, though largely later in the century; see for example: Scamozzi, Het Voorbeelt der Algemeene Bouwkonst and Scamozzi, De Grondt-Regulen. Serlio’s works were also widely available; see Vène, Bibliographia Serliana and Hopkins and Witte, “From Deluxe Architectural Book to Builders Manual.” 35 Scamozzi et al., Idea of a Universal Architecture, 136. 36 van Winter, “De Hollandse Tuin,” 35. 37 van Winter, 35. Van Winter notes that it is most commonly used to represent one city or province, but also came to represent the Republic as a whole. 38 Schama, Embarassment of Riches, 71–72. 39 Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 77–79.

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Figure 4.4. Willem Buytewech, Title page to Merckt de Wysheit vermaert vant Hollantsche huyshouwen en siet des luypaerts aert die niet is te vertrouwen. 1615. Etching with engraved text, 137mm × 176mm. Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam. BI-B-FM-053.

a carefully pruned miniature Orange tree. The House of Orange, carefully kept in check by the gardeners, flourishes without dominating. Outside the garden to her left is an advancing army, led by a woman with a leopard representing the Spanish. The message is clear: might and reason tend the nation where the Orange tree grows and the lion stands guard. Intended to refer to the Twelve Year Truce, the print uses the motif of the formal Dutch garden also to comment on the appropriate balance of powers between Republic and Orange. The garden becomes the microcosm of the nation where all forces are granted their proper role. Amalia van Solms would have been well-acquainted with the symbolic potential of gardens. In her youth she served as a lady-in-waiting to the so-called Winter Queen, Elizabeth of Bohemia, wife of Frederick, Elector Palatine, at their court in Heidelberg. Amalia would therefore have witnessed firsthand the creation of the Hortus Palatinus, now regarded as the most famous of late Renaissance formal gardens.40 It was

40 See Morgan, Nature as Model, ch. 6.

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intended to embody the sophistication and power of the Elector and his wife through the deliberate deployment of staged vistas, the invocation of classical mythology, and the strategic placement of statuary – all strategies later repeated by Amalia at Huis ten Bosch. Furthermore, as Morgan has argued, the Hortus Palatinus celebrated an eternal spring created through the marriage of Frederick and Elizabeth. By invoking stories such as that of Vertumnus and Pomona, the garden design celebrated the fertility of the marriage and recast their garden as a stage for court masque.41 Morgan’s interpretation for the Elector’s garden provides an important model for the interpretation of early modern gardens and their iconographic potential. Following Amalia’s marriage, new gardens were added to Orange palaces and existing gardens were expanded and replanted. These projects supported claims to political legitimacy through the cultivation of land. According to estate account books and the letters of Constantijn Huygens, it was Amalia who was primarily responsible for decisions regarding the layout of a new east garden at Honselaarsdijk when that residence was expanded in the 1630s, as well as for another of their country houses in Rijswijk, Ter Nieuburch.42 She was directly involved in both design decisions and practical affairs and was intimately familiar with gardens in both their practical and symbolic forms. That she might leverage the symbolic potential to her own advantage should come as no surprise. Amalia’s garden at Huis ten Bosch created a series of strategic vistas within her symbolic nation-in-miniature. Visitors to the garden were transformed into part of the symbolic landscape; they embodied the flourishing, living domain overseen conceptually by the House of Orange and literally by elite viewers inside the house. Just as Post introduced a reader to the framed vista of the palace complex on the title page, prioritizing the central role of the house within the garden, the actual garden was presented to the viewer from strategic points. (Figure 4.5) The formal southern garden, represented in Post’s plan of the overall complex on the right side, was strongly bisected by north-south (here horizontal) and east-west (vertical) axes, each with a terminal point from which the garden could be viewed. This mirrors a strategy used inside in the Oranjezaal: Post’s floorplan informed viewers where they should stand. The marquetry of the floor in the Oranjezaal contains four darker-toned squares, carefully indicated on the plan. Rather than merely a practical solution, they seem to indicate where a viewer should stand to examine each cardinal wall to greatest effect. The repetition of this strategy in the garden unites the interior and exterior. Instead of squares in the floor, Post provided viewing platforms at three of the four terminal points. First was the Oranjezaal itself, elevated and isolated, where the elite 41 Morgan, Nature as Model, 192–197. 42 Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 35. Huygens comments on Amalia’s involvement with gardens in his letters of 12 June 1642 and 16 Oct. 1635, accessible via the Huygens Correspondence Online at https://www.huygens.knaw. nl/huygens-briefwisseling-online-1608-1687/.

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Figure 4.5. Jan Matthys after Pieter Post. Algemeene Grond van de Sael van Orange, met haere omstaende Timmeragie, Hoven, Plantagie, etc. 1655. Etching, 295mm × 380mm. Collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-AO-12–96–2.

visitor and patron could look out and down onto the symbolic garden realm below.43 Secondly, there were the two terminal points in the east-west axis of the garden, the groen cabinetten, small octagonal pavilions built of latticework that supported live greenery. They initially seem somewhat inconsequential and yet Post dedicated a full page to them in his book of plans and Jan van der Heyden represented them repeatedly in painted views of the garden.44 They were distinctive elements of the garden, formally tied to the Oranjezaal through the domed roofs and octagonal shape. They also provided elevated platforms from which visitors to the garden – perhaps less elite than those granted access to the interior – could view the landscape.

43 In Post’s designs, the south façade only has windows; as is apparent from early twentieth century photographs, it was only later that they were converted to doors. 44 Jan Matthysz and Pieter Post, Zijaanzicht en plattegrond van het Groen Kabinet bij Paleis Huis ten Bosch Groen Cabinet, welcker twee staen inden Hoff, van De Sael van Orange, 1655. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam RP-PAO-12–96-12.

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As visible in both Post’s plans and van der Heyden’s paintings, each axial view of the garden was flanked by pairs of lattice obelisks. In another context, the obelisks might be regarded merely as decorative elements or functional supports for plants; court gardener Jan van der Groen later included them as one type of garden trellis in his manual Den Nederlantsen Hovenier.45 However, in both print culture and iconographic literature, the obelisk was a symbolically charged form. During the Roman Empire, obelisks had already been transposed from their Egyptian homeland and were associated with the burial sites of emperors. The approach to the mausoleum of Augustus, for example, was flanked by a pair of red granite obelisks, knowledge that circulated widely in Renaissance prints representing the site.46 Funereal and commemorative associations were also recorded and circulated by architects such as Serlio. In his Book 3: On Antiquities (1540), Serlio illustrated a series of obelisks in Rome which he explicitly described in relation to imperial burial. He specified that not only was there an obelisk surmounted by a globe (such as those found in Amalia’s garden) at St Peter’s made of Egyptian stone, but also that it contained the ashes of Julius Caesar.47 The obelisk was both the marker of imperial burial and literal container for the remains of the deceased. By the seventeenth century, the obelisk had accrued another level of symbolic significance: in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, an obelisk-like form was part of the emblem Gloria de Prencipi, the “Glory of Princes.”48 These associations with glory, power, and commemoration took on a further significance within the specific context of the House of Orange. Obelisks were a key element in the design of the funerary monument for Willem the Silent in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, erected by Hendrik and Pieter de Keyser between 1614 and 1621. The monument celebrated Frederik Hendrik’s father Willem using imagery drawn from Ripa. As Angela Vanhaelen has argued, the site served dual functions of commemoration of Willem and continuation of his political role, a potent model for Huis ten Bosch.49 Hendrik de Keyser further invoked the glory of princes through the inclusion of the four obelisks surmounting the catafalque, referencing yet another emblem from Ripa. Through the use of obelisks in the most famous Dutch funerary monument of the seventeenth century, de Keyser linked established conventions of glory, power, commemoration, and immortality directly to the Oranges. That the obelisk form, so closely associated with the emperors of Rome, was incorporated in the tomb of a figure closely tied to national identity centers the House of Orange within collective Dutch national identity. 45 van der Groen, Den Nederlandtsen Hovenier, 82. 46 Curran et al, Obelisk, 46. Curran et. al. note that the obelisks at the mausoleum of Augustus had fallen and broken by the middle ages. However, their original spatial function was clearly understood, since in Renaissance prints of the site they are represented upright. 47 Serlio, Hart, and Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, 152–153. 48 Ripa, Iconologia, 248. The Dutch edition of 1644 does not include an illustration of this particular emblem, but it was included in French versions of the same year. 49 Vanhaelen, “Recomposing the Body Politic,” 366; Scholten, Sumptuous Memories, 78.

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Within the gardens of the House of Orange, the obelisk served to structure garden space and the experience of the viewer. Garden obelisks had previously been diplomatically deployed in the gardens at Huis ter Nieuburch, less than five kilometers from the Orange cenotaph in Delft. Present on a 1644 print of the gardens, obelisks demarcated the intersections of the major allées. As Sellers has noted, at Huis ter Nieuburch the central allée was a symbolic axis that visually linked the palace to the Nieuwekerk, connecting the living realm of the Prince and Princess to the site of dynastic memory.50 The view of the church on the horizon would have been flanked by obelisks mimicking the approach to the mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, itself a dynastic monument containing the burials of multiple generations.51 The paired obelisks become a motif that pervade many of these ritual sites: at Huis ten Bosch, lattice obelisks placed strategically at the end of each axis within the southern garden framed views of house and land that invoked narratives of commemoration and princely splendor. This is most pertinent to the final terminal point from which Post intended the garden at Huis ten Bosch to be viewed, a slight irregularity in the border at the southern end of the garden where a small area juts slightly further south inside the garden walls. This detail of the plan has never been discussed in analyses of the garden or house plans. However, it played a crucial role in creating the most spectacular view of house and garden. At the terminus of the north-south axis, visitors at ground level could look between a pair of obelisks and across the garden with the south façade rising as a backdrop. The view from this point combined house, garden, and patron with narratives of dynastic lineage and immortality through the symbolic connotation of the obelisks. It fully transformed the house into both mausoleum and cenotaph; the obelisks in the garden perform the same function as those at the mausoleum of Augustus, framing the approach. The allusions to both the burial of Roman emperors and the burial of the Willem the Silent served to present the “triumphal temple” of Huis ten Bosch. Although Buytewech’s hollandse tuin cannot be said to have an explicit causal relationship with the design of the Huis ten Bosch garden, it provides a compelling parallel for reading the site. In both cases, a viewer was presented with a view of a classicizing architectural backdrop beyond a garden enveloping the symbolic House of Orange. In both cases, the body of a woman presented a critical symbolic component. The garden, as microcosm of the nation, revolved around a monument to the House of Orange, its sacrifices, and its continued role in cultivating a living, thriving landscape.

50 Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 67. 51 Davies, Death and the Emperor, passim. A view of the link between ter Nieuburch and the Nieuwekerk was recorded in a print by J Gole, reproduced in Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 67.

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As the trellis obelisks were part of the living narrative of flourishing greenery, so too was the body of Amalia a living aspect of the language of commemoration. After all, the house was not a tomb or a temple, but a residence. This fact subtly shifts the potential narratives. The site was activated by the mobile, living body of the resident. Post’s plans indicate that there was a small stairway that connected Amalia’s most restricted spaces to the ground floor, giving access to the formal garden. Post specifies that the stairs are for heijmelycke gebruycke – secret or confidential use.52 Amalia could conceivably appear in the garden, in the center of the tripartite triumphal arch created by the design of the south façade.53 The theatricality of a concealed door is not particular to the garden, either. Post apparently repeated this strategy in the Oranjezaal, where a door hidden behind a portrait of Amalia and her daughters in a triumphal arch connected to Amalia’s rooms. Just as in Buytewech’s overtly propagandistic garden, at Huis ten Bosch, a victorious woman stood framed by a triumphal arch on the far side of a quartered garden, acting out the central role of the House of Orange within the hollandse tuin.

The Architectural Language of Triumph, or The Inside Looking Out Having navigated the garden on foot or by coach, a visitor might then be granted entry to the interior. Post’s plans (Figure 4.5) seem to indicate that a visitor to the complex could cross the canal, leaving the woods behind to enter the realm of the patron. Visitors arriving by carriage approached the house from the north, along a main allée lined in citrus and alder which provided a line of sight toward the north façade of the house.54 The visitor climbed a flight of the steps to enter the house on the main floor. Here he would be faced with an arched doorway beneath a pediment bearing Amalia’s coat of arms.55 Once inside the house, the experience of the visitor was no less strategically manipulated than outside. As he had done with the axes of the garden, Post created framed vistas, repeatedly directing the visitor’s gaze outside reminding him of where within the microcosm he currently stood. The juxtaposition of painted, planted, and architectural components speaks to a close collaboration between Post, artistic designer

52 See element M in the ground floor plan. Plattegrond van de eerste verdieping, Jan Matthysz., 1655, RP-PAO-12–96-3. 53 See element O in the ground floor plan. Plattegrond van de eerste verdieping, Jan Matthysz., 1655, RP-PAO-12–96-3. 54 Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 117. The de Bovio brothers, who visited after the death of Amalia, comment on the rarity and costliness of the citrus trees as well as how peculiar it is that there were no water features. Brom, “Italiaanse reisbeschrijving,” 119. 55 When the voorsael was expanded under Marot, the façade was also changed, eliminating the temple-like aspects of the north face of the building. See Loonstra, Het Huis int Bosch, 68–69.

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Jacob van Campen, and the patron herself, as existing paintings were integrated into the scheme and new ones were commissioned. The difference with these interior experiences can be explained by which aspect of Amalia’s identity is stressed: interior imagery foregrounded Amalia as a mother and her living legacy in the form of her descendants, while the exterior focused on more public narratives of her role within the Republic. In the way that Artemisia’s body carried the ashes of Mausolus into the future, the interior decoration of Huis ten Bosch carried Frederik Hendrik’s legacy forward and extended the cultural relevance of his widow. In the way that Amalia’s gardens bore fruit outside, her body bore fruit inside. Imagine the experience of Cosimo III de’ Medici, who, on his visit to Huis ten Bosch, would have first ascended to the main floor entered the voor sael or vestibule, filled with statues of Orange princes.56 From here he would have turned left (east) to enter Amalia’s apartment. Beginning in the voorkamer, he may have stopped to look out the window to the east, gaining a new appreciation for the fruit and herb beds in the gardens closest to the house. (Figure 4.3) Standing in front of the window, Cosimo would turn to enter the bedtkamer where Amalia received visitors in front of a state bed. The view with which he was presented through the open door might have surprised him, because he was not presented with a series of doors en enfilade. The enfilade, or alignment of doors, was explicitly prescribed by architectural theorists and was a central feature of early modern palaces. Scamozzi recommends: Lastly, ordinary or connecting doors serve to connect rooms and should be sufficient in number to satisfy requirements and built in line within each apartment so that there is a through view of all the rooms to create a nobler and grander effect […] doors should not be positioned too close to corners for this weakens the fabric of the building.57

The practice allowed a visitor to gauge his relative standing by looking through a series of spaces and was thus a critical element in practices that reinforced social status. In the design of Huis ten Bosch, Post deliberately ignored the advice of architects that he used to great advantage elsewhere. This is particularly surprising since the enfilade was a common practice in the palaces built for the stadholder.58 Post himself used it when renovating the urban palace at Noordeinde as well as on the ground floor of Huis ten Bosch itself.59 56 Hoogewerff, “Twee Reizen van Cosimo de Medici,” This account indicates that Amalia was keenly aware of architecturally specific practices of etiquette, hierarchy, and relative social standing. 57 Scamozzi et al., Idea of a Universal Architecture, 204. Emphasis mine. 58 Willemijn Fock has argued that the stadhouder not only brought the enfilade to the Netherlands, and with it the etiquette of hierarchical spaces, but even that such an arrangement of space virtually took over in palace planning. Fock, “Het décor van Huiselijk Vermaak,” 43. 59 See ground floor plan. Plattegrond van de eerste verdieping, Jan Matthysz., 1655, RP-P-AO-12–96-3.

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Given its demonstrated utility in other designs by Post, the absence of the enfilade on the main floor at Huis ten Bosch must have been deliberate. As a visitor turned to enter the bedtkamer, he would be faced not with a view penetrating through space but rather with a view of the bedtkamer’s fireplace, surmounted by The Holy Family with a Round Dance of Angels and with Partridges by Antony van Dyck, a painting notable for the profusion of fruit in the foreground.60 Post therefore presented the visitor with two complementary framed views: the fruitful land outside, and a painting. The painting spoke to Amalia’s wealth and taste as an art patron while invoking narratives of fertility through both the birth of Christ and the still life of fruits piled at Mary’s feet.61 Perhaps the visitor was intended to elide these two landscapes, painted and planted, that he saw from this vantage point, or to regard Amalia as a typological counterpart to Mary, as in other women ruler’s palaces. The connection between the two fruitful mothers was repeated even more forcefully in the next room in the apartment sequence: in the east cabinet, images of Mary and Amalia faced each other across the room, mirroring one another in posture, behavior, and lighting.62 In a house commissioned by a widow who had borne a son and four daughters to continue a dynasty, the language of fertility throughout Amalia’s rooms would be particularly powerful. Further, the elision with Mary was a promotional strategy employed by other elite widows in the seventeenth century. As Lisa Anne Rotmil has argued for Anne of Austria, Sheila ffolliott for Catherine de’ Medici and Robert Berger, F.H. Hazelhurst, and Deborah Marrow for Marie de’Medici, the ties between Mary and the widow-patron underlined the patron’s virtue and served as effective political metaphor.63 That Amalia should use strategies comparable to other elite women further suggests that the house was intended to resonate with international audiences and provide her with a stage on which to continue to enact her agendas into her later years. The language of fertility is particularly significant as Post and van Campen repeatedly directed the attention of the viewer back to the gardens outside. Visually and symbolically, the designers established continuity between the realms of vestibule, hall, and southern garden; Sellers has shown how the placement and decoration of 60 Barnes, Van Dyck, 251. The painting was purchased on behalf of Frederik Hendrik by Jan Caspeel in Antwerp in 1646. Originally painted around 1630, the original patron is unknown. Both Lunsingh-Scheurleer and Loonstra call the painting a Flight into Egypt. Amalia’s inventory describes it: “Voor de schoorsteen in de slaepcamer een schilderije van Maria ende Joseph met het kindeken Jesus ende daerbij een dans van engeltgens, door Van Dijck gedaen.” (“For the mantelpiece in the bedroom, a painting of Mary and Joseph with the infant Jesus and also a dance of small angels, by Van Dijck”). Drossaers and Lunsingh Scheurleer, Inventarissen, 281; Loonstra, Het Huis int Bosch, 37. 61 Barnes summarizes the scholarship on the symbolism, relating the apples to Mary’s role as the new Eve and noting the profusion of fertile imagery including pomegranates, grapes, gourds, figs and apples. Barnes, Van Dyck, 251. 62 I have previously argued for the relationship between these paintings in Beranek, “Govert Flinck,” 66–79. 63 Rotmil, Artistic Patronage, 251; Marrow, Art Patronage of Marie de Medici, 61; ffolliott, “A Queen’s Garden,” 252. 64 Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 117.

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Figure 4.6. Gerard van Honthorst. Allegory on the Marriage of Amalia van Solms and Frederik Hendrik. 1648–1650. Oil on Canvas, 300 x 750 cm. Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch, The Hague. photograph: Margareta Svensson.

the parterres de broderie behind the house blurred the distinction between interior and exterior, extending the dominion of Amalia into the garden.64 The monogram of the Prince and Princess (HAVO, or Hendrik and Amalia Van Oranje) was repeated both as a decorative element on the ceiling of the cupola that rose above the Oranjezaal and in the center of each quadrant of the parterres. This linked the site with Jacques Boyceau, a leading writer on gardens in the early seventeenth century who was concerned with the connections established between garden and house. Mukerji has noted that Boyceau was particularly concerned with how the parterres closest to the house would look from the windows.65 The visual penetration of the membrane mediating interior and exterior is repeated in multiple rooms using multiple media. From the voor sael, the visitor to Huis ten Bosch would enter the central Oranjezaal. Across from the entrance and visible even from the voorsael was a large painted allegory celebrating the marriage of Amalia and Frederik Hendrik, painted by Gerrit van Honthorst. As Sellers has noted, the painting was placed over a tripartite arch formed by the south windows – functionally speaking, the painting constituted the architrave of a triumphal arch.66 The architect, assisted by decorative planners Van Campen and Huygens, referred to the triumphal entry where it was common for an arch to be crowned with a tableau vivant or painting. Other contemporary examples include the temporary arches built for the visit of Marie de Medici; surviving illustrations and tracts make it clear that the arches were surmounted with stages, including a scene representing the marriage of Marie de Medici and Henry IV.67 In the Oranjezaal, the wedding of Amalia and Frederik Hendrik formed one such tableau over the southern windows. The dynastic agenda was established with Amalia’s coat of arms in the pediment on the facade, continued into the voorsael with four generations of the Princes of Orange in life size sculptures, and culminated with 65 Mukerji, “Reading and Writing,” 660. 66 Sellers, Courtly Gardens, 115. 67 Barlaeus, Marie de Medicis entrant dans Amsterdam, 18.

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a direct line of sight to the allegorized marriage necessary for preserving both dynasty and polity. The painting is rife with political commentary on the fruitfulness of the union and its implications for the United Provinces, foregrounding the beneficent nature of the marriage of the Prince and Princess surrounded by symbols of land and sea. (Figure 4.6/Plate 6) To the left is Neptune, brandishing his trident, with putti carrying the fruits of the sea that reference the Dutch mastery of the seas. To the right lies a cornucopia filled with the fruits of the earth, and the foreground is filled with a snaking group of frolicking putti holding hands. As early as the eighteenth century, these seven children were seen as symbols of the United Provinces, united under Frederik Hendrik and Amalia.68 The fruitful land of the allegory is directly elided with Amalia’s fruitful gardens visible through the windows below and the mobile bodies of visitors moving through them. Lineage and fertility also were emphasized by the visible presence of Amalia’s children throughout the house. In the Oranjezaal, Amalia is represented seated in a triumphal arch with her four daughters, witnessing the apotheosis of Frederik Hendrik. Willem II is at his father’s side. The marriages of both Willem II and Amalia’s eldest daughter, Louis Henriette, to the Elector Palatine, form part of the triumphal procession encircling the room. Furthermore, portraits of the family stud the rest of the house. In the western cabinet (the function of which is unknown), the whole family appears, life size, assembled as if on a terrace and arranged such that Amalia forms the backbone of the composition, in effect the center of the dynasty. The western cabinet is therefore transformed from contained interior to liminal space testing the boundary between inside and out and creating the illusion of garden space indoors just as the green cabinets outside create the illusion of interior space in the garden. To be sure, the house commemorated the deceased Prince and celebrated his life and works. Yet for all the commemorative strategies of the garden and the references to the mourning widow, Amalia’s power in life was equally emphasized by that which is living. As the memory of the Prince passed into legend, Amalia tended his fame to generate a living legacy with flourishing plants and her own living body.

Conclusions: Built Identity and Living Memory Because most scholarship focuses on the celebration of Frederik Hendrik’s memory, the role of important trends within continental architectural and garden theory of the early modern period at Huis ten Bosch has been overlooked. Post designed the complex at Huis ten Bosch at a moment when palaces helped construct and make visible the identity of the resident. In L’idea dell’architettura universal, Scamozzi wrote, “A building is nothing more than the construction of a man-made body,” and 68 van Dijk, Beschryving, 20.

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that “just as we judge a man by his face, these external signs inform us that this is the house of a nobleman.”69 Status and identity were inscribed on a residence, standing in as a worthy embodiment of the resident, a type of built portrait. The programmatic unity relating interior and exterior incorporated the garden into the symbolic logic and representational strategies of the site, making it part and parcel of the built portrait of the patron. Huis ten Bosch reflects the significance of international influences on the Orange court in a way that would resonate with elite visitors: Amalia was embodied and represented by Huis ten Bosch in her roles as protector of memory and mother of a dynasty using techniques culled from French and Italian models. The physical body of the patron formed a central part of the symbolism of the complex through the deliberate invocation of the story of the classical widow Artemisia, who became Mausolus’ living tomb. The fabric of the house was implicit in creating a living memory, as was Amalia herself. Huis ten Bosch’s existence is rooted in promoting the beneficent stewardship of the House of Orange, here re-centered around Amalia herself. The house and garden became an embodiment of the politicized hollandse tuin, a symbolic realm that made visible the fruitfulness of the land under the careful oversight of its patron. This was a message with distinct political urgency for the patron at the time the palace was built, decorated, and planted. The fruitful land presented a parallel to the physical body of its patron: both generated the fruit that sustained the nation, framing Amalia van Solms and her descendants as figures central to communal well-being. At Huis ten Bosch, it is not the Dutch maid-as-Victory enthroned within the triumphal arch, but the Dutch matron, Amalia, to whom the government ought pay heed to continue to protect the freedoms and privileges of the Dutch people. The house and garden were neither private memorial nor tomb. Rather, together they took on wider significance as a tool used by Amalia to reinforce her role within the nation. Her significance was made clear through the decorative scheme: her portrait occupied the literal keystone of the cupola of the Oranjezaal. Beyond a setting for the house or a manifestation of elite leisure, the gardens were a carefully calculated foil to any funereal narrative within the house. Like the ancient widow Artemisia, Amalia created a monument to the memory of her deceased husband, but leveraged it to her own advantage. With the gardens at Huis ten Bosch, Post created a living memorial, transforming stone obelisks into living greenery and passive cenotaph into active residence. While Artemisia drank the ashes of the cremated Mausolus to ensure the survival of his memory, Amalia enshrined the memory of the Prince in house, garden, and body, stressing the links to the monuments of deceased Orange ancestors as well as the links to the living lineage. Repeatedly, it is the living body of the faithful widow that provides a fulcrum around which the meaning of the site revolves. When read symbolically and integrated into the commemorative 69 Scamozzi et al., Idea of a Universal Architecture, 40 and 105.

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strategies at Huis ten Bosch, the garden re-centers the interpretation of the site as both appropriate memorial for the dead and powerful political tool for the living. From such a study, Amalia emerges not only as a vessel of living memory, but as an active agent in ensuring the survival of the Orange dynasty, thereby shaping her own personal legacy and that of the Dutch Republic.

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Mukerji, Chandra. “Reading and Writing with Nature: Social Claims and the French Formal Garden,” Theory and Society 19, no. 6 (1990), 660. Ottenheym, K. “Possessed by Such a Passion for Building: Frederik Hendrik and Architecture.” In Princely Display: The Court of Frederik Hendrik of Orange and Amalia van Solms, edited by Maria Keblusek and Jori Zijlmans, 105–125. The Hague and Zwolle: Haagse Historische Museum and Waanders Publishers, 1997. Panofsky, Erwin. Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964. Pepys, Samuel, Robert Latham, and William Matthews. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription. London: Bell, 1970–1983. Peter Raupp, Hanna. Die Ikonographie des Oranjezaal. Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1980. Poelhekke, J.J. “Amalia van Solms.” In Vrouwen in het landbestuur: van Adela van Hamaland tot en met Konigin Juliana. Vijftien Biographische opstellen, edited by C.A. Tamse. ‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1982. Post, Pieter. De Sael van Oranje, ghebouwt bij haere Hoocht. Amlie Princesse Douariere van Oranje etc. Amsterdam, 1655. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia, of Uytbeeldingen des Verstands: van Cesare Ripa van Perugien, Ridder van SS, Mauritius en Lazzaro. Amsterdam: Dirck Pietersz Pers, 1644. Rotmil, Lisa Anne. “The Artistic Patronage of Anne of Austria (1601–1666): Image Making at the French Court.” PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2000. Rowen, Herbert H. “The Revolution That Wasn’t: The Coup d’état of 1650 in Holland.” In The Rhyme and Reason of Politics in Early Modern Europe. Collected Essays of Herbert H. Rowen., edited by Craig Harline, 63–72. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992. Scamozzi, Vincenzo. Het Voorbeelt der Algemeene Bouwkonst van Vincent Scamozzi, Bouwmeester van Venetie. Het derde Boeck, in ‘t eerste deel. Amsterdam: Danckert Danckertsz, 1658. Scamozzi, Vincenzo. Bouwkonstige Wercken begrepen in 8 boeken. Amsterdam: Dancker Danckertsz, 1661. Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Koen Ottenheym, W. Vroom, and Jan Derwig. The Idea of a Universal Architecture. III, Villas and Country Estates. Trans. P.B. Garvin, M.J. Obbink, H.J. Scheepmaker. Amsterdam; Woodbridge: Architectura & Natura; ACC Distribution, 2003. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Knopf, 1987. Scholten, Frits. Sumptuous Memories: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Tomb Sculpture. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2003. Sellers, Vanessa Bezemer. Courtly Gardens in Holland. Amsterdam and Woodbridge: Architectura + Natura Press and Garden Art Press, 2001. Serlio, Sebastiano, Vaughan Hart, and Peter Hicks. Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture. Books I-V of ‘Tutte L’Opere D’Architettura et Prospetiva’ by Sebastiano Serlio. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1996. Skelton, Kimberley. “Redefining Hospitality: The Leisured World of the 1650s English Country House.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68 (4): 496–513, 2009. Slothouwer, D.F. De paleizen van Frederik Hendrik. Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1945. Sutton, Peter C. Jan van der Heyden (1637–1712). Greenwich, Conn.; Amsterdam; New Haven: Bruce Museum; Rijksmuseum; In Association with Yale University Press, 2006. Terwen, J.J. and K. Ottenheym. Pieter Post (1608–1669): Architect. Zutphen Walberg Pers, 1993. Tiethoff-Spliethoff, Marieke. “Role Play and Representation: Portrait Painting at the Court of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia.” In Princely Display: The Court of Frederik Hendrik of Orange and Amalia van Solms, 161–184. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1997. Treanor, Virginia. “Amalia van Solms and the Formation of the Stadhouder’s Art Collection, 1625–1675.” PhD, Art History, University of Maryland, 2011. Tucker, Rebecca. “His Excellency at Home: Frederik Hendrik and the Noble Life at Huis Honselaarsdijk.” Nederlands Kunsthistorische Jaarboek 51: 83–102, 2001. Tucker, Rebecca. The Art of Living Nobly: The Patronage of Prince Frederik Hendrik (1584–1647) at the Palace of Honselaarsdijk During the Dutch Republic. PhD diss, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 2002.

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Tucker, Rebecca. “The Politics of Display at Honselaarsdijk.” Nederlands Kunsthistorische Jaarboek 65: 114–143, 2015. Tung, Mason. Two Concordances to Ripa’s Iconologia. New York: AMS Press, 1993. Valerius, Maximus, Conradus Mirkinius, and Jan Leendertsz Berewout. Negen boecken, van ghedenckweerdighe, loflicke woorden, daden ende gheschiedenissen der Romeynen en de uytlantsche volcken. Rotterdam: J.L. Berewout, 1614. van der Groen, Jan. Den nederlandtsen hovenier: zijnde het I. deel van het Vermakelijck land-leven, beschrijbende alderhande princelijke en heerlijcke lusthoven en hofsteden; en hoeman de selve, met veelderley uytnemende boomen, bloemen en kruyden, kan beplanted, bezaeyen, en vercieren. Amsterdam: Gysbert de Groot, 1699. van Dijk, J. Beschryving der Schilderyen in de Oranjezaal van het vorstelyke Huys t Bosch. Den Haag: Wed. O. Thol en Zoon, 1767. van Gelder, J.G. “Rubens in Holland in de zeventiende eeuw.” Nederlands Kunsthistorische Jaarboek, 1951. van Winter, P.J. “De Hollandse Tuin.” Nederlands Kunsthistorische Jaarboek 8: 29–121, 1957. Vanhaelen, Angela. “Recomposing the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century Delft.” Oxford Art Journal 31 (3): 363–381, 2008. Vène, Magali. Bibliographia Serliana. Catalogue des éditions imprimées des livres du traité d’architecture de Sebastiano Serlio (1537–1681). Paris: Picard, 2007. Visser, J. Gloria Parendi: Dagboeken van Willem Frederik, Stadhouder van Friesland, Groningen en Drenthe, 1643–1649, 1651–1654. Den Haag: Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, 1995. Waddy, Patricia. Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan. New York, N.Y.; Cambridge: Architectural History Foundation; MIT Press, 1990. Walsh, Amy. “Van Dyck at the Court of Frederik Hendrik.” In Van Dyck 350, edited by Susan J. Barnes and Arthur Wheelock, 223–244. Washington and Hanover: National Gallery of Art and University Press of New England, 1994. Zoet, Jan. D’Uitsteekenste Digt-Kunstige Werken. Amsterdam: Jan Klaasz ten Hoorn, 1675.

About the Author Saskia Beranek obtained her Ph.D from the University of Pittsburgh, writing about the patronage of Amalia van Solms. She is Assistant Professor of Art History at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois.

5. Louise Hollandine and the Art of Arachnean Critique

Lindsay Ann Reid Abstract Louise Hollandine was an artist and student of internationally renowned Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst. Though relatively few works now survive that can be authoritatively ascribed to her, Louise Hollandine’s artistic reputation is flatteringly memorialized in Richard Lovelace’s seldom-remarked poem “Princesse Löysa Drawing.” “Princesse Löysa Drawing” reworks in surprising and nuanced ways the celebrated weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva from Book 6 of the Metamorphoses. After briefly establishing the broader social contexts in which both this Princess Palatine and Lovelace operated, this chapter presents a sustained literary analysis of “Princesse Löysa Drawing,” exploring both its intertextual, literary connections with Metamorphoses 6 and its relation to two Ovidian portraits historiés by Louise Hollandine, The Daughters of Cecrops and Vertumnus and Pomona. Keywords: Louise Hollandine; Gerard van Honthorst; Richard Lovelace; Ovid; Arachne; cavalier poetry

Louise Hollandine (1622–1709), granddaughter to Britain’s King James I (1566–1625) and “scion of the most staunchly Protestant branch of the Stuart dynasty” was born in The Hague.1 It was in this city that her parents, Frederick V, Elector Palatine and short-lived King of Bohemia (1596–1632) and Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), dwelt in exile following their flight from Prague in 1620.2 When Louise Hollandine is now remembered at all, it is usually for her intrepid social and religious transformation in the late 1650s from Protestant princess to runaway Catholic nun and eventual Abbess of Maubuisson in Paris.3 Yet she was also an artist, as we are reminded by a youthful self-portrait in which the princess meaningfully presents herself with a mahlstick in hand (Figure 5.1). Having received her childhood education primarily at her family’s 1 MacKenzie, “Jane Barker,” 64. 2 For a succinct overview of the Bohemian exile court’s existence in The Hague, see Keblusek, “Bohemian Court.” 3 See, for example, Broomhall and Van Gent, “Converted Relationships,” 659–63 and Broomhall and Van Gent, “Queen of Bohemia’s Daughter.” Sutton, E. (ed.), Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, Amsterdam University Press 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789463721400_ch05

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Figure 5.1. Louise Hollandine, Self Portrait, c. 1640–1655, oil on panel, Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague.

Prinsenhof, or nursery palace, in Leiden, Louise Hollandine is reputed to have begun drawing lessons at the age of six. Later, along with a number of her many siblings, she advanced her studies under the tutelage of Gerard van Honthorst (1590–1656).4 As the Memoirs of her younger sister Sophia of Hanover (1630–1714) detail, Louise Hollandine “completely devoted herself to painting” in her youth, and “so great was her talent that she could capture peoples’ likeness without them having to sit for

4 For Louise Hollandine’s biographical details, I have relied primarily on: Kerstjens, “Princely Painter”; Rohr, “Peint par Madame”; and Keblusek, “Bohemian Court,” 50–53. Earlier accounts of Louise Hollandine’s life include: Spilbeeck, “Louise Hollandine”; Depping, “La Princesse”; Butler, Short Account, 24–28; Costello, Memoirs, II, 139–41; Nolan, Irish Dames, 118–21; and Wendland, “Pfalzgraf Eduard.”

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Figure 5.2. Louise Hollandine, Self Portrait of Louise Hollandine Palatine as Benedictine Nun, c. 1659–1709, oil on canvas, Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague.

her.”5 What is more, as a second self-portrait indicates, she continued these artistic pursuits even after taking the veil (Figure 5.2). Although relatively few extant works can be definitively attributed to her, Louise Hollandine’s reputation amongst her own contemporaries as an artist of considerable talent is flatteringly memorialized in “Princesse Löysa Drawing,” the text of which I reproduce in full at the close of this chapter.6 Penned by Richard Lovelace (1617–1657) – “one of the most traditionally cavalier of cavalier poets” and a figure 5 Hanover, Memoirs, 23, 43. 6 For a comprehensive list of works attributed to Louise Hollandine, see Rohr, “Peint par Madame,” 155–60. Here and throughout this essay I have silently regularized capitalization, orthography, and italicization in early modern titles.

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Figure 5.3. Louise Hollandine, Portrait of Three Women as the Daughters of Cecrops Finding the Serpent-shaped Erichthonius, c.1635–1709, oil on canvas, Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague.

much celebrated as a “handsome lover, courageous warrior, and consummate lyricist” – this poem was first printed in Lucasta of 1649, though it may well have been composed several years prior to that date.7 This little-remarked 53-line paean to Louise Hollandine’s artistic skill is an Ovidian aficionado’s delight.8 It reworks, in 7 Loxley, “Poetry, Portraiture,” 355; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 115. Although Lovelace’s Lucasta was not licensed for publication until early 1648, it has been argued that “[w]e have good reason to assume a terminus ad quem of the final months of 1647” for the work, meaning that “Princesse Löysa Drawing” was in all likelihood written prior to this date: McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 114. For further speculations on the timeline of Lucasta’s publication (and socio-political backdrop), see Robertson, Censorship and Conflict, 70–99. Lovelace’s charm and good looks attracted much early modern commentary. At the close of the seventeenth century, Wood reported that Lovelace had been “the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld, a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him […] much admired and adored”: Athenae Oxonienses, sig. L1r. 8 “Princesse Löysa Drawing” has been regularly bypassed in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship. To wit, one of the most sustained analyses that it has generated in the past 150 years or so is Alice Meynell’s fleeting assessment of 1897 that Lovelace’s “daunting” literary conceits render the poem a “very maze” with “little paths of verse and fancy turn[ing] in upon one another”: Meynell, Flower of the Mind, 339. Another brief

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Figure 5.4. Mary Hotchkiss after Louise Hollandine, Called the Prince of Denmark and Elizabeth, Viscountess ­Mordaunt, as Vertumnus and Pomona, but more probably Henry, 1st Viscount Mordaunt and Miss Taylor, oil on canvas, © National Trust / Peter Muhly.

surprising and nuanced ways, the mythological weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva from Book 6 of the ancient Roman Metamorphoses, an episode that has been regularly hailed as one of “the most substantial examples of Ovid’s treatment of artistic creation and reception.”9 “Princesse Löysa Drawing” frames Louise Hollandine in neo-Arachnean terms as a creator among women and a seemingly proto-feminist critic of classical tradition. Lovelace’s descriptions of the mythological images issuing from “bright Löysa’s pencills” in this early modern text owe much to Ovid’s anterior portrayal of Arachne’s artwork (which, in turn, takes as its subject “caelestia crimina,” or heavenly crimes, involving acts of coercion, deception, and violence perpetrated by the oversexed pantheon of Olympian deities).10 My ensuing consideration of this English poem and its relationship to Louise Hollandine’s known Ovidian paintings, The Daughters of Cecrops (Figure 5.3) and Vertumnus and Pomona (Figure 5.4/Plate 7), falls into four parts. I first establish something of the broader social contexts in which both Louise discussion (with the poem posited as a statement on “the transforming powers of art”) can be found in Farmer, Poets and the Visual, 55. However, Farmer misreads the poem’s mythological plot: as my subsequent analysis clarifies, his summative claim that the inscribed Louise Hollandine’s “inventive recasting of […] Ovidian tales puts Venus’ nose quite out of joint” is not strictly true. 9 Johnson, Ovid before Exile, 6.

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Hollandine and Lovelace operated. In so doing, I raise the tantalizing possibility that the poet may have based “Princesse Löysa Drawing” on actual, real-life encounters with the Princess Palatine and/or her work – a connection that would add undeniable piquancy to his ekphrastic representation of her Ovidiana. My second section turns to a more detailed analysis of Lovelace’s classical intertextuality, exploring how material from Metamorphoses 6 is appropriated and reworked in “Princesse Löysa Drawing.” I subsequently call attention to the problem of disentangling art from ekphrasis and the hermeneutic tendencies of the historical Louise Hollandine from Lovelace’s literary conceits. Finally, I juxtapose Lovelace’s depiction of Louise Hollandine’s artistry with an analysis of the two aforementioned mythological portraits historiés painted by the princess herself, querying the degree to which Lovelace’s fictionalization aligns with the character of this amateur artist’s known Ovidian pieces.

Historical Contexts As Nadine Akkerman has shown, the Bohemian exile court into which Louise Hollandine was born rapidly “transformed the Hague into a rich cultural capital,” and the princess’s family sustained a “friendly rivalry” with the neighboring court of Orange that found “expression in masques, ballets, musical performances, art, tilting, and tournaments.”11 It was amongst a “heady mixture of artists and scholars at the crossroads of learned Europe,” then, that Louise Hollandine cultivated her intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities.12 The scholarship of Elizabeth Alice Honig has helped to provide color for the more particular environment in which she must have learned to draw and paint. Although Judith Leyster (1609–1669) remains the best known of the era’s Dutch women artists, the widely recognized “milieu of professional artistic production” in which Leyster operated existed alongside a vibrant and remarkably populous “second world” of so-called amateur production that engaged numerous other women. This “elite milieu [was] comprised of often highly educated, highly cultivated families,” including Louise Hollandine’s own, “whose members’ social status was often the inverse of their products’ current cultural status.”13 Figures like Louise Hollandine’s famed teacher van Honthorst stood at the sometimes hazy intersection between the production of amateur and professional Dutch art in the seventeenth century. After making a name for himself in Rome between approximately 1616 and 1620 (where he developed his distinctive Caravaggesque 10 Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C2r (line 51); Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.131. My citations of “Princesse Löysa Drawing” refer both to Lucasta (by signature) and to the transcription provided at this chapter’s end (by line number). 11 Akkerman, Correspondence, 48. For a more detailed expansion of this assessment, see Akkerman, Courtly Rivals. 12 Pal, Republic of Women, 35. 13 Honig, “Art of Being,” 31.

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techniques and was dubbed “Gherardo della Notte”), this Utrecht native returned to the Netherlands and quickly began attracting the attention of both local and international patrons and collectors. His growing popularity was such by the late 1620s that van Honthorst was invited to England by Louise Hollandine’s uncle, Charles I (1600– 1649), where he produced King Charles I and His Wife Queen Henrietta Maria as Apollo and Diana (1628). Van Honthorst was subsequently engaged by the British monarch to paint The King and Queen of Bohemia and Their Children (1630).14 This was not the only time that members of the Bohemian exile court would serve as van Honthorst’s subjects: in addition to a multitude of single portraits featuring Louise Hollandine, her parents, and her siblings, van Honthorst also executed further group portraits of the family, as exemplified by The Four Eldest Children of the Queen of Bohemia (1631) and The Triumph of the Winter Queen (1636). Along with receiving such prestigious commissions, van Honthorst was a teacher. By the mid-1630s, he was operating large studios in both Utrecht and The Hague where many professional pupils trained, and he also provided instruction to numerous amateur artists. As C.H. Collins Barker put it, his “position as a drawing master to the royal ladies is well known,” and Louise Hollandine “seems to have been one of the most successful of his pupils.”15 Two centuries later, their relationship would be recollected, and perhaps somewhat romanticized, by Hendrik Jacobus Scholten (1824–1907) in Gerard van Honthorst Showing the Drawings of His Pupil Louise of Bohemia to Amalia van Solms (Figure 5.5/Plate 8). Though English, Lovelace’s own personal connections with the Low Countries appear to have been manifold. His Kentish father, Sir William Lovelace the Younger (1584–1627), had, as was noted in a petition of 1629, “served about thirty yeares in ye warres” prior to his death in the Siege of Grol (i.e. Groenlo).16 That William Lovelace’s wife and young family may have accompanied him during his continental military exploits is suggested by a reference in his widow’s will, in which she bequeathed to her eldest son Richard her “beste suite of diaper, which [she] made in the Low Countries.”17 C.H. Wilkinson has even ventured the possibility that the poet may have been born in Holland rather than his family’s native Kent.18 Later in life, after receiving an MA from Gloucester Hall, Oxford in 1636, Lovelace is said to have “retired in great splendor to the Court,” where he became a protégé of George Going (1608–1657).19 Rising to the rank of Captain, Lovelace went on to pursue a military career under

14 On van Honthorst’s connection with Charles I, see Millar, “Charles I, Honthorst,” 36–39. 15 Barker, Lely and the Stuart, I, 60–61. Van Honthorst’s artistic tutelage of various women is treated by Labordus, who includes some discussion of Louise Hollandine: “Gerard van Honthorst,” 81–84. For the outlines of van Honthorst’s biography, I have relied primarily on: Judson and Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst, 1–46; Judson, Gerrit van Honthorst; Brown, Utrecht Painters, 62; and Bok, “Biographies,” 382–83. 16 Qtd. in Wilkinson, Poems, xvi. 17 Qtd. in Wilkinson, Poems, xiii. 18 Wilkinson, Poems, xiii. 19 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, sig. L1r.

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Figure 5.5. Hendrik Jacobus Scholten, Gerard van Honthorst Showing the Drawings of His Pupil Louise of Bohemia to Amalia van Solms, 1854, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Goring’s influence (and sometimes direct command), which seems to have repeatedly placed him back in Holland during the 1640s. In “A Register of Friends” of c. 1675, Thomas Stanley (1625–1678), a relation of Lovelace’s and patron to numerous cavalier poets, remarked of his cousin’s continental military service that “During our Civill Wars” the “boldly-Loyall” Lovelace had been largely “confin’d to peace” yet was “Expos’d to Forrein Wars, when ours did cease.”20 Others amongst Lovelace’s 20 I cite “A Register of Friends” from the transcription provided in Osborn, “Thomas Stanley’s,” 136. For the broader context of Stanley’s poem, see this source as well as Revard, “Thomas Stanley.” Stanley’s comments should not be taken to mean that Lovelace was unaffected by the English political upheavals of the 1640s. Indeed, he rather famously spent two separate stints imprisoned in England during this decade. However, the character and extent of his Royalism has been queried by contemporary scholars, most notably in Hammond, “Richard Lovelace.”

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contemporaries made more definitive references to his Dutch affiliations. An anonymously published poem of 1659 entitled “An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of My Late Honoured Friend, Collonell Richard Lovelace” declares, for instance, that “Holland and France have known his nobler parts, / And found him excellent in Arms, and Arts.”21 And a piece by John Tatham (fl. 1632–1664) written sometime prior to 1645 and later printed in Ostella (1650), is pertinently titled “Upon my Noble Friend, Richard Lovelace Esquire, His Being in Holland.”22 We can assume with reasonable confidence that Lovelace spent some of this time in The Hague, where he may well have come into the orbit of the unmarried, twenty-something (and as-yet-still-Protestant) Louise Hollandine, as well as her extensive family. That Lovelace would have rubbed elbows with members of the Bohemian exile court during the 1640s comes as little surprise, given his pedigree and personal connections. He seems to have had social ties to the court of Elizabeth Stuart’s brother Charles I dating back to his youth. A 1631 warrant in the Public Record Office documents the teenaged Lovelace’s honorary appointment as “A Gent Wayter extraordinary” to the British monarch.23 And in Athenae Oxonienses (1692), Anthony à Wood (1632–1695) reported that an intervention by one of the ladies of Charles I’s wife Henrietta Maria (1609–1669) may have facilitated Lovelace’s precociously early receipt of his MA degree: In 1636 when the King and Queen were for some days entertained at Oxon, he was, at the request of a great Lady belonging to the Queen, made to the Archb. of Cant. then Chancellor of the University, actually created, among other persons of quality, Master of Arts, tho but of about two years standing.24

Furthermore, Lovelace’s own associate and mentor Goring, who spent much of the 1630s in The Low Countries (sometimes fighting alongside Louise Hollandine’s brother Rupert), is said to have known the Princess Palatine “throughout her teen years” and, in fact, to have “engaged in some form of flirtation” with her.25 The seventeenth century has been aptly described as “pre-eminently an age of portraiture, both in literature and the visual arts,” and it is worth observing that “Princesse Löysa Drawing” was neither Lovelace’s sole commemoration of a member of Charles I’s royal family, nor was it the only early modern English poem to feature Louise Hollandine as its subject.26 Indeed, there are several 21 Lovelace, Posthume Poems, sig. I4r. 22 Tatham, Ostella, sig. M1v. Evidence for the pre-1645 date of this latter poem’s composition is supplied in Wilkinson, Poems, xliii. 23 Berry and Timings, “Lovelace at Court,” 396. 24 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, sig. L1r. 25 Memegalos, George Goring, 102. For this claim, see also Morrah, Prince Rupert, 102. 26 Pace, “Delineated Lives,” 1.

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roughly contemporaneous literary pieces with which “Princesse Löysa Drawing” might be productively compared and contrasted. A poem by Lovelace included in the multi-authored collection Musarum Oxoniensium Charisteria pro Serenissima Regina Maria (1639), for instance, laments the “new-borne Funerall” of Louise Hollandine’s cousin Catherine, the daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria who lived for a single day.27 Furthermore, Sophia of Hanover’s Memoirs recall that James Harrington (1611–1677) once “compose[d] verses comparing her [sister] to an artist who, angry at being unable to paint the lather on a horse, hurls the brush at the canvas and, by this lucky stroke, achieves a perfect rendering of the horse’s frothy coat,” and, at the century’s close, Jane Barker (1652–1732) addressed a more sober if similarly flattering poem to Louise Hollandine (who was, by then, the longstanding Abbess of Maubuisson).28 Moreover, the concerns with the paragone underpinning Lovelace’s “Princesse Löysa Drawing” resonate with a number of other pieces in the cavalier poet’s canon. We might consider, for example, “Upon the Curtaine of Lucasta’s Picture, It Was Thus Wrought” or the two ekphrastic poems that Lovelace addressed to Peter Lely (1618–1680), a Dutch transplant who made a significant impact upon English visual culture in the mid-seventeenth-century: “To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly: On that Excellent Picture of His Majesty, and the Duke of Yorke, Drawne by Him at Hampton-Court” (a piece first published along with “Princesse Löysa Drawing” in Lucasta of 1649) and “Peinture: A Panegyrick to the Best Picture of Friendship Mr. Pet. Lilly” (which appeared a decade later in Lovelace’s Posthume Poems of 1659). Of particular interest for this discussion is Lovelace’s “To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly,” which takes as its subject Lely’s Double Portrait of Charles I and James, Duke of York (1647). This has been called “one of the best-known seventeenth-century poems on a work of art” and perhaps even the first “close ekphrastic analysis of a painting” in English literary tradition.29 As Claire Pace has noted, it is “one of the few poems” of the era “devoted to a specific portrait which does more than refer to that portrait in the most general of terms.”30 The remarkable sense of iconographical specificity in “Princesse Löysa Drawing” invites speculation that, like Lovelace’s better-known poem on Lely’s painting, this piece may have been analogously inspired by the cavalier poet’s encounters with his subject’s artwork. Admittedly – and in contrast with the clear and traceable relationship between Lely’s Double Portrait of 27 Musarum Oxoniensium Charisteria, sig. bb1r. This elegiac tribute to Louise Hollandine’s infant cousin was later reprinted in Lucasta (where it directly follows “Princesse Löysa Drawing”): sigs. C2v-C4r. 28 Hanover, Memoirs, 43–44. On Barker’s poem, see MacKenzie, “Jane Barker.” 29 Farmer, Poets and the Visual, 57. 30 Pace, “Delineated Lives,” 12. For the relationship between Lely’s Double Portrait of Charles I and James, Duke of York and Lovelace’s “To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly,” see: Loxley, “Poetry, Portraiture,” 360–66; Potter, Secret Rites, 65–71; Farmer, Poets and the Visual, 57–58; and Anselment, “Clouded Majesty.” On the painting, see also Harris, “Ambivalent Image.”

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Figure 5.6. Gerard van Honthorst, Meleager and Atalanta. c. 1625–1655, chalk drawing, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Charles I and James, Duke of York and Lovelace’s literary response to this painting – there is no specific set of known Ovidian drawings by Louise Hollandine that directly corresponds to the pictures ekphrastically described by the poet in “Princesse Löysa Drawing.” If such drawings by the Princess Palatine did exist, however, they might have looked something like her teacher van Honthorst’s sketch of another Ovidian tale, that of Meleager and Atalanta from Metamorphoses 8 (Figure 5.6). As J. Richard Judson reminds us, Louise Hollandine’s prolific mentor, though perhaps more often associated today with Caravaggesque techniques and genre scenes, “was famous during the seventeenth century for his mythological and historical paintings.”31 And, although her own work seems to have tended more towards portraits of family members and other aristocratic friends and acquaintances, Louise Hollandine is known to have likewise dabbled in mythological subjects.

31 Judson, Gerrit van Honthorst, v.

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Ovid’s Arachne and Lovelace’s Louise Hollandine Leaving aside, for the moment, the historical conceivability that Louise Hollandine crossed paths with the debonair and virtuosic Lovelace during the 1640s and that the poet’s work may in some way document her artistic output, “Princesse Löysa Drawing” is also a deeply allusive literary piece: its many mythological references rely upon audiences’ recognition of Arachne and Minerva’s legendary weaving contest as intertext.32 It is therefore worth recounting the outlines of Lovelace’s Ovidian model, the locus classicus for this tale. Book 6 of the Metamorphoses opens with the Maeonian weaver Arachne, famed throughout Lydia for her artistic skill, attracting the attention of Pallas, or Minerva, patron goddess of the craft. Though Ovid’s narrator avers “scires a Pallade doctam” (“you could know that Pallas had taught her”), Arachne denies it.33 In fact, the Maeonian woman responds to such suggestions by defiantly calling upon Minerva to compete with her. The ensuing artistic contest between goddess and mortal is described in detail by Ovid’s narrator as each weaves an iconographically weighty tapestry. Upon completion, we are told of Arachne’s art: “Non illud Pallas, non illud carpere Livor / possit opus” (“not Pallas, nor Envy himself, could find a flaw in that work”).34 Despite – or perhaps because of – the technical perfection of what one commentator describes as Arachne’s “surpassingly beautiful but strategically ill-advised” tapestry, Minerva resorts to violence.35 The goddess exercises her godly prerogative by beating Arachne over the head with a weaving shuttle and violently rends the artwork of her bold competitor. The Maeonian woman responds to these twinned assaults upon her person and textile by attempting to hang herself – a suicide ultimately prevented by Minerva, who, allegedly overcome by pity, transforms Arachne into a spider. Contemporary critics of Ovid’s poem have inconclusively grappled with the question of who emerges as the victor at the end of the Arachne and Minerva episode. Whereas Andrew Feldherr suggests that the weaving competition “ends in a draw,” others, such as Douglas Lateiner, have been more insistent that, in fact, “Arachne wins the contest, although she loses her life.”36 Ovid’s narrator, it has often been argued, subtly “implies [Arachne’s] success.”37 Notably, the most frequently cited of the “many compelling reasons for deducing that Ovid was on Arachne’s side” is the poem’s lengthy ekphrastic description of her artwork.38 William S. Anderson’s influential 32 The narrative of Arachne and Minerva seems to have held a particular fascination for Lovelace, who would later rework it to different ends in “The Toad and Spyder”: Lovelace, Posthume Poems, sigs. D5r-D8v. 33 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.23. 34 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.129–30. 35 Johnson, Ovid before Exile, 7. 36 Feldherr, Playing Gods, 60; Lateiner, “Mythic and Non-Mythic,” 16. 37 Fantham, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 54 (emphasis my own). 38 Brown, Ovid, 108.

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assessments of Arachne’s and Minerva’s respective textiles have definitively shaped readings of Metamorphoses 6 over the past fifty years. Minerva’s tapestry is, in Anderson’s estimation, meant to be understood as “a perfect piece of Classicistic art, structurally balanced and thematically grandiose, in support of the established order”: In the center of twelve gods, six on either side, Jupiter presides over a dispute between Minerva and Neptune. First, Neptune performs a miracle in order to establish his claim upon Athens. Then, Minerva brings out of the earth the olive. We may reasonably assume that, just as the judging gods are symmetrically arranged around Jupiter, so the disputants are disposed on either side of the center. To complete the symmetry, Minerva wove for each corner an admonitory panel to show what happened to others who challenged gods; and then she framed the whole in a border of olive leaves.39

Anderson contrastingly describes Arachne’s output as “a swirl of divine figures in unedifying situations, one god after another gratifying his lust for a human woman.” Remarking that “[t]here is no apparent structure to the tapestry, which consists of nine affairs of Jupiter, six of Neptune, four of Apollo, and one each of Liber and Saturn,” he submits that Ovid’s juxtaposition of Minerva’s and Arachne’s textiles creates “a cumulative effect, much as Baroque paintings do by contrast with neatly arranged masterpieces of Raphael.”40 Derivative, neo-Andersonian evaluations permeate the scholarly literature on this Ovidian tale, and critics have often made the further move of reading Arachne’s tapestry as mise en abyme, thereby directly aligning the Maeonian weaver’s visual aesthetic with Ovid’s own poetics. It is, after all, the creative potential of chaos itself upon which both the Metamorphoses and Arachne’s epitome are founded. Lateiner, for example, opposes Minerva’s “balanced, stiff and symmetrical scheme” with the “swirling lack of formal structure and […] fluidity” of “Arachne’s masterpiece [that] reminds one of Ovid’s poem,” and Leonard Barkan similarly argues: In contrast to the discrete classicism of Minerva’s tapestry, Arachne piles stories helter-skelter together […] so that they flow in a seamless mass, joined not by the logic of cause and effect or of morality but by the thread of metamorphosis itself. It requires no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachne’s tapestry all the elements of Ovid’s own poetic form in the Metamorphoses, which is, after all, a poem that eschews a clear narrative structure and rather creates a finely woven fabric of stories related via transformation.41 39 Anderson, Review of Ovid, 103. 40 Anderson, Review of Ovid, 103. 41 Lateiner, “Mythic and Non-Mythic,” 15; Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 4.

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It is not only the aforementioned stylistic analogies noted by Lateiner, Barkan, and others that have fuelled the current critical consensus regarding Arachne’s Ovid­ ianism (or, alternatively put, Ovid’s own Arachnean bent). Rather, it is also their shared subject matter. Many of the same stories taken up by Arachne are recounted elsewhere in Ovid’s poem, therefore drawing audiences’ attention, as one critic has put it, to “where the warp of this myth intersects with the weft” of other tales in the Metamophoses.42 The tale of Arachne and Minerva’s strife in Metamorphoses 6 is not simply a tale of artistic rivalry or a goddess’s struggle for reverence. Rather, it is also deeply concerned with the lopsided power dynamics and the sinister sexual politics of mythological tradition. In response to Minerva’s textile, which emphasizes the goddess’s own prior conquests as well as the unfortunate fates of presumptuous mortals, Arachne’s weaving conversely represents an eddy of twenty-one mythological rape scenes. The divine justice championed in Minerva’s design is thus queried and destabilized in Arachne’s composition. Gods including Jove, Neptune, Apollo, Bacchus, and Saturn are shown predatorily abducting and violating woman after woman. It is little wonder that Arachne’s critique of the male deities through a chaotic grouping – one that highlights their systematic exploitation of female bodies and implicit stifling of female creativity, voices, and viewpoints – has been identified as a potentially subversive “countercultural account.”43 Such assessments also square nicely with dominant readings of Ovid himself as “a comic innovator of glittering flippancy” and a poet who often invoked gendered perspectives to “deflat[e], dynamit[e], and generally outrag[e] the accepted ideas, ideals, and heroes of his day.”44 Patricia J. Johnson has employed the term “performative ekphrasis” to describe how the weaving contest in Metamorphoses 6 combines “a detailed representation of the conditions of artistic performance […] with descriptions of the art produced under those conditions.” Such performative descriptions, she argues, function “in essence as […] double narrative[s], comprising an ekphrastically described artwork and a narrative of the moment and circumstances of its creation.”45 This same emphasis on representing process as well as product infuses Lovelace’s derivative “Princesse Löysa Drawing,” for the poem likewise “encourages consideration of the conditions under which art comes into being in the world.”46 Replicating the actions of Arachne, the Princess Palatine in “Princesse Löysa Drawing” is depicted in the act of provocatively translating the mythological tales of literary tradition into a new, specifically visual medium. And, like Arachne before her, Lovelace’s Louise Hollandine is overtly posited as a reworker of Ovidian mythography: her subjects include 42 Brown, “Arachne’s Web,” 121. 43 Miller, “Arachnologies,” 273. 44 Lateiner, “Mythic and Non-Mythic,” 1. 45 Johnson, Ovid before Exile, 27. 46 Johnson, Ovid before Exile, 28–29.

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Echo and Narcissus (Metamorphoses 3), Pan and Syrinx (Metamorphoses 1), Ariadne and Theseus (Metamorphoses 8), Iphis and Anaxerete (Metamorphoses 14), Apollo and Leucothoë (Metamorphoses 4), Apollo and Daphne (Metamorphoses 1), and Venus and Adonis (Metamorphoses 10). Although Lovelace’s “Princesse Löysa Drawing” patently adapts images and ideas from Ovid’s tale of Arachne and Minerva in Metamorphoses 6, a new set of contestants vie for hermeneutic – and, by extension, narrative – authority in this early modern English poem. The palpably Arachnean Louise Hollandine (who, at first glance, seems, like her Ovidian antecedent, to be “Minerva in Epitomy”) is here pitted against the “winged wagge” Cupid (whom she also resembles) and her “pencills” juxtaposed with this god’s lust-inducing “darts.”47 Moreover, unlike the competition of Metamorphoses 6, whose winner remains provocatively ambiguous, there is a clear victor in Lovelace’s derivative contest. Louise Hollandine’s artistic skill is ultimately able to “enliveth more / Beauties, then [Cupid’s arrows] destroy’d before.”48 Despite her many obvious parallels with Arachne, the artist in Lovelace’s poem abjures the Maeonian woman’s signature aesthetic of “helter-skelter” chaos: the tidy (and, counter-intuitively, perhaps even Minerva-like) sense of order that she alternatively brings to the Metamorphoses’ characters is used by the poet to signal his female subject’s full victory over Cupid and the classical inheritances he epitomizes. Even Venus, the competition’s internal arbiter, must admit that her own son looks “Uselesse” and his efforts decidedly “vaine” in contrast to the dominant Princess Palatine.49 In a dec­ laration of Louise Hollandine’s obvious triumph, Lovelace’s Venus thus “Unedge[s] all [Cupid’s] Arrowes” and “riv[es] the Wood” of her son’s bow “in two” in a move that perceptibly echoes Minerva’s decision to viciously rip apart her rival’s tapestry at the end of the corresponding Ovidian episode.50

Poetic Portraiture and Questions of Agency Along with other female weavers of classical tradition, such as Penelope, Helen, and Philomela, Arachne (who, arguably, launches antiquity’s most incisive condemnation of mythological gender politics) has often been appropriated as an emblem for women’s (re)writing. Her tale has been regularly invoked by twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist scholars interested in exploring “woman’s elevation of her safe, feminine, domestic craft – weaving – into art as a new means of resistance,” as Patricia Klindienst Joplin famously put it, with the “woman artist […] us[ing] her 47 Lovelace, Lucasta, sigs. C1r, C2r (lines 2, 4, 51, 50). 48 Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C2r (lines 52–53). 49 Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C2r (line 42). 50 Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C2r (lines 46–47).

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loom to tell stories [women] are never allowed to hear unless they are mediated by men.”51 Such analyses also include Nancy K. Miller’s influential reading of Arachne’s story in Metamorphoses 6 “as a possible parable […] of a feminist poetics.”52 Rather surprisingly, a roughly analogous interpretation appears to underpin Lovelace’s seventeenth-century poem. The central conceits in “Princesse Löysa Drawing” seem, at least on one level, to anticipate with some prescience more recent readings of Arachne’s Ovidian tapestry that render it a site of “feminocentric protest,” a “challenge to […] patriarchal institution[s],” and a “self-reflexive, internal commentar[y] on the authority of representation.”53 As in Metamorphoses 6, the Princess Palatine’s Ovidian artwork in Lovelace’s poem is calculated to emphasize the ways in which Cupid’s “fond Artillerie” has, in fact, traditionally caused more devastation than love.54 And yet, instead of merely commenting upon this fact, the seemingly – and perhaps superficially – empowered female artist in “Princesse Löysa Drawing” expands the purview of Arachnean critique. Like Arachne, Lovelace’s princess samples from the Metamorphoses in her visual artwork. But whereas Louise Hollandine’s Ovidian antecedent pointedly offered a meta-critique of classical tradition’s erotic economy via a relatively straightforward “exposé of Olympian misconduct,” Lovelace’s artist takes an alternative tack by restoring some of the Metamorphoses’ best-known victims of romantic misadventure and/or sexual exploitation “to li[f]e, and love.”55 Echo, for instance, avoids her “distrest” Ovidian fate as disembodied voice in the Princess Palatine’s artwork.56 Resuming her “lively” and “wanton” female form, the nymph instead embarks on a hunting expedition with her now-willing paramour Narcissus.57 Similarly, Syrinx is saved by Louise Hollandine’s “pencills” from her reedy Ovidian transformation. Under the amateur artist’s command, she “run[s] fast / to Pans imbraces” – in reversal of direction, though with the very same “haste” that “Shee fled” the unwanted advances of that same deity in Metamorphoses 1.58 Analogous revisions are at work in the inscribed artist’s handling of other Ovidian tales, as well: Leucothoë is fortuitously “untombe[d]” by Apollo, thus sparing her from post-mortem botanical transformation; Ariadne, here freed from her astronomical associations with the Corona Borealis, is happily “ravish’t” by her “return’d” lover Theseus; a distinctly un-arboreal Daphne “Knowes […] no bayes but round her haire”; Iphis “Hangs no where now, but on” the pliant and decidedly non-stony “neck” of Anaxarete; and, far from turning 51 Joplin, “Voice of the Shuttle,” 26, 51. 52 Miller, “Arachnologies,” 272. See also Kruger, Weaving the Word, 53–86. 53 Miller, “Arachnologies,” 273, 272; Kruger, Weaving the Word, 58. 54 Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C2r (line 43). 55 Oliensis, “Power of Image-Makers,” 287; Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C1r. (line 11). 56 Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C1r (line 6). 57 Lovelace, Lucasta, sig. C1r (lines 6, 8). 58 Lovelace, Lucasta, sigs. C1r-C1v (lines 14–16).

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into a flower, the famously reluctant Adonis “now offer[s]” to Venus “those joyes with voice and hand, / Which first he could not understand.”59 Lovelace’s princess is thus depicted not only accenting or censoriously underlining what has been called “the pattern of violation-revenge-violation” at the heart of Ovid’s poem, but also attempting to revise this pattern by repositioning formerly tragic characters within a new vista of amatory satisfaction and fulfilment.60 There is an appeal to the notion that the historical Louise Hollandine may have been something of a neo-Arachne, using her finely honed talents and laudable “pencills” to launch a proto-feminist assault on the brutal power dynamics and excoriable sexual politics of classical tradition. It is an image of female authority and resistance that achieves particular potency given that, as the recent work of Carol Pal and others has demonstrated, the Bohemian exile court in the Netherlands – a creatively fertile locus where “courtiers, ministers, scholars, artists, princes, princesses, diplomats, ministers, and refugees met and mingled” – is known to have provided an atmosphere particularly “conducive to women’s intellectual careers.”61 Indeed, following Frederick’s death in 1632, it became “essentially a female-directed space.” 62 As one visitor to The Hague, Samuel Sorbière, described it, in the era that Louise Hollandine came of age the “Court of the Queen of Bohemia was that of the Graces, who numbered no less than four, since her Majesty had four daughters, around whom everyone in society […] would gather every day, to pay homage to the wit and beauty of these Princesses.”63 This description of the exile court resonates almost too felicitously with the observations of more recent scholars that Arachne likewise sits at “the center of a community of women” in Metamorphoses 6.64 After all, as Sarah Annes Brown reminds us, in this Ovidian tale Minerva narrates the story to the Muses, who have just told her how they beat their rivals, the Pierides, in a rather similar storytelling contest. Minerva and Arachne are both female, and so is their audience of nymphs. This textual community of artistic women is an important part of the story’s reception.65

59 Lovelace, Lucasta, sigs. C1v-C2r (lines 26, 20, 18, 29, 25, 35–37). 60 Joplin, “Voice of the Shuttle,” 45. We may sense here an extension of wider-spread rhetorical conventions concerning patronage in seventeenth-century English literary culture: relevant examples exist in which a patron is flatteringly presented as having a special personal capacity to improve upon the flaws or shortcomings of inherited tradition. See, for example, “To Mrs Magdalen Herbert: Of St Mary Magdalen”: Donne, Complete Poems, 489. I am grateful to Erin A. McCarthy for this reference. 61 Pal, Republic of Women, 25, 36 (emphasis my own). 62 Pal, Republic of Women, 36. 63 Qtd. in Pal, Republic of Women, 36. 64 Joplin, “Voice of the Shuttle,” 48. 65 Brown, Ovid, 117–18

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This vision of Arachne, not unlike the historical Louise Hollandine, as a creative figure “embedded within a network of female artists and connoisseurs” is one that found frequent realization in the visual arts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.66 In addition to works such as The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne (c. 1657) painted by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) or a surviving oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) for the now-lost Pallas and Arachne (c. 1636), numerous early modern illustrated editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses likewise activated the Roman poem’s narrative emphasis on the circle of women surrounding Arachne. In such a gynocentric sphere, the mortal weaver’s loom itself – though the potential site of incisive patriarchal critique – can, as Joplin suggests, be seen as representing a female-brokered “communitas, or peace […] in which it is possible for pleasure to be nonappropriative and nonviolent.”67 Nonetheless, it has also been proposed that “the theme of [Arachne’s] work as a weaver […] supplied [Ovid] with a double opportunity: to expose the undignified sexual exploits of the male gods and to compose verbal tapestries himself – that is, to write skillful ekphrases of textile skill.”68 I now want to slightly complicate the reading of the early modern English poem that I have presented thus far by postulating that much the same could be said about “Princesse Löysa Drawing” and the “double opportunity” that using Louise Hollandine as a subject afforded Lovelace to construct “skillful ekphrases” of a possibly fanciful nature. I am here referring to the repercussions of Clara Shaw Hardy’s observation that, in Metamorphoses 6, “the ecphrastic form calls the audience’s attention to the fact that it is not the weavers, but the [Ovidian] narrator, who gives us our view of the two tapestries: while we can indeed think of Minerva and Arachne as narrators, we must acknowledge the secondary level at which their narrating operates.”69 Related – and thorny – issues of narrative authority and agency inevitably arise to trouble any analysis of Lovelace’s poetic portrait of Louise Hollandine. It is worth noting that the central conceits of “Princesse Löysa Drawing” were not entirely unprecedented in English literary tradition. The classically inspired Campapse (1584) of John Lyly (1554–1606) for example, contains an extended allusion to Ovid’s Arachne that likewise hinges upon fictive female critique. In Act 3, scene 3 of this Elizabethan play, Alexander the Great’s love interest Campapse visits the studio of Apelles, who has been commissioned to paint her portrait. She finds it full of mythological paintings whose “subjects – Leda, Alcmena, Danaë, Europa and Antiopa – are taken from […] the sixth book of the Metamorphoses,” as Michael Pincombe observes.70 Given that Apelles’s pictures conspicuously recreate the same episodes of

66 Brown, Ovid, 117. 67 Joplin, “Voice of the Shuttle,” 48. 68 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 96.

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divine rape featured in Arachne’s anterior tapestry, Campapse’s assessments of their caelestia crimina are laden with intertextual meaning: Campapse. Apelles. Campapse. Apelles. Campapse. Apelles. Campapse. Apelles. Campapse. Apelles. Campapse.

What are these pictures? This is Leda, whom Jove deceived in likeness of a swan. A fair woman, but a foul deceit. This is Alcmena, unto whom Jupiter came in shape of Amphitriton, her husband, and begat Hercules. A famous son, but an infamous fact. He might do it, because he was a god. Nay, therefore it was evil done, because he was a god. This is Danae, into whose prison Jupiter drizzled a golden shower, and obtained his desire. What gold can make one yield to desire? This is Europa, whom Jupiter ravished; this, Antiopa. Were all the gods like this Jupiter?71

In Lyly’s play, Campapse’s censorious reaction upon viewing Apelles’ Arachnean paintings – in which she sees “foul deceit,” “infamous fact[s],” and “evil done” – reproduces the Maeonian weaver’s implicit critique of the gods’ violent eroticism in Metamorphoses 6. And, though she is positioned here as audience for rather than maker of these artefacts, Campapse’s gendered response to the Olympian sexual economy would seem to both echo that of Ovid’s Arachne and foreshadow that of the Princess Palatine in Lovelace’s later poem. Furthermore, the compulsion attributed to the female artist in “Princesse Löysa Drawing” to not only critique, but also correct the tales of classical tradition is not unique within early modern English literary culture, either. In fact, something remarkably similar transpires in Act 2, scene 2 of The Maid’s Tragedy (c. 1610), a dramatic work co-written by Francis Beaumont (c. 1585–1616) and John Fletcher (1579– 1625). Here, the recently jilted Aspatia inspects a “piece of needlework” depicting Ariadne’s mythological desertion that has been “wrought” by her maid Antiphilia.72 Proclaiming the piece’s “colors are not dull and pale enough,” Aspatia advises the “much mistaken” Antiphilia to start over.73 The tale, Beaumont and Fletcher’s heroine believes, ought to have said that Theseus’s “keel was split, / Or his masts spent, or some kind rock or other / Met with his vessel.”74 Certainly, Aspatia insists, it “should 69 Hardy, “Ecphrasis,” 142. 70 Pincombe, Plays of John Lyly, 43. 71 Lyly, Campapse, 3.3.9–24. 72 Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2.40. 73 Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2.62–63. 74 Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2.46–48.

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ha’been so.”75 It is thus that Aspatia instructs Antiphilia to “work a quicksand / And over it a shallow smiling water / […] and then a [personified] Fear” to interfere with the homeward journey of Ariadne’s “cozening” and unfaithful lover, Theseus.76 What is more, Aspatia summarily dismisses Antiphilia’s anxiety that these punitive additions will “wrong the story.”77 How could they when the story had long been “wronged by wanton [male] poets” – including, most notably, Ovid himself?78 The very existence of analogues for Louise Hollandine’s countercultural acts of critique and revision in earlier English works like Campapse or The Maid’s Tragedy potentially calls the authenticity of Lovelace’s poetic portrait of the princess into question. After all, the purportedly female voices in these other English works were constructed by male dramatists for performance by male actors. By extension, where does literary conceit end and portraiture begin in “Princesse Löysa Drawing”? Does it make a difference if the alter-Arachne in Lovelace’s poem is an identifiable historical woman rather than a fictional character? Should the innovative and corrective aesthetics attributed to the Princess Palatine by Lovelace be properly understood as the female visual artist’s or the imaginative male poet’s? And, if the latter, does Lovelace’s ekphrastic portrayal of Louise Hollandine’s supposed opinions – however proto-feminist their veneer – possibly divest her of agency rather than representing the perspective of an empowered historical woman? Does the poem instead participate in the more widely discussed, appropriative “ventriloquism […] of the feminine voice” in literature that may, in fact, “contribut[e] to a larger cultural silencing of women,” as Elizabeth D. Harvey has argued?79

Louise Hollandine’s Ovidianism In the case of Louise Hollandine, the true tenor of the princess’s critical “voice” is at least partially recoverable in the form of her visual artwork, which includes two undated paintings based on episodes from the Metamorphoses. The first of these paintings, The Daughters of Cecrops (Figure 5.3), depicts a tale from Book 2 of Ovid’s poem. Louise Hollandine’s work shows Herse, Aglauros, and Pandrosus, the three virginal daughters of the Athenian king Cecrops, in the act of discovering Erichthonius. Using both hands to brazenly lift the lid off of the infant’s basket, Aglauros coolly leans in to get a better view; meanwhile, the more visibly agitated figures of Herse and Pandrosus appear to be backing away from the monstrous, golden-ringleted child rising up towards them. The current whereabouts and status of Louise 75 Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2.49. 76 Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2.54–56. 77 Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2.58. 78 Beaumont and Fletcher, Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2.59. 79 Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 12.

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Hollandine’s second Ovidian painting, Vertumnus and Pomona, which takes as its subject a tale from Metamorphoses 10, are unknown. However, what is presumed to be a copy of this piece attributed to the otherwise unknown artist Mary Hotchkiss (Figure 5.4/Plate 7) now hangs at Castle Ward in County Down, Northern Ireland. It portrays a man and woman – one of whom may be one of the children of John Mordaunt, First Earl of Peterborough (1599–1643) – in the guise of these minor Italian gods. With his dark cape slipping off to reveal a vibrant red tunic, the seated Vertumnus grasps at a decidedly unenthusiastic looking Pomona with his left arm, as if to physically prevent her from escaping. In the final section of this chapter, I turn my attention to these two portraits historiés to ask what Louise Hollandine’s paintings might reveal about the character of this historical woman’s Ovidianism. Aneta Georgievska-Shine has recently (perhaps mis-) characterized the tale of the Cecropides as one “rarely commented on in writing and even more seldom represented in painting,” yet it was twice treated by Rubens in both a painting of 1616 and later work of c. 1632–33 that now survives only in fragmentary form.80 Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), too, would twice paint the Cecropides, while Jacob de Backer (c. 1555– 1585), Jasper van der Lanen (1585–1634), Moses van Uyttenbroeck (c. 1600–1646), Paulus Bor (c. 1601–1669), Willem van Herp the Elder (c. 1614–1677), and Hendrick Heerschop (1626–1690) likewise produced paintings on this subject.81 Ovid’s tale of Erichthonius, the literary version upon which all of these aforementioned paintings are at least partially founded, is remarkably brief. In Metamorphoses 2, the three daughters of Cecrops are tasked by Minerva with safeguarding a box. Herse, Aglauros, and Pandrosus are expressly instructed by the goddess not to investigate the container’s contents. Though Pandrosus and Herse are inclined to follow Minerva’s directive, Aglauros cannot resist taking a peek. Upon opening the box, the Cecropides find an infant boy with a serpent stretched out beside him. While Ovid’s treatment of Erichthonius’s discovery is itself succinct, this tale (like so many other mythological episodes in the Metamorphoses) is positioned within an interlocking set of inter-referential narratives. Earlier in Book 2, Apollo’s pet raven had learned of the infidelity of his master’s lover Coronis. Intercepted by a chatty crow while en route to inform Apollo of this amatory indiscretion, the raven is advised by his avian interlocutor not to tattle on Coronis. The crow, Cornix, proceeds to regale Apollo’s raven with an exemplary story to illustrate her point: that is, the tale of the Cecropides and Erichthonius. Cornix reveals that, hidden in a nearby tree, she bore witness to the Cecropides’ transgression and promptly reported it back to Minerva. She was not duly rewarded, however. Rather, Minerva turned her wrath back upon Cornix, and the crow predicts much the same fate for the raven should he disclose 80 Georgievska-Shine, “From Ovid’s Cecrops,” 58. On Rubens’s paintings of the Cecropides and their particular debts to Ovid, see Held, “Daughters of Cecrops.” 81 On the iconography of the Cecropides in Renaissance culture, see Stechow, “Finding of Erichthonius.”

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Coronis’s infraction to Apollo. Though it is Cornix’s punishment that we hear of first, Ovid’s Cecropides do not ultimately escape unscathed, either – it appears that their divine reprimand is merely deferred. Ovid’s poem returns to the triad of disobedient Athenian sisters when, later in Book 2, the beautiful Herse catches the eye of Mercury. Smitten, the god attempts to visit her under cover of night but is intercepted by Aglauros. Upon learning of Mercury’s desire for her sister, Aglauros greedily agrees to assist the love-struck deity – provided that he richly compensates her. Privy to this exchange, Minerva is once again irked and invokes the aid of Envy to discipline Aglauros for her serial acts of misbehavior. When Mercury attempts to access Herse, her avaricious sister, now artificially infected with jealousy, reneges on their former agreement and is summarily turned to stone. Meanwhile, apparently forgetting about his passion for Herse, Mercury disappears back into the heavens. As one commentator remarks, the apparent “alteration of Mercury’s purpose from love to vengeance” marks this tale as “the logical continuation” of the Erichthonius narrative found earlier in Metamorphoses 2: “The imperatives of Minerva’s old vengeance compete with Mercury’s love and eventually transform a mutable god into an avenger.”82 Like other seventeenth-century paintings inspired by this same tale, The Daughters of Cecrops focuses on the circle of women surrounding Erichthonius’s basket at the moment of his initial discovery. One of the distinguishing features of this reinterpretation of the Cecropides’ tale (and one that sets it apart from depictions by Louise Hollandine’s male contemporaries), however, is Princess Palatine’s decision to render one of Aglauros’s sisters looking not at the figure of Erichthonius, who glowers directly at her, but instead – almost sheepishly, as if caught in the act of violating a divine edict – directly out at the viewer. This economy of gazes heightens our sense that the Cecropides are trapped in a double moment of discovery: simultaneous to their own detection of and by the monstrous infant is one sister’s vital recognition that the group has been externally observed uncovering their charge. The woman’s outward look also implicates the painting’s viewers in this scene, placing us squarely in the subject position of Metamorphoses 2’s tattletale Cornix. What is more, the woman’s arresting stare anticipates the central role that sight – both seeing and being seen – plays in Ovid’s subsequent account of the Cecropides’ punishment. It is, after all, Mercury’s chance spotting of Herse that later incites the god’s lust and eventually leads to Aglauros’s punitive transformation.83 The overall effect of these intertextually resonant gazes in The Daughters of Cecrops, a work in which we forebodingly sense 82 Wheeler, Narrative Dynamics, 50. The many intra-connections between the discovery of Erichthonius episode and transformation of Aglauros episode in Metamorphoses 2 are treated by Keith, Play of Fictions, 117–23. 83 Ovid’s poem makes such links explicit by reminding us, when Aglauros first encounters Mercury near the end of Metamorphoses 2, that this daughter of Cecrops “adspicit hunc oculis isdem, quibus abdita nuper / viderat […] flavae secreta Minervae” (“looked at him with the same covetous eyes with which she had lately peeped at the secret of the golden-haired Minerva”): Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2.748–49.

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the forces of divine retribution being set into motion, is thus decidedly unsettling. Notably, the painting’s tangible gestures towards the inevitable tragedy to come also stand in marked contrast to the pat correctives and happy reversals of mythological tradition attributed to the neo-Arachnean artist in Lovelace’s poem. In short, The Daughters of Cecrops is an Ovidian painting that overtly highlights issues of sight and voyeurism, transgression and power inequity. The tale from Metamorphoses 14 evoked in Louise Hollandine’s second Ovidian painting, Vertumnus and Pomona, focuses on a much-desired female figure. In an episode that has been called the Roman poem’s “culminating narrative of amorous chase,” Pomona, who is all too aware she has attracted the unsolicited attention of a bevy of male deities, immures herself in a garden.84 The rustic god Vertumnus, her most determined admirer, is nonetheless determined to access her. He assumes a series of covers, appearing at her gate in the successive forms of a reaper, a soldier, a fisherman, a gardener, and, eventually, an old woman. It is in this final, female guise that Vertumnus gains entry to the garden and, still operating under transvestite cover, unsuccessfully attempts to woo Pomona using verbal means. Frustrated and explicitly prepared to resort to violence to achieve his goal, Vertumnus finally resumes his own shape.85 Perhaps surprisingly, Ovid’s Pomona seems dazzled by this revelation and promptly acquiesces to the demands of her persistent wooer. Seventeenth-century renditions of this Ovidian episode, including paintings by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Domenico Fetti (1589–1624), and Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693), tend either to depict Pomona interacting with Vertumnus in his final disguise as an old woman or (as in the case of a 1638 painting by Jordaens based on Rubens’s 1636 oil sketch of the subject) to show the rustic god wooing Pomona in his own male form. While maintaining the “typical emphasis on Vertumnus’s capacity for dissimulation” apparent in many of these other works, Louise Hollandine’s painting does something in between, for Vertumnus is captured at the precise moment of his figurative transformation.86 Scholarly interpretations of Ovid’s Pomona and Vertumnus tale have been dramatically polarized. In one of the twentieth century’s first sustained readings of this episode, David J. Littlefield described this “narrative of Vertumnus’s ingenious and patient wooing of fair Pomona” as “attractive.”87 And W.R. Johnson – though he paired his analysis with the caveat that “not a few feminists will not accept this version” – was insistent that the tale “represents […] perhaps the only romantic comedy” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses rather than “another macho-stud sentimentalization of what happens on a date-rape (the pattern begun by Apollo’s ‘pursuit’ of Daphne [in Book 1] and thereafter subjected to intricate variations throughout much of the poem).”88 Making 84 85 86 87 88

Georgievska-Shine and Silver, Rubens, Velàzquez, 74. For Vertumnus’s willingness to use force, if necessary, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 14.770. Georgievska-Shine and Silver, Rubens, Velàzquez, 76. Littlefield, “Pomona and Vertumnus,” 465. Johnson, “Vertumnus in Love,” 370, 372.

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the semantic distinction that, whereas “Jupiter and Sol and Apollo are in lust, Vertumnus is in love,” Johnson argued: He does not […] rape her when he has the opportunity that his “competitors” have vainly tried to find. Perhaps he was shy, had a sudden failure of nerve that caused him (again and again) not to take immediate advantage of his luck? Or perhaps, as his next “move” may suggest, he is not trying to “get” her, not trying to seduce her even. He is trying to win her by wooing her. That is to say, he is trying to persuade her, not merely that he loves her, but that he is worthy of her, worthy of her love.89

Other critics have been far less certain about the purity of Vertumnus’s motives and the ethical defensibility of his actions. K. Sara Myers, for instance, observes that, while the tale “ends on [a] theme of (evidently) mutual attraction, thus reversing with its ‘happy’ ending the amatory norm” found elsewhere in Ovid’s poem, we are faced with the discouraging possibility that Pomona has simply “learned well the lesson of the amatory pattern of the Metamorphoses and […] chosen submission over transformation or death.”90 And Roxanne Gentilcore has been even more forceful in her argument that, rather than standing in contrast to the rapacious eroticism that permeates much of Ovid’s work, the “dominant presence of deception, of metamorphosis as a means of persuasion, of images of violation, and of the threat of violence” in Book 14 “encourages us to read this tale […] as a contribution to the theme of love as a destructive force” that informs the Metamorphoses more broadly.91 As known via Hotchkiss’s copy, the details of Louise Hollandine’s composition suggest that the Princess Palatine’s own reading of Metamorphoses 14 shares more with the wary assessments of male predation and female vulnerability offered by Myers and Gentilcore than with Littlefield’s or Johnson’s unproblematized glosses of the episode as light comic romance. Louise Hollandine’s Vertumnus appears to have just removed a mask – an old woman’s visage, its empty, disturbingly hollow eyes staring directly out at us – from his own face, and this mask’s presence in the scene underscores troubling themes of dissimulation and erotic deception.92 What is more, Pomona’s body language as she leans away from Vertumnus indicates that she is preparing for flight. Our sense that she has been unpleasantly startled by the revelation of her wooer’s male identity is enhanced by the presence of a fruit basket lying at her feet. Pomona seems to have dropped this container abruptly, for its contents tumble haphazardly onto the ground before her. In Metamorphoses 14, Ovid draws

89 Johnson, “Vertumnus in Love,” 368, 361. 90 Myers, “Ultimus Ardor,” 243. 91 Gentilcore, “Landscape of Desire,” 110. 92 On masks as both symbols of deceit and symbols of antiquity in Renaissance visual culture, see Barasch, “Masks,” 82–85.

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attention to the etymological connection between Pomona’s name and the pomae, or apples, of her cultivated orchard, creating a verbal and symbolic analogy between them, and this equivalence plays into Louise Hollandine’s visual reconception of the scene.93 The implicit motion of the spilling fruit, which rolls in Vertumnus’s direction, provocatively anticipates the way in which Pomona, too, will be magnetically pulled – unintentionally and quite possibly unwillingly – into his physical sphere. There is little sense of “ingenious and patient wooing” here. Rather, as in Louise Hollandine’s equally disconcerting painting of the Cecropides, viewers are made acutely aware of the fact that they are bearing witness to a female subject’s decisive manipulation by divine forces beyond her own immediate control. In the end, although the precise relationship between Lovelace’s ekphrastic poem and the Princess Palatine’s real-life artistry remains unresolved and likely unresolvable, one cannot help but observe that the ominous scenes depicted in Louise Hollandine’s Ovidian paintings feel rather far removed from the felicitous, orderly resolutions that the inscribed artist purportedly concocts for Echo, Syrinx, Ariadne, Iphis, Leucothoë, Daphne, and Adonis in “Princesse Löysa Drawing.” And yet – while his central conceits possibly owe more to the literary traditions that likewise inspired the censorious appraisal of Ovidian lust voiced by Lyly’s Campapse or the emendations of mythological narrative demanded by Beaumont and Fletcher’s Aspatia than to encounters with Louise Hollandine’s real-life Ovidiana – Lovelace’s basic impulse to position the princess as an alter-Arachne feels apt. The Ovidian scenes in her portraits historiés may not neatly square with those pert acts of artistic sanitization attributed to the fictionalized Louise Hollandine in “Princesse Löysa Drawing,” but they do position their female creator as an incisive critic of mythological tradition’s power inequities and, more particularly, its recurrent victimization of women. Indeed, I would submit there is a deepening – perhaps even a darkening – of the Ovidian Arachne’s critical perspective in this early modern artist’s paintings. In both her depiction of the Cecropides and her portrayal of Pomona and Vertumnus, this is a perspective that is, in fact, more classically Arachnean than the happily-ever-after brand of revisionism attributed to the princess by Lovelace. In Louise Hollandine’s mythological artwork, as in Arachne’s of Metamorphoses 6, divine justice takes on a consistently menacing flavor, while godly passions and threats of attendant violence loom all too large.

93 For this etymological note, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 14.626.

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The Poem I here reproduce “Princesse Löysa Drawing” in full, as it runs from sigs. C1r-C2r in Lovelace’s Lucasta of 1649. Princesse Löysa drawing. I Saw a little Diety, Minerva in Epitomy, Whom Venus at first blush, surpris’d, Tooke for her winged wagge disguis’d; But viewing then whereas she made Not a distrest, but lively shade Of Eccho, whom he had betrayd, Now wanton, and ith’ coole oth’ Sunne With her delight a hunting gone; And thousands more, whom he had slaine, To live, and love, belov’d againe: Ah this is true Divinity! I will un-God that Toye cri’d she? Then markt she Syrinx running fast To Pans imbraces, with the haste Shee fled him once, whose reede-pipe rent, He finds now a new Instrument. Theseus return’d, invokes the Ayre And windes, then wafts his faire; Whilst Ariadne ravish’t stood Halfe in his armes, halfe in the flood. Proud Anaxerete doth fall At Iphis feete, who smiles of all: And he (whilst she his curles doth deck) Hangs no where now, but on her neck. Heere Phœbus with a beame untombes Long-hid Leucothoë, and dombes Her Father there; Daphne the faire Knowes now no bayes but round her haire; And to Apollo and his Sons Who pay him their due Orisons, Bequeaths her Lawrell-robe, that flame Contemnes, Thunder and evill Fame. There kneel’d Adonis fresh as spring,

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Gaye as his youth, now offering Her selfe those joyes with voice and hand, Which first he could not understand. Transfixed Venus stood amas’d, Full of the Boye and Love, she gaz’d; And in imbraces seemed more Sencelesse and cold, then he before. Uselesse Childe! In vaine (said she) You beare that fond Artillerie: See heere a Pow’r above the slow Weake execution of thy bow. So said, she riv’d the Wood in two, Unedged all his Arrowes too, And with the string their feathers bound To that part whence we have our wound. See, see! the darts by which we burn’d Are bright Löysa’s pencills turn’d; With which she now enliveth more Beauties, then they destroy’d before.

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About the Author Lindsay Ann Reid obtained her Ph.D from the University of Toronto, specializing in English and the History of Print Culture. She is Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

6. Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking

Amy Reed Frederick Abstract In the seventeenth century, contemporary art critics argued that reproducing a work in print required less imagination and less skill than an original work, and therefore, was a particularly appropriate medium for female artists. Scholars of our own time, however, offer correctives to this assumption, and assert that reproductive printmaking often prompted innovation, specifically for female printmakers. We can examine the work of Dutch printmaker Magdalena van de Passe (1600–1638) as both a reproductive printmaker, highlighting the work of predominantly male artists understood primarily through her engravings, and also as an artist whose work was reproduced by her female students. Keywords: printmaking; woman artist; reproductive engraving; gender; early modern period

In 1620, printmaker Crispijn de Passe the Elder and Jan Janszoon from Arnhem jointly published the Heroologia Anglica in Utrecht. This folio included sixty-five portraits of kings, queens, noblemen, clerics, and scholars, in the tradition of Hendrick Hondius.1 The portraits are all reproductive, borrowed from paintings by court artists in England such as Hans Holbein.2 In addition to Crispijn the Elder, two of his children, Magdalena and Willem, also engraved portraits for the Heroloogia. The author of the book’s Latin couplets, Dutch humanist Aernout van Buchell, recommended the young engravers in one of the introductory poems: “Both De Passes, too, joined in this celebrated work, MAGDALENA and her BROTHER, whose achievement well-nigh 1 For example, see Hondius’s Pictorum aliquot celebrium praecipue Germaniae Inferioris effigies of 1610, a series of seventy-two etchings of famous painters. Hondius’s series follows in organization and construction the earliest series of artists’ portraits, Domenicus Lampsonius’s Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies of 1572. The most well-known seventeenth-century portrait series is Anthony van Dyck’s Iconographia (c. 1632–1645), which, like the Heroologia, included portraits of princes, military commanders, statesmen, scholars, and artists. These series were meant, in part, to elevate the status of (male) artists to that of other esteemed contemporaries. 2 Several scholars, such as Michael Bury, Evelyn Lincoln, and Lia Markey, argue against the use of the term “reproductive,” arguing that printmaking is inherently interpretive. The term will be used in this essay, however, to underscore the need for a broader definition of reproductive printmaking.

Sutton, E. (ed.), Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, Amsterdam University Press 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789463721400_ch06

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matches hers.”3 From this inscription, in which Magdalena de Passe is named and her brother is not, it is evident that Magdalena is the more notable printmaker in 1620. Perhaps Van Buchell, a friend of the De Passe family, singled her out because of her sex, but it is more probable that he mentioned her by name because of her skill as an engraver. By 1620, Magdalena had been signing work in her father’s workshop for approximately six years. Yet since this seventeenth-century praise, Magdalena’s contributions to the workshop have been summarily undervalued. As a female, and as a reproductive printmaker, her work has remained on the margins of the central narrative of individual creative genius that has shaped the discipline of art history. Reclaiming Magdalena’s work as a reproductive printmaker reassesses both her artistic production and the medium in which she primarily worked. In this image of Lady Jane Grey from the Heroologia, the infamous noblewoman is shown half-length, facing the viewer, against a shaded background. Her youth is on display here; she was just fifteen when she was Queen of England for nine days, and only sixteen when she was executed. The Latin inscription below makes reference to the sitter’s tragic demise: Decollata next to her name clearly marks her beheading, while the couplet by Van Buchell laments, “Of royal lineage, I encircled my hair with a sorrowful diadem / But after this God gave me a better realm.”4 Similar to the majority of the portraits in the Heroloogia, the portrait of Lady Jane Grey is not signed, and it has been attributed to both Magdalena and her brother Willem. A lack of a signature was common for prints from the De Passe workshop, where it may have been more important to establish a workshop style than individual authorship. While ascribing an individual name to a work is a privileged art historical pursuit today, in the seventeenth century an identifiable workshop style was more important to the selling and commissioning of work – especially for work that was reproductive. Although scholars have attempted to distinguish the De Passe hands, they have not been able to successfully determine which De Passe engraved which portrait in the Heroloogia, or in fact, even how many portraits were engraved by each family member. Such efforts have relegated Magdalena’s work into stereotypically feminine realms through descriptors such as “delicate” or “graceful” used to define her style. While trying to identify those prints for which Magdalena was sole engraver laudably attempts to insert her into art historical discourse, it should also be noted that the blurring of hands – that is, the lack of knowledge about attribution – can be seen as advantageous for Magdalena’s professional reputation. Since her gender would only act as a deterrent to and not add value to her work, her ability to emulate artistic styles as a mechanism of self-effacement allowed her to contribute collaboratively to 3 Quoted from Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 248. 4 The inscription reads: “Regia stirps tristi cinxi diademare crines / Regna sed omnipotens hinc meliora dedit.” Engraved after a painting by Hans Holbein, the print has become one of the most well-known images associated with Lady Jane Grey. The identification of the sitter, however, may not be correct. Another suggested sitter is Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII. Thanks to Jonathan Sutton for the translation from Latin.

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Figure 6.1. Magdalena de Passe (?) or Willem van de Passe (?), after Hans Holbein the Younger (?), Iana Graya from Heroologia Anglica. 1620. Engraving, 15.7 cm. x 11.3 cm. British Museum, Museum no. 2006, U.776.]

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the workshop production. Her skill at imitating others simultaneously underscored her technical ability as a reproductive printmaker. Engravings offered a vast world of visual information for artists in the early modern Netherlands. Reproductive prints were catalysts that shaped the nature of Netherlandish art: they provided scholarly diversion and gave artists and their circles the opportunity to assess a large body of work by a single master.5 Although in the art historical literature reproductive prints have occupied a lower status than forms of more “original” printmaking, in the seventeenth century the labor and ability required for successful reproductive printmaking commanded praise, just as did innovation of compositions.6 Recently, art historians have become more nuanced in the understanding of the early modern status of reproductive printmaking and have interrogated the notion that the reproductive printmaker was somehow less creative than the printmaker who engraved his own designs. For example, art historians now generally acknowledge that reproducing an image in another medium required an ability to translate or interpret an image, often from one medium to another.7 Walter Melion has successfully argued that Hendrick Goltzius, through his Life of the Virgin prints from 1593–1594, asserted his powers of appropriation by seeming to defer to those masters whose manner he represented in print, declaring his skill by exemplifying their individual hands.8 In this series, each print makes stylistic and compositional references to works by artists from both the Northern and Italian past, including Raphael, Federico Barocci, Jacopo Bassano, Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden. In an engraving of the Circumcision, Goltzius looked to the composition of Dürer’s woodcut of the same subject from his own series of The Life of the Virgin, but Goltzius, instead of straightforwardly copying Dürer’s print, created a new work in the style of his esteemed predecessor.9 Rather than uncritically reproducing the work of others, Goltzius instead suggested the work of earlier artists in both conception and style. Through this series, Goltzius purposefully inserted himself into the canon of great masters – and even, as was probably his goal – surpassed them in his ability to execute their styles.

5 Silver, Graven Images, 1–46. 6 Melion, Graven Images, 48; 54–55. 7 See essays by Larry Silver, “Graven Images: Reproductive Engravings as Visual Models,” 1–46, and Walter Melion, “Theory and Practice: Reproductive Engravings in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands,” 47–70, in Graven Images, 1993. 8 Melion, “Hendrick Goltzius’s Project,” 458. 9 Walter Melion has discussed Goltzius’s reproductive engravings at length, asserting that it was Goltzius’s virtuosity as a reproductive printmaker that prompted Karel Van Mander to call him Proteus – he can transform into any manner he chooses. Van Mander recounted that Goltzius’s imitation of Dürer was so successful that art lovers bought impressions as original works by Dürer. Melion, “Hendrick Goltzius’s Project,” 464.

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This recent re-examination of reproductive engraving, however, has yet to include the female printmaker or to consider the role of women in the practice of reproductive printmaking.10 While it is important to recognize and recover the understanding that reproductive printmaking was a worthy endeavor, it should also be emphasized that reproductive printmaking was an enterprise comparatively open to women who then became some of its principal practitioners. Perhaps for Magdalena, the self-effacing aspect of reproductive engraving was not Goltzius’s masculine-infused triumph over those she was emulating, but a practical display of skill that confirmed her superiority as a printmaker over her brothers in the family workshop. She was able to best display the De Passe approach to reproductive printmaking.

Magdalena’s Development as an Engraver In 1620, Magdalena de Passe was twenty years old, and in many ways, working as a typically successful seventeenth-century printmaker in the Netherlands. Born to Dutch parents in Cologne in 1600, her family was exiled in 1611 and eventually settled near Utrecht. Her father, Crispijn de Passe the Elder, is considered today as the founder of a “dynasty” of printmakers.11 Four of his five children and one grandson participated in the family business. Magdalena’s brothers – Simon, Crispijn the Younger, and Willem – were successful printmakers, each bringing international acclaim to the family name as they worked around Europe. The profitable De Passe workshop functioned much like other early modern print workshops. The workshop was the center of the early modern print industry, and presented ideal conditions for a family business. Printmaking was a necessarily collaborative process, and print production and publication allowed for the participation of a broader range of individuals, sometimes even the female members of the family. Every workshop employed several people for each of the central roles: inventor, engraver, or etcher, and the publisher, who may have been an engraver and printer too. The inventor designed the print; the engraver or etcher executed the print; the publisher owned the plates and published the prints. The scene depicted in this now-familiar engraving has been interpreted as a representation of a conventional early modern print workshop. The reproductive print, by Jan Collaert I after a design by Jan van der Straet (Stradanus), is part of a series entitled Nova Reperta (New Inventions of Modern Times) published by Philips Galle in Antwerp around 1600. The division of responsibility is evident. In the background, 10 The notable exception being feminist scholarship on early modern female artists, such as work by Evelyn Lincoln, Elizabeth Honig, and Lia Markey. I argue here that the broader literature on reproductive printmaking has primarily addressed the work of male printmakers. 11 For a thorough and eminently readable examination of Crispijn de Passe and his children as printmakers, see Veldman, Crispijn de Passe.

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Figure 6.2. Designed by Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, The Workshop of an Engraver (Sculpture in Aes), plate 19 from Nova Reperta. ca. 1600. Engraving, 20.2 x 27.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession no. 53.600.1823.

men flatten copper to make plates for engraving. In the foreground, a man on the right uses his engraving to emphasize a point to a young boy. In the center, men prepare the engraved copper plates for printing, while a young boy at the center left creates a copy of a design on a copper plate. On the left, three men work the printing press to make the engraved impressions, which are then hung to dry on the racks at the back of the room. Crispijn de Passe probably ran his workshop in a similar manner, with the exception of Magdalena’s presence. Despite her gender, Magdalena’s training in the workshop was similar to that of her brothers.12 Crispijn the Elder clearly trusted the training and then skill of his children (most likely because he directed it), as evidenced by the publications designed and published by Crispijn with their signed contributions. By 1614, four of Crispijn the Elder’s children had official status in their father’s studio. Crispijn the Younger, the eldest son and primary assistant to his father, had been signing his own prints in Cologne since 1611. Simon started doing so in Utrecht in 1612, and Willem’s signature

12 See Kloek, et al., 1998 for a detailed study of women artists in the Dutch Golden Age.

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first appeared in 1614.13 For each of them, their signatures appeared the year they turned seventeen. Magdalena, however, began signing her name at age fourteen, in the year 1614, prompting Ilja Veldman to describe her as a “prodigy.”14 The series of Twelve Sibyls, designed by Crispijn the Elder and published in 1617, is an example of how the work of the family business could be distributed among his children. Crispijn the Younger was responsible for the execution of Sibyls 2, 3, 8, and 12; Simon engraved the print of Sibyl 6; and Magdalena engraved Sibyls 6, 7, and 11. However, as much as Magdalena’s early career resembled those of her brothers, their paths soon diverged, primarily because of her status as a woman. For example, each of her brothers left Utrecht to distinguish themselves from their father and to pursue their own careers.15 In 1616, Simon left for London for two years, where he worked almost exclusively on printed portraits. At some point after 1622, Simon was back in Utrecht, living with Magdalena and their parents, and then he left again to become the royal engraver to the Danish king, Christian IV, in Copenhagen. Simon was able to spend much of the 1620s traveling between Utrecht, London, and Copenhagen, as a result of his position with the King. In 1618, Crispijn the Younger moved to Paris for approximately eleven years, where he created portraits of French royalty and nobility, as well as title plates and illustrations for manuals. And in 1621, Willem followed Simon to London, and perhaps Crispijn the Younger to Paris. His life is not as well-documented as his brothers’, nor does he appear to have been as successful of a printmaker. But, significantly for this discussion, he was able to leave Utrecht. While his three sons were abroad, Crispijn the Elder’s work in his Utrecht studio continued virtually uninterrupted, with Magdalena probably acting as her father’s primary assistant. Her known oeuvre from this time, however, is not substantial, and Veldman posits that the probable cause is that like so many women artists, Magdalena helped run the household as well as the workshop.16 Between 1621 and 1634, she continued to work as a reproductive engraver, almost exclusively from models by others, although she reproduced prints in a variety of genres.17 When Magdalena married Frederick van Bevervoordt in 1634, she stopped making prints entirely. She lost her husband after only eighteen months of marriage. She died soon thereafter, in 1638, at the age of thirty-seven.

13 Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 200. 14 Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 200. 15 Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 237–244. 16 Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 283. 17 Veldman notes that Magdalena did not engrave as many portraits as her siblings, and turned toward landscapes with biblical or mythological figures after 1620. Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 284.

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Figure 6.3. Magdalena de Passe after Adam Elsheimer, Apollo and Coronis. ca. 1623. Engraving. 21.2 cm. x 23 cm. British Museum, Museum no. S.7458.

Apollo and Coronis/The Death of Procris The engraving of Apollo and Coronis/The Death of Procris (c. 1623), and the scholarship surrounding it, reveals Magdalena’s careful self-effacement in the role of reproductive engraver and subsequent academic misunderstanding about her aims. According to the inscription on the engraving, the print reproduces a painting by German artist Adam Elsheimer, whose work Magdalena would have known through reproductive prints by Hendrick Goudt.18 At the bottom right of the print, she has

18 Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 60. Goudt may have purchased some of Elsheimer’s paintings on copper. He then used those paintings as models for his own engravings from 1608 on. See also Bann, “Meaning/ Interpretation.”

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uncharacteristically identified herself as the engraver.19 She also has included a threeline dedication to Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens: “Peter Paul Rubens, easily the first in the art of painting in our century and supreme lover of all the liberal arts.”20 The dedication is especially appropriate for an engraving after Elsheimer, whose work Rubens admired. Although Magdalena titled the engraving The Death of Procris, because of her simultaneous attribution to Elsheimer in the inscription, it is now generally understood to be a reproduction after Elsheimer’s painting of Apollo and Coronis.21 Magdalena’s engraving may have been meant for a series of landscape prints from Ovid to be given as gifts, supplemented with others by her father and brothers.22 According to Ovid in Book II of the Metamorphoses, Apollo learns that Coronis, his lover, was not loyal to him. He is so outraged that he kills Coronis with an arrow. Apollo immediately regrets his rash behavior and attempts to save the baby in Coronis’s womb as her body is engulfed by flames on the funeral pyre. In Magdalena’s reproduction, the nude body of Coronis lies on a cloth in the right foreground with an arrow at her feet. Apollo searches for healing herbs next to her. In the distance on the left, satyrs prepare the funeral pyre. Unlike Artemisia, the wife of Persian ruler Mausolus, neither Procris nor Coronis are protagonists with whom early modern individuals often identified or whose biographies were used as living iconographical metaphor in the seventeenth century (as is the case of Amalia van Solms with Artemisia, detailed by Saskia Beranek in this volume). While speculative, I choose to use this engraving as an example where Magdalena purposefully blurs lines (metaphorically and visually), where emulation and individualization is a pronouncement of her skill. Although she reproduced the painting by Elsheimer, after Goudt, she titled it Death of Procris to draw attention to her ability to reproduce the composition accurately and skillfully and claim it as her own. In the 450 years since her death, not many scholars have commented on her signed work. This engraving, only one of a few certainly by her hand alone, has prompted some of the more disparaging comments about her work as an artist, ironically because of her role as a reproductive engraver and because of the supposed mistake in the title. For example, although he offers a thorough investigation of the sources for Magdalena’s print in his essay “Meaning/Interpretation,” Stephen Bann interprets Magdalena and her work only relative to the male artists that surround her.23 Bann 19 “MAGDALENA PASSÆA CRISP. F. FECIT.” 20 Bann, “Meaning/Interpretation,” 136. 21 The painting by Elsheimer is today in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (WAG 10329). The painting and the engraving were known as The Death of Procris until 1951, when the subject of Apollo and Coronis was proposed. 22 Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 60. 23 Bann, “Meaning/Interpretation,” 128–142.

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is quick to assert that Magdalena’s use of Elsheimer for her engraving was not of her own device, but because Goudt had done so before her: Like Goudt, Magdalena de Passe composes her engraving ‘after’ an oil painting by this particular artist: like him, she credits the painter in an elegant italic formula, ‘Adam Elsheimer pinxit’; like him, she includes a set of verses in Latin to sum up the moral implications of the scene depicted; like him, she includes a dedication to a prestigious figure as a prominent feature of the engraved text.24

After remarking that Apollo and Coronis was indeed engraved by Magdalena, Bann focuses on her father Crispijn’s biographical details instead of hers. He then offers that while Magdalena was not indebted to her father for the subject, style, or visual presentation of this engraving, she was indebted to Goudt. Even Magdalena’s dedication to Rubens is not about her expertise, or her knowledge of circles of influence, but about a relationship between men: “This engraving forms a kind of relay between Elsheimer and Rubens, or, more precisely, between the small, highly original works of a uniquely important northern artist who worked in Rome and the eventual achievement of another northern artist who contrived to establish the high style of the Italian baroque in a Flemish context.”25 While Bann attempts to situate Magdalena’s engraving after Elsheimer within a larger web of interpersonal influence (Magdalena’s debt to her father; her debt to Goudt; Goudt’s debt to Elsheimer, etc.), he does so by diminishing Magdalena’s contributions as a printmaker. Bann ignores how Magdalena may have drawn attention to her ability to reproduce in this print, by retitling the scene. At the same time, he diminishes reproductive engraving as a legitimate enterprise, as he notes that the primacy of Elsheimer’s painting is clearly declared in the inscription.26 Finally, Bann asserts that Magdalena’s work is a misinterpretation of the scene from Ovid. He suggests that Magdalena – again, following Goudt by including four lines of Latin verse in a stylish italic hand – draws the viewer’s attention to the unhappy Coronis or Procris. However, I assert that by titling this image Death of Procris and focusing on the sad figure, Magdalena may have given us a clue to her own idea of self-effacement, where, significantly, her name is engraved in perpetuity next to some of the most important artistic personalities of her time.

24 Bann, “Meaning/Interpretation,” 128–142. 25 Bann, “Meaning/Interpretation,” 134. 26 Bann, “Meaning/Interpretation,” 136.

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Rewriting Art History While I single out Bann’s interpretation here, that he interpreted both Magdalena’s work and reproductive printmaking as inferior is not surprising. The dominant narrative of art history has long “reproduced” its own story that denies the significance of and contributions to the history of art by woman, and especially those that practiced reproductive printmaking. But in the seventeenth century, this erasure was not conceivable. In 1623, painter, printmaker, and poet Adriaen van de Venne wrote an ode to his family friend entitled “(from the) Artful Zeeland grinder to the honourable Miss Magdalena de Passe, rich in morals and art, and deserving of praise.” Fortune comes to the person whom it PASSING fits Who shuns and hates ingratitude. / He knows DE PASSE, man and girl And how to encomPASS then with cheer; / He will PASS muster, so he says And loves doing good. / You, young lady, who hone your graving tools Skilfully and surpassing well, / That your hand may again gracefully Carve anew in the copper, / Accept this song in return for the art With which you have honoured me, / I deem things from which I learn Excellent, honourable and favourable.27

The occasion for the tribute, according to Van de Venne, was to offer thanks to Magdalena, who honored him with the gift of a print. The specific print is unknown today, as is the situation that prompted its gifting. But as Veldman has asserted, this poem attests to her excellent reputation as a printmaker in the seventeenth century.28 Like other female artists of her period, Magdalena worked around barriers put in front of her and experimented quite successfully. For example, in addition to her more traditional reproductive work, Magdalena printed reproductive copperplates on satin in the 1620s (while her brothers were traveling), and the impressions were relatively expensive (although no impressions are left today). Nadine Orenstein has suggested that this technique probably gave Magdalena the idea to also print on linen house caps or night caps, which were worn as informal dress in the home or to bed by gentlemen of the upper classes.29 As a result, in 1630, Magdalena was granted a three-year privilege by the States General to reproduce prints on these caps. At that time, Magdalena was the only person in the Dutch Republic permitted to print on linen or other textiles, and the prints she had shown the States-General were not to be copied, printed or sold by anyone else without Magdalena’s permission, or they

27 Quoted from Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 293. 28 Veldman, Crispijn de Passe, 315–316. 29 Orenstein, “Who Took the King of Sweden to Bed?” 45–46.

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would be fined a hefty 150 guilders.30 She engraved contemporary events on the caps, potentially broadening their appeal. Magdalena, because of her gender and her work within a collaborative enterprise, has occupied an intermediary space in art history. Lia Markey argued that familial connections were essential for an early modern woman to pursue a professional career in art: “A woman’s social situation was undoubtedly critical to her growth as an artist; a woman who did not have easy access to a printmaker’s training could not produce prints.”31 However, women in the workshop were often relegated to activities that subsequent scholars have interpreted as secondary. Women most often worked as engravers or woodcutters, and because reproductive prints historically were interpreted by some as mere copies, it was considered appropriate for “less imaginative” females to make reproductive engravings.32 But as shown here, Magdalena did not see herself this way, nor did her contemporaries. Although seventeenth-century women artists often occupied a liminal space between professional and amateur status, as Elizabeth Honig has argued, her creation of “wearable art” certainly responds to Honig’s claim that “the most distinctive and most pervasive characteristic of Dutch women’s art is the premium it places on inventive diversity; and this is a quality that it derives not from essential femininity but rather from the way its makers took advantage of a disadvantage, their own exclusion from the strictures (but also the opportunities) of standard professionalism.”33 This is not to say that Magdalena was an amateur – she certainly was not. She signed her name at fourteen, she took on students, and she received printed praise and copyright privileges during her own time. And it was not that Magdalena lacked opportunity; she had excellent training in her father’s workshop. Rather, she was a woman, and a reproductive printmaker. The adversity she has had to overcome was not so much in her own lifetime, but rather, a result of the perversity of the discipline of art history in the telling of her story. Linda Nochlin’s words from her 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” still apply today for the study of the work of Magdalena de Passe: It is no accident that the crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great art has so rarely been investigated, or that attempts to investigate such general problems have, until fairly recently, been dismissed as unscholarly, too broad, or the province of some other discipline, like sociology. To encourage a dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented approach would reveal the

30 31 32 33

Orenstein, “Who Took the King of Sweden to Bed?” 44. Markey, “The Female Printmaker,” 52. Markey, “The Female Printmaker,” 52. Honig, “The Gentle Art of Being ‘Artistic,’” 37.

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entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based, and which has only recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents.34

With this brief look at the actuality of Magdalena’s career – at what she produced, and how and when she produced it – I suggest that we still need to encourage different questions. The hierarchies of gender parallel the hierarchies of media, and are modern constructions. There is much still to learn from examining Magdalena de Passe’s work, and in reconsidering her work as both individual expression and collaborative enterprise.

Bibliography Bann, Stephen. “Meaning/Interpretation.” In Critical Terms for Art History. Eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 128–142. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bury, Michael. The Print in Italy: 1550–1620. London: British Museum Press, 2001. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 5th edition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. Honig, Elizabeth Alice “The Gentle Art of Being ‘Artistic:’ Dutch Women’s Creative Practics in the 17th Century.” Women’s Art Journal 22:2 (Fall 2001/Winter 2002): 31–39. Jacobs, Frederika. “Woman’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola.” Renaissance Quarterly 47:1 (Spring 1994): 74–101. Jacobs, Frederika. Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women Artists and the Language of Art History and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kloek, Els, Catherine Peters Sengers, and Esther Tobé, eds. Vrouwen en kunst in de republiek. Hilversum: Verloren, 1998. Lincoln, Evelyn. “Making a Good Impression: Diana Mantuana’s Printmaking Career.” Renaissance Quarterly 50:4 (Winter 1997): 1101–1147. Lincoln, Evelyn. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Markey, Lia. “The Female Printmaker and the Culture of the Reproductive Print Workshop.” In Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–1800. Eds Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini, 51–74. Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 2005. Melion, Walter. “Hendrick Goltzius’s Project of Reproductive Engraving.” Art History 13, no. 4 (December 1990): 458–487. Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, 145–178. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Orenstein, Nadine M. “Who Took the King of Sweden to Bed?” Print Quarterly 8 (1991): 44–47. Pon, Lisa. Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Riggs, Timothy, and Larry Silver, eds. Graven Images: The Rise of Professional Printmakers in Antwerp and Haarlem, 1540–1640. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Veldman, Ilja M. Crispijn de Passe and his progeny (1564–1670): A Century of Print Production. Translated by Michael Hoyle. Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Publishing, 2001.

34 Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” 153.

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About the Author Amy Reed Frederick obtained her Ph.D from Case Western Reserve University, writing about Rembrandt’s prints and print culture. She is Assistant Professor of Art History at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky.

7. Towards an Understanding of Mayken ­Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx1

Arthur J. DiFuria Abstract Interrogating gender and the development of the print trade in the early modern Netherlands inevitably leads us to the murky historiographic territory surrounding the women who were so crucial to the medium’s growth in the mid-sixteenth century. In particular, Mayken Verhulst (1518–1599) and Volcxken Diericx (active 1570–1600) appear as frequently used names concealing fragmented personae within the interwoven social and discursive patriarchal constructs of art history. This is despite their location at the epicenter of Netherlandish print production. Mapping the fragmented literary and visual evidence surrounding these two important women onto the backdrop of patriarchal Netherlandish art history’s canon of praise suggests a new model for understanding their multivalent forms of creativity. Keywords: Mayken Verhulst; Volcxken Diericx; Pieter Coecke van Aelst; Hieronymus Cock; sixteenth-century Netherlandish print; Aux Quatre Vents

Introduction: Erasures, Confessions, Sublimations The timeline in Grand Design, Elizabeth Cleland’s recent outstanding exhibition catalog on the work of Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502–1550), makes note of a key moment in the pioneering Brussels artist’s career: the posthumous publication by Mayken Verhulst (1518–1599) of his majestic printed frieze-like scroll, Ces Moeurs et fachons de faire de Turcz, or “The Customs and Fashions of the Turks.”2 (Figure 7.1) An important figure in the mid-sixteenth century artistic milieu of the Netherlands, 1 I should thank Elizabeth Sutton for conceiving of a session on such an important topic at SECAC 2017, Columbus, OH, sponsored by the Historians of Netherlandish Art. I would also like to express my deepest regrets for not being present to voice this paper in person at that conference. I therefore need to thank Nicole Cook, an art historian to whom I was already greatly indebted, for agreeing to read this paper aloud there in my absence. I also greatly appreciate Elizabeth’s patience with my submission of this draft. 2 Cleland, ed., Grand Design, 21. The notation itself states: “1553: Mayken Verhulst publishes the Customs and Fashions of the Turks.” Sutton, E. (ed.), Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, Amsterdam University Press 2019. doi: 10.5117/9789463721400_ch07

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Verhulst painted miniatures and was also Coecke van Aelst’s wife for a little over a decade (married c. 1538/39–1550). The catalog’s notation is correct in suggesting that Verhulst deserves credit as the prime actor in the publication of the long, horizontal woodblock prints of Coecke van Aelst’s designs. Nadine Orenstein’s concise essay introducing the prints serves admirably the overarching agenda of the Grand Design catalog and exhibition – to detail Coecke van Aelst’s achievements.3 Orenstein situates Ces Moeurs within Coecke van Aelst’s career as a masterful draftsman, tapestry designer, and antiquarian painter who served Emperor Charles V (1500–1558). She discusses the origin of the prints and describes how they began life as designs for tapestries. Orenstein also accounts for the subjects that the prints portray and identifies some of Coecke van Aelst’s figural sources in Italian art, particularly the paintings by Giulio Romano that Coecke van Aelst encountered during his Roman sojourn, which took place in the early 1530s.4 However, as a whole, the Grand Design catalog offers no significant follow-through on its timeline’s laudable acknowledgement of Verhulst’s role in the publication of Ces Moeurs. In the larger historiographic picture, this is understandable for a number of reasons this essay addresses; chief among them in the context of Grand Design’s focus on Coecke van Aelst, there are no other studies of Ces Moeurs exploring Verhulst’s role in their publication.5 Remarkably, her actions are nowhere sufficiently acknowledged in the historical record. This is despite the fact that she was indispensable for the translation of Coecke van Aelst’s drawings for Ces Moeurs into the print medium. Were it not for Verhulst, those compositions might never have enjoyed any significant manifestation or circulation before audiences of important collectors and the concerned viewers in their circles of influence. It is likelier that they would have been left to exist only in a perpetually preliminary, never fully realized state. Moreover, other specific aspects of Verhulst’s publication of Ces Moeurs – the timing in particular – suggest that by deciding to circulate prints after the Ces Moeurs woodblocks, she executed an astute entrepreneurial master stroke in response to a complex, rapidly shifting marketplace of ideas. Without doubt, we can trace the reasons for the lack of discourse on her achievement – and more broadly, her role in sixteenth century Netherlandish art – to the same social, historical, and historiographic blind spot for the accomplishments of women that prompted Linda Nochlin’s frequently rehearsed, pioneering interrogative, “why have there been there no great women artists?”6

3 Orenstein, “Customs and Fashions,” 176–182. 4 Bibliography on Pieter Coecke van Aelst in Rome is surprisingly scant. See Ibid., 346; Van Mander Het Schilder-Boeck, f218v; Marlier, La Renaissance Flamand, 23–46. 5 Marlier, La Renaissance Flamand, 73, suggests Verhulst’s role but does not pursue the implications in such a statement. 6 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 22–39, 67–71.

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Figure 7.1. Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Ces Moeurs et fachones de faire de Turcz I, 1553, 30 x 45.9 cm, ink on paper, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Object Number RP-P-OB-2304K).

A similar example that is clearly symptomatic of the same enduring tendencies towards sublimation comes to us in the form of an entry in one of the two New Hollstein volumes that bring together all of the known prints composed by renowned Haarlem antiquarian artist, Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574).7 In a seemingly absentminded omission – one that is perhaps most accurately described as a “mention without mention” – the entry for Van Heemskerck’s Samson and Delilah engraving of 1553 tells readers that its copper plate was found in the inventory of “Hieronymus Cock’s widow.”8 However, there was no need for the use of such an anonymous descriptor, which we normally reserve for those whose names have previously been lost to us. The holder of the inventory where the copper plate for Samson and Delilah was found – along with many other prints by such sixteenth century Netherlandish luminaries as Van Heemskerck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and several others – was Volcxken Diericx (1525–1600; Figure 7.2). In this example, the appearance of such vague language is tantamount to an erasure of historical identity via the omission of the name of the widow in question. But Diericx’s name was well known enough to us at the time of this particular New Hollstein volume’s publication. The inventory that the New Hollstein entry cites was not merely a listing of the personal holdings of 7 Veldman, The New Hollstein. 8 Ibid., no. 234.

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a private person upon her death, as the notation’s compact phrasing could lead one to conclude. Rather, it was the inventory of one of the most important publishing concerns of early modern Europe, Antwerp’s Aux Quatre Vents (“At the Sign of the Four Winds”).9 This is to say that the contents of Diericx’s inventory have never simply represented something passive like her inheritance of the copper plates that bore the prints her husband Cock commissioned by himself. Nor is the inventory merely the end product of Diericx’s dutiful carrying forth of an agenda that was laid out for her and solely reflective of Cock’s vision. Rather, it is a partial index of her entrepreneurial collaboration with him. Much more importantly for this volume’s mission, however, in the state it assumed at the time of Diericx’s death, it reflected her own vision for the Quatre Vents, her stewardship of the publishing house during the three decades after her collaborator and husband’s death. Thus, as was the case with Grand Design’s mention of Mayken Verhulst’s publication of the Ces Moeurs prints, the New Hollstein’s mention of Diericx through the use of the anonymous moniker, “Hieronymus Cock’s widow” conceals the historical figure’s execution of a set of difficult artistic decisions in response to a complex, turbulent set of market conditions. Nevertheless, I should also provide full disclosure; if I am to refer to the machinations that went into the word choices we find in an exemplary New Hollstein volume, I must add my own omission, a variation on this erasure of Diericx’s name that is more condemnable due to its status as a repetition. A citation in an article I published in 2010 on Van Heemskerck’s Self-Portrait Before the Colosseum contains my slavish, unthinking perpetuation of the New Hollstein’s verbiage.10 In my essay’s note 34, I too wrote of the Samson and Delilah print’s plate that it was “found in the inventory of Hieronymus Cock’s widow.” At the time when I wrote the citation in question, I must confess that I did not even know who “Hieronymus Cock’s widow” was. In other words, I was not only unaware of the name to append to the vaguely articulated personage mentioned in the New Hollstein, but I also knew nothing of the deeds of the widow in question. Thus, when confronted with the New Hollstein entry’s anonymous descriptive language, I did not bother to conduct any research in order to discover said widow’s identity. I was more concerned with my essay’s topic, the relation of Van Heemskerck’s prints to the artistic ideology that his self-portrait asserted on his own behalf. This was an especially egregious oversight given that I noticed that someone, either Hieronymus Cock or “[his] widow,” appears to have been selective in keeping the copper plates of prints by Van Heemskerck bearing his inventive ruinscapes over and above other plates engraved after his compositions of other subjects.11 Nonetheless, without giving the matter much thought, I incorrectly 9 The definitive publications on Aux Quatre Vents are Riggs, Printmaker and Publisher and van Grieken, ed., The Renaissance in Print. 10 DiFuria, “Remembering the Eternal.” 11 Veldman, New Hollstein, cites nos. 77, 84, 160, 178, 225, 226–35, 524–35, all featuring ruinscapes, as the only prints by Van Heemskerck whose plates appeared in Diericx’s inventory.

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assumed that the name of the widow mentioned in the New Hollstein was no longer known to us. Of course, Diericx’s printed portrait of 1579 engraved by Johannes Wiericx confirms that the opposite is true; she has always been known. (Figure 7. 2) And so the two omissions of Diericx’s identity I cite here occurred despite an apparent and significant bulwark against the loss of her name in the collective cultural and historical memory. Whether these omissions and erasures are damnable sins of history writing should not be the point. Seeking the sublimations that explain them in the context of the publications where they appear should be, however.12 I highlight these slights to neither shame nor exonerate the individual authors who committed them. I present them instead as micro-symptoms of larger, systemic, and thus authoritative patriarchal constructs. They signal a force that has exerted greater strength and impact on the historical record than the deeds of the women they mention, by name or otherwise. As such, they signal the unwitting perpetuation of a historically potent default, a gender biased frame of mind that inhibits our discovery of a fuller understanding of the spaces that women inhabited and navigated in early modern culture. Moreover, while they do not undercut the art historical value of the specific publications in which they appear, that is only because those texts address men, deemed more important than the important women who form the focus of this essay. And of course, therein lies the rub, as Nochlin’s essay and so many that have preceded and followed it have pointed out in a variety of ways. Thus, the title of this essay acknowledges our place us at some distance from understanding Verhulst and Diericx with the hope of establishing lines of inquiry that move us closer to discrete understandings of each as well as the historical and historiographic machinations that have defined them.

Verhulst and Diericx in History and the Historical Imagination At the risk of arguing from an unsubtly historicist standpoint, history’s want of nuanced descriptions of Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx indicates an inextricable bond between the patriarchally constructed world in which they lived and the historical complex that continually produces cultural knowledge and memory. We note the latter’s usurpation of discursive detail according to gender biased criteria.13 Did neither woman lead a significant life worthy of nuanced consideration?

12 For an analysis of specific acts of sublimation as feminine expressions and their ethical impact on social and historical constructs, see Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman. 13 The founding text on the pitfalls of historicism’s notion that history itself originates social and historical phenomena is Popper’s Poverty of Historicism. However, even Popper concedes historicism’s value as a form of discourse that counters tendencies towards generalizations.

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Figure 7.2. Johannes Wiericx, Portrait of Volcxken Diericx, 1579, 15.9 x 12.4 cm, ink on paper, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-OB-67.071).

Of course, both did. That we know of them at all suggests as much. Moreover, even if we did not know of them, microhistorical approaches have persuasively woven anonymous lives and situations traditionally regarded as quotidian or of marginal

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importance into the record of significance.14 Although history writing itself may not be the prime mover of historical events, its content – not to mention its gaps – does indeed exert a considerable force on subsequent historical works. It thus determines the formulation, perpetuation, and reformulation of consciousness, which in turn does indeed spark cultural productions. The production of books that synthesize and present history entails seemingly endless difficulties; authors, editors, publishers, and readers try to square organic, uneven, complex historical acts with an impossible modernist expectation that descriptions of past people and events must somehow be objective and bear unity, free of any poetic or otherwise subjective modes of description.15 And this is even before we arrive at identifications of the misguided associations and values determining the biases that privilege some cultures and relegate others to the status of the subcultural, banished to margins that such biases reify. In other words, producers and consumers of history tend to receive the ineffable as truth. Thus, as the mere mentions of women receive no follow-through and the omissions of their names risk oblivion, the total failure to recall them later, few publications entail a sustained focus on the variety of ways, small and large, that early modern women could have possibly functioned as cultural agents, movers of history, or as people who were barred from being so, or whose historically important acts were sublimations that elevated the men in their lives. This last tendency is one that patriarchally constructed histories are designed to perpetuate. Exploring the ideas of who Verhulst and Diericx have been and are – from their time to the present – alongside a selection of the art objects and other cultural productions associated with them should at least establish fundamental but exigent historiographic lines of inquiry if not provide new insights regarding the nature of their achievements. However, by suggesting movement towards an understanding of each in this manner, we do not purport that such approaches can bolster our confidence that we know the “actual” women bearing those names. After all, if that has ever been the goal of the historical project writ large, it has been an impossible one to achieve to completion. Even the male figures who have received vivid and detailed afterlives in the historical record are ultimately fluid historical identities. Rather, the production of history has always resulted from the continual probing of the relation between individual historical figures and their cultural milieux in order to most judiciously speculate on the origins of their impulses, to question the veracity of the record of 14 I agree with Magnússon, “Social History and Microhistory,” 707–710, who argues for microhistory’s embrace of the particular as an effective bulwark against the generalizations of traditional historical approaches and as a crucial element of the postmodern record. For an argument for microhistory’s usefulness to feminist studies, see Holton, “Challenging Masculinism.” 15 Such a consciousness of the problematics of history writing are traceable as far back as antiquity, but recent expressions of such awareness of in response to modernist expectations of objectivity in history have their origins in Carlo Ginzburg’s work. For a concise account by Ginzburg on this topic, see “Two or Three Things,” 10–11.

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their acts, and to trace their impact. Thus, the individual continues to become an idea in relation to the institutional, one that has been subject to endorsed discourse and revision. One must admit that these approaches have proven unsatisfactory for historical women such as Verhulst and Diericx. Griselda Pollock has articulated the quandary we grapple with here on behalf of them, that “‘woman’ is a term in a system of meanings that denies the possibility of its signifying anything about those who are designated by it as women, other than their not-being.”16 This is to say, while historical explorations for gender-biases can bring into sharper focus the gaps in the discourse surrounding these two women – and the exposure and elaboration of these gaps is a useful form of historical production – such processes might allow the idea of either woman’s identity to remain underdeveloped. Consequently, this could also continue to be true of the artistic productions with which we associate them. Pollock’s comment above also highlights the pitfalls in “bundling” Verhulst and Diericx together in the same essay, as done here. The implication in such a choice is decidedly anti-feminist. It suggests a tacit endorsement of the fact that both women currently lack individuated historical identities. It also suggests that from within the limiting confines of a single essay, we can successfully situate them (do we choose “each” or “both”?) historically. We thus risk perpetuating the systemic absentmindedness that forms the crucial pressure point with which this essay began. Seen in this light, perhaps this essay’s title should have received revision to suggest a greater awareness of the difficulties in its implication of the two names it voices as conceptually distant loci from an established center of understood art historical discourse. The notion of working “towards” an understanding of Verhulst and Diericx is potentially rife with unseemly implications that ring true with current historical practices: grouping both together as one conceptual destination appears to be as undesirable as using those practices as the starting point from which we approach them. At present, however, we do not understand either woman in a sustained or discrete way. While merely being able to name them suggests that their fame was real, the act of doing so compromises them because it highlights our inability to say more about them; this is the delimiting cycle that marks our starting point. These are the historiographic conditions that the patriarchal constructs of the historical cycle – making, writing, and reception – have created for Verhulst and Diericx. Thus, we seek them outside of this cycle. And that is where we find them.17

16 Pollock, Generations and Geographies, xv. 17 Nochlin, “Great Women Artists,” 22 describes the liminal historical space occupied by women of history as ‘the very position of a woman as an acknowledged outsider, the maverick “she” instead of the presumably neutral “one”‘ as a ‘decided advantage, rather than merely a hindrance or a subjective distortion’.

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Commonalities between Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx warrant our approach to both of them together, as an embodiment of a complex of historiographic problems. The abbreviated historical idea of who Verhulst and Diericx were includes their inhabitance of discursive territories that appear almost entirely within the more expansive and detailed regions mapped out for the men in their lives, determined by the “hidden ‘he’ that is the subject of all scholarly predicates.”18 Thus, addressing both together foregrounds how patriarchally constructed historical frameworks create anemic notions of important early modern women. It also underscores how these structures can blur distinctions between historically marginalized women. In the present version of the historical record, Verhulst and Diericx fall into the reductive category of women who worked for, with, or alongside men who were important for shaping the paradigm shifts of their eras in the broadly marked art historical bedrock areas of style and medium.19 At different points in the sixteenth century, Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Hieronymus Cock helped to develop Netherlandish antiquarianism.20 Both were also important for advancing the print medium.21 That Verhulst and Diericx fall within this larger umbrella of male accomplishment and influence has thus far unfairly defined them as vaguely similar entities. Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Hieronymus Cock have always rightly received scrutiny as important men in the arts, prime movers of early modern artistic production. However, as historiographic conditions surrounding Verhulst and Diericx render each in low relief against the backdrop of history, less significant than they were, and thus falsely alike, these same conditions mark a necessary node for understanding each on her own terms. In other words, their shared historiographic status is not only a vexing symptom of patriarchally constructed gender biases, it is a crucial point of focus. It would seem that a viable first step towards countering these conditions in order to build individuated historical identities for each of these women should be an exploration of their scant early modern biographies, especially for reliable markers of their origins and deeds. One would expect such a cataloguing to reveal immediate concretions and thus distinctions between the two. However, if we construe the historical record with uncritical acceptance, we hazard the perpetuation of the patriarchal constructs that created the conditions we challenge. Perhaps more obviously, but no less importantly, biography as it has manifested in the current historical

18 Ibid., 22, identifies this as a condition perpetrated by ‘the white-male-position-accepted as “natural”‘. 19 For this observation, see Silver, “Review of Jan op de Beek,” who cites Timothy Riggs’s awareness of a linkage of Verhulst and Diericx in this manner. 20 The bibliography on Netherlandish antiquarianism is vast. Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s most notable contribution to Netherlandish antiquarianism was his publication of Sebastiano Serlio’s books on architecture in the Netherlands. See del Fontaine Verwey, “Pieter Coecke van Aelst.” For Cock’s antiquarianism, see de Jonge “Hieronymus Cock’s Antiquity.” 21 For Coecke van Aelst, see Orenstein, “Customs and Fashions.” For Cock, see Riggs, Printmaker and Publisher; Van Grieken, et. al., Renaissance in Print; Heuer, “Aesthetics of Collapse.”

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record is not only the source of the historiographic conditions we work against, it also bears an entanglement of topoi with apparently reliable content.22 The sources and referents for both types of speech are not easily tracked or verified as either. Thus, as we recount the artistic lives of both women, we do so with the intention of building upon the information we have inherited while examining the inadequacies it contains. At its heart, this is a futile but necessary comparative exercise. This is to say that as a matter of course, we read the historical records of Verhulst and Diericx against those of early modern men engaged in similar pursuits. We do so quantitatively, with an eye towards tracking the greater or lesser amount of information in their stories as presently told. But we also do so qualitatively, questioning the content of their stories, particularly for the modes and voices in which they are told. We must, first and foremost, read with a consciousness of the forms of knowledge not present in the text before us.23 Equally important, we must also chart the discursive lives of both women within prevailing modes of storytelling and history writing. More specifically, it is imperative to map the received identities of each through the evolving language of criticism and praise that have defined them. And in the end, we must construct judicious, historically imagined identities for both.24 Beyond history’s delivery of Mayken Verhulst to us via the achievements of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, her relation to the Bruegel and Goltzius men has layered the manner in which patriarchal constructs have marginalized her historical identity. Even today, she is conveyed to the general public in a way that perpetuates the embedding of her within the biographies and historical importance of several apparently “more important” men, thus situating her at several removes from her own historical agency. For example, if we consult Wikipedia to see how the most widely consulted first source for basic information on any given topic broadcasts her to the world, or to refresh ourselves in some general way regarding who she is and what she accomplished, we find but a small quantity of information bearing the following claims in rapid succession: Lodovico Guicciardini deemed her one of “the four most important female painters” of her homeland; she was not only Coecke van Alest’s “second wife,” but she was Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s mother-in-law; she was the first painting teacher to her grandsons, Pieter the Younger and Jan the Elder; she was the sister to Lysbeth Verhulst who was married to Hubert Goltzius; she was also sister to Barbara, 22 Kurz and Kris, Legend, Myth, and Magic, 13–38, identify appearance of such topoi from antiquity in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550 and 1568) and Karel van Mander’s Het Schilder Boeck (1604). 23 For the general notion of knowledge as fluid and dependent upon text and context, see Williamson, Knowledge, especially 63: ‘Thus the search for a substitute for knowing in causally explanatory contexts is forced to recapitulate the history of attempts to analyse knowing in terms of believing, truth, and so on, a history which shows no sign of ending in success.’ For an exploration of the relation of text, discourse, and cultural productions, see Vandevelde, “Notions of ‘Discourse.’” 24 The notion of historical imagination as articulated here has its roots in Collingwood, The Idea of History. For a critical reevaluation of the method, see Dray, History as Re-Enactment.

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who was married to Jacob de Punder.25 Thus, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, the first impression many would receive of Verhulst is her situation within a framework of male achievements. Diericx fares only slightly better. The Wikipedia page dedicated to her does describe her as the “co-founder” of Aux Quatre Vents, which she most certainly was. However, the first sentence of the entry introduces her as Hieronymus Cock’s spouse, stating “she was probably from Antwerp like her husband Hieronymus Cock and about the same age when she married him.”26 The text describing Diericx goes on to enumerate her achievements via a primarily pronominal coupling with her husband, the use of the third person plural “they.”27 As such, Wikipedia’s entry on Diericx acknowledges no value in distinguishing her actions from those by her more famous husband. Via their small quantity and reductive content, anemic descriptions such as these form a sort of anti-history. Of course, we can trace the roots of this vague but pervasive brand of discourse around Verhulst and Diericx from the opposite direction as well, from those early mentions to the present. They are so scant, recounting them does not require copious amounts of space. As the discourse surrounding both is quantitatively meagre, a deeper dig into the historical and historiographic territory surrounding them reveals a provocative murkiness. Terrain is largely unmapped. Conclusions are vague and details are few. Guicciardini’s mention of Verhulst of 1567 assesses her on the basis of gender, grouping her with three other woman artists in the “not bad for a girl” discursive mode; thus she appears an important woman artist, not an important artist.28 Karel van Mander’s Het Schilder Boeck follows a Vasarian mode by relegating mentions of both women – and thus the women themselves – to the biographies of their important husbands.29 Georges Marlier’s monograph on Pieter Coecke van Aelst, exhaustive in its approach to the master, makes scant mention of Verhulst.30 Likewise, the few mentions of her in Grand Design reveal uncertainties regarding her role in the production of Ces Moeurs.31 Jan op de Beeck’s small catalog on Verhulst conjectures that she should receive credit for the works of the so-called Brunswick

25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayken_Verhulst. [Accessed 04/28/2018]. 26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcxken_Diericx#. [Accessed 05/05/2018]. 27 Ibid. In rapid succession, after a first sentence beginning with ‘She’, the next three sentences refer to her and Cock and start with ‘Together they founded’, ‘Their shop was located’, and ‘They later moved’. 28 Guicciardini, Descrittione, 145: ‘Et di donne vive nomineremo quattro: […] la terza è Maria de Bessemers di Malines […] moglie di maestro Pietro Couck d’Alost.’ (‘And of living women we will name four:…the third is Maria de Bessemers of Malines…wife of the master, Pieter Coecke van Aelst’). 29 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, f218v35–37, gives one sentence to Verhulst, stating that Coecke van Aelst’s ‘Weduve Mayken Verhulst gas zijn naegelaten Metselrija Boecken upt in’t Jaer 1553’. (‘[His] wife Mayken Verhulst published his [translations of Sebastianio Serlio’s] architecture books in the year 1553’). Ibid., 232r27– 29, states of Cock that he ‘haddde doch geen kinderen van een Hollandt sche Vrouw / Volck oft Volcktgen ghenoemt’. (‘[He] no children from [his] Dutch wife who was called Volck or Volcktgen’). 30 Marlier, La Renaissance Flamand, 73, 84. 31 Orenstein, “Customs and Fashions,” 178.

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Monogrammist, earlier argued by Simone Bergmans.32 However, the attribution seems dubious and has not gained acceptance. Recently, Diericx has been the recipient of more discourse than Verhulst. Joris van Grieken’s catalog on Hieronymus Cock, a major achievement in chronicling the publisher’s artistic life and productions, contains an early chapter purporting to situate Diericx within the larger sphere of Aux Quatre Vents’ productivity. However, there again, we see considerable evidence that the record on which to build a nuanced case for Diericx is itself paltry, a shaky foundation for further studies; the Cock monograph describes Diericx’s documented appearance in court to testify that she witnessed Pieter Baltens’s marriage to Clara de Crael.33 That Baltens was also a publisher of prints prompts author Jan Van der Stock to cite the documentation as evidence that print publishers in the Low Countries comprised a tight knit community. The catalog goes on to cast Diericx as little more than a “caretaker” of the publishing concern in the years after her husband’s death. Thus, the Wikipedia pages that present “digest” versions of the lives of these two women not only reflect a reductive afterlife for their reputations, they are the fruit that has never ripened due to a perpetual neglect of both women stretching back to the times in which they lived. Thus, the historical accounts of both are as notable for an exceptional preponderance of disconnects as they are for content that betrays the strange place both occupy with in a patriarchally constructed art history. For example, while Guicciardini’s praise for Verhulst singles her out as one of the four most important female artists of her day, she has received no securely attributable works. While we have noted the speculation that she was the so-called “Brunswick Monogrammist,” no scholar has conducted a rigorous exploration of the possibility, which begs a line of inquiry that some would deem fruitless, but which I do not: how can the cultural productions surrounding both women reveal the conditioned notoriety we describe above, followed by a conspicuous void? Further, how do we weave an art historical presence for the name, rather than tacitly endorsing its status as an absence? Consider the points of tension in Sarah Gwyneth Ross’s landmark study of the intellection of womanhood in early modern Italy and England as an index of her admirable grappling with the difficulties in charting new lines of inquiry towards situating the cultural productions of early modern women, the same obstacles we encounter if we attempt to individuate Verhulst and Diericx. As Ross correctly observes, “older interpretive models are proving intractable.”34 However, the realities implicit in lines of inquiry that would circumnavigate those models render questionable the utility in her optimistic declaration that “our treasury of information [on early modern women] now overflows.” Ross’s project proceeds along traditional 32 Op de Beeck, Mayken Verhulst, 94; Bergmanns, “Monogrammiste de Brunswick.” 33 Van der Stock, “Hieronymus Cock and Volcxken Diericx,” 14. 34 Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 1.

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lines; she presents traditional forms of information to describe a “golden age” for the seventeenth century woman; the sheer number of women’s productions – publications, translations, and an increased number of women in educational roles – evinces her “project of historical recovery.”35 In places, she veers perilously close framing quantity as agency. However, the possibility of control over the production and reception of the early modern “household salon” she has reconstructed receives little address. Over the entirety of her text, patriarchy receives explicit mention in only two places. While she cites early modern critiques of patriarchy, she offers no sustained critique of it as the systemic regime from within which the productions she tracks took place.36 Productions like those Ross brought to light serve our understanding of the early modern woman of privilege who was at least somewhat productive, if not prolific. However, their entry into the historical record reifies a historical model that fails to define figures like Verhulst and Diericx; they do not come with a readymade “overflowing treasury” of information. As we have seen, an investigation of them occurs upstream, against the currents of centuries worth of such difficulties, and entails an attempt to understand what it means to have their names with little to no clear-cut conception of the contents of their personal time, their situation within patriarchally defined milieu, and most importantly, how either of them were able to make productions out of that time. Thus, we must consider how their contemporaries regarded such productions. Did some or many see them as de facto transgressions simply because they were the products of women? Did those who witnessed their productions view them in gendered terms as the product of women’s time and labor? Or were they simply sublimated, regarded as the products of the men in their lives? And if the answer to this latter question is “yes” in reference to any particular production, then how do we know the nature of their contributions to other productions not normally associated with them? What fruit will research bear if their contemporaries attributed the agency of their works to others? Such questions frustrate because they are fraught with a false center-periphery binary, also most effectively articulated as a series of interrogatives; was the Renaissance woman at the “nexus of text and practice” as Ross, and Pamela Benson before her, have argued?37 Or is arguing as such a way of reifying patriarchal constructs? Moreover, do attempts to establish links between the marginalization of 35 Ibid., 235–237. 36 Ibid., 188–189, Ross notes that the ‘“household academy,”[was] headed by a learned father and supplemented by father-patrons’. She goes on to claim that the criticism of patriarchy that ‘pervaded [Venetian] literary culture […] made its appearance […] within the more conservative English context’ without providing convincing evidence. Ibid., 314, she advocates for a ‘comparative approach’ adopting the Venetian late sixteenth century critique of patriarchy 37 Ibid., 315; Pamela Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999).

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early modern women’s individuated identities and their sublimated productions reify their place at the margin? Or does the exposure of such sublimations comprise a useful historical exemplum?

Questions, Productions, and Open Conclusions Thus, we have “backed in” to our topic; we have reached an interrogative conclusion that the limited means of cultural agency for early modern women has populated into their historical afterlives. However, we reject the notion that this conclusion is tantamount to an end. We embrace the cultural potency of the negative spaces for early modern women as indicators of discursive lacunae, which in turn comprise evidence as well as a seedbed for critical interrogation and exploration. In this context, charting the discursive terrain around Verhulst and Diericx in the specific realm of the sixteenth century Netherlandish print market reveals their production via effective but unmapped forms of creativity. That they were able to do so successfully suggests the market’s status as an exceptionally ready hotbed for innovation, unlike, for example, the market for sculpture, which tended be less welcoming of experimentation and change, if only because of the exorbitant expenses it demanded. However, we can only gain a nuanced understanding of the nature of their productions if we press for evidence of their agency in the production of the objects involving them in any way. Verhulst’s campaign on the print market after Coecke van Aelst’s death recommends her as an artistic entrepreneur of the highest order, an individual possessing a nuanced understanding of the concetti that would capture the imaginations of erudite, worldly collectors.38 We might regard her publication of the Ces Moeures et Fachons printed frieze as the carrying out of her husband’s wishes. Clearly, however, that view denies her any significant agency in the creative life of the project. Such a scenario seems unlikely. There is no clear cut evidence that Coecke van Aelst considered the print medium for his tapestry designs during his lifetime. Their publication as prints was unequivocally Verhulst’s decision. Coecke van Aelst made the stunning designs after a journey to Istanbul in 1533, but they remained unexecuted for the remainder of his life, save for the commission of blocks carved after them. Rather than publish the block prints immediately upon Coecke van Aelst’s death, Verhulst published them some 20 years later, in 1555. The timing does not appear to be mere happenstance. Their publication coincides with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s retirement, a five-year process begun in 1549 with a Joyous Entry through Antwerp.39 38 The notion of the sixteenth century print market’s status as a hotbed of innovation receives a concise articulation in Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, 118–136. 39 Meadow, “Antwerp Blidje incompst.”

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Coecke van Aelst, who had served as court painter to the emperor, was responsible for prints of the Joyous Entry’s ephemeral decorations. Charles, known at the time as the “world emperor,” was famed for his halt of the Turkish advances on Vienna in 1529 and the Italian peninsula in 1532.40 Thus, the occasion of his withdrawal from public life presented a most appropriate moment for the publication of prints showing the customs of the Turks. Verhulst doubtless knew that their imagery would have resonated the most with a northern European audience at a moment honoring the reign of the emperor who had quieted the Turks. Moreover, their status as designs by his recently deceased court painter would have given them an added commemorative charge. We can speak similarly of Diericx’s work after her husband Hieronymus Cock’s death. Her shrewd stewardship of the Quatre Vents publishing house after Cock died in 1570 suggests not only her collaboration with her husband. It suggests also her mastery of the pictorial and entrepreneurial intelligence that was then so crucial to the operation of a thriving print concern. In the recent catalog on Cock’s work, Diericx’s selection of some plates for continued printing while jettisoning others is described as a “reflection of late sixteenth century tastes.” Naturally, the same volume suggests that Cock’s selection of artists and engravers created tastes in print. There can be no doubt that Cock was responsible for the creation of a Netherlandish print market. But Cock cast a wide net. At the very least, a likelier scenario includes Diericx’s foresight in the posthumous formulation of a Quatre Vents catalog, a canon of sixteenth century print that has been handed down to us according to her vision, but that we have taken for granted. Portraits associated with Verhulst and Diericx (figures 7.3 and 7.2 respectively) offer visual records that prompt fruitful discourse on their agency vis-à-vis their husbands’ productions. They have yet to receive full consideration in art historical gender discourse and have received no substantial linkage to the identities of the women they portray, or the print productions with which we associate them. Nevertheless, as presentations of their likenesses for semi-public and public consumption, they stand as crucial founding objects that provide opportunities for further critical inquiries that could, in turn, better situate both figures within a more nuanced history. A double-portrait that scholars have traditionally thought to be of Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Mayken Verhulst in Zurich’s Kunsthaus is the only known extant image we have that could possibly portray her. (Figure 7.3) The double-portrait has been read as a product of Coecke van Aelst’s authorship. The possibility that Verhulst painted it has been suggested, but has not recieved exploration.41 Moreover, scholars have likened it to the Netherlandish marriage portrait formula more prevalent at the end 40 For prints by Maarten van Heemskerck commemorating Charles’ victory over Suleiman in 1529 and other important military victories, see Veldman, et. al., New Hollstein, nos. 524–535. 41 King, “Looking a Sight,” 394–395. The painting’s cartellino once included text, but it is no longer legible.

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Figure 7.3. Unknown Artist, Portrait of Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Mayken Verhulst, c. 1550, oil on panel, 50.5 x 59 cm, Kunsthaus, Zurich.

of the fifteenth century.42 However, the woman at right in the painting, presumably Verhulst, wears “widow’s weeds,” the black clothing of a woman in mourning.43 Thus, if Verhulst the painter fashioned the image, her husband’s death prompted her to do so. Indeed, the painting shows Coecke van Alest’s right hand resting on a skull. While his death may have in fact prompted Verhulst to either commission or execute the painting, granting this circumstance primacy in attempts to formulate an understanding of the painting leaves under-developed our understanding of its other crucial aspects. Moreover, doing so not only subordinates any possible agency that Verhulst may have had in the painting’s production to Coecke van Aelst’s death, it also relegates questions regarding the portrayal of her alongside her husband to the status of a lesser, or even insignificant set of concerns. Thus, our understanding of the painting – and half of its content – has remained incomplete. 42 Ibid., 395 and n. 65 for earlier bibliography on the subject. 43 Bergmanns, “Monogrammiste de Brunswick,” 133–157.

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Figure 7.4. Quentin Massys, The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514, oil on panel, 70 x 67 cm, Louvre, Paris, Inv. no. 1444.

However, in its time and place, the painting’s composition and unique handling of content recommend it as a potent index of Verhulst’s status as a woman of import, regardless of her specific role in the painting’s production. Depicting Coecke van Aelst and Verhulst abreast and facing the picture plane at left and right, the double-portrayal is notable as a somewhat belated variation on the category of genre picture emanating from Antwerp portraying couples counting money. The most famous examples of this type of picture are by Quentin Massys and Marinus van Reymerswaele. Annette Lezotte’s recent interpretation of the Massys double-portrayal in particular establishes a foundation upon which we can consider the Coecke van Aelst-Verhulst double-portrait.44 (Figure 7.4) Lezotte moves our thinking past the traditional suggestions that the Massys painting, which depicts a male figure who is fixated on the coins before him and a woman who thumbs a bible while looking distractedly away from the sacred text to gaze upon the unruly pile of money, presents a moralizing argument on lucre’s evils. Lezotte instead situates the painting within the fluid complex of economic concerns emergent in Antwerp in the 1520s. Establishing the notion of feminine agency within the flux of Antwerp’s burgeoning marketplace, she argues for the painting’s status as a record of the changing status of women at the time. In LeZotte’s vision, the Massys picture evinces the market place as an expansive 44 LeZotte, “Moralizing Dialogues.”

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venue of invention that was, in a Darwinistic sense, open to the ideas that would work most effectively.45 In the context of the pictorial category from which it takes its cue and Verhulst’s role in the posthumous publication of Coecke van Aelst’s images of the Turkish life, the double-portrait suggests her status as his equal. Johannes Wiericx’s print of Volcxken Diericx also presents an opportunity for situating her identity within the artistic, economic, and social milieu of her day.46 (Figure 7.2) Its conception, execution, and circulation, suggest her as more than just a name of record that has carried into the present. Rather, the circulation of her likeness, which was potentially broad, suggests unassailably her status as a figure of public currency. The portrait’s stunningly detailed mode of depiction aligns with its argument for its sitter’s importance. It is a notable image for its lionization of a woman in the same stately portrait mode normally reserved for paintings of the most important men.47 Sitting at a quarter view from the picture plane, Diericx wears a brocaded garment and a lace hat and collar. Her attire is not the overly ostentatious garb of royalty. It is nonetheless elaborately and impressively wrought, perhaps a metaphor for the print medium’s capacity for dazzling visual effects and likenesses within a perceived set of technical limitations in comparison to painting. Wiericx’s handling of the burin is of the highest order, the printed analog to the fine mode of rendering pioneered by Jan van Eyck. The print presents Diericx’s physiognomy and clothing via a masterful manipulation of a networked variety of lines that appear as such upon close examination, but resolve into convincing unity of tonal variations when viewed at arm’s length. Thus, Wiericx portrays his sitter in a uniformly relentless manner that announces the print medium’s capacity for vivid, ultimately convincing likenesses. In so doing, his portrait argues for Diericx’s gravitas. It is therefore most appropriate that Wiericx’s print commemorates Diericx in the very medium and pictorial category she helped to pioneer. Coupled with a print from Aux Quatre Vents ca. 1563 composed by Hans Vredeman de Vries representing the publishing house on an imagined street, we can read Diericx’s portrait as an emblem of her stewardship of the Quatre Vents in the years after Cock’s death.48 (Figure 7.5) The print shows Cock standing in the doorway of the shop, while Diericx stands at the counter inside. It includes an inscription at bottom right stating “Laet de Cock coken om tvolckx Wille” (“Let the cook [Cock] make as his wife [Volkx] wills it”).49 With its playful punning, the inscription clearly invites considerations of Diericx’s agency in Aux Quatre Vents’ productions. Notable is Van

45 For the art market’s expansion in the context of Antwerp’s economic growth, see also Silver, Peasant Scenes, 26–35. 46 Van Grieken, et. al., Renaissance Print, cat. no. 6. 47 Woodall, “Sovereign Bodies.” 48 Van Grieken, et. al., Renaissance Print, cat. no. 3. 49 Ibid., 76.

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Figure 7.5. Johannes or Lucas van Doetechum after Hans Vredeman de Vries, Street with the Print Shop Aux Quatre Vents, 1563, ink on paper, 21.1 x 25.9 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmusum (Object Number BI-1897-A-972–3).

Grieken’s translation of the inscription to include the pun on Cock’s name but not Diericx’s. Thus, as we have seen throughout this essay, the channels by which the women who form this essay’s topic received commemoration as discrete subjects. Yet they are not synthesized with the historical record in any sort of critically nuanced way. By way of conclusion, I wish to note that the few images this essay shows are ones that we traditionally associate exclusively with the men in the lives of both of the women whom I hope we now see as exempla of a range of concerns. Elaborating the fragmented literary and visual evidence surrounding these two important women against the backdrop of patriarchal Netherlandish art history’s canon suggests a new model for understanding their entrepreneurial creativity. However, we would be remiss if we did not note that doing so also simultaneously highlights patriarchal historical discourse’s status as a self-perpetuating closed system. While the print medium, fluid and open, welcomed their nuanced visions of Netherlandish visual culture and the record of their achievements is scant, it also stands as a record of an opportunity for further inquiry, continued looking and thinking.

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Bibliography Benson, Pamela. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999. Bergmanns, Simone. “Le problème Jan van Hemessen, monogrammiste de Brunswick: le collaborateur de Jan van Hemessen, l’identité du monogrammiste.” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 24:3/4 (1955): 133–157. Cleland, Elizabeth, ed. Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry. New Haven / New York: Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. de Jonghe, Krista. “Hieronymus Cock’s Antiquity.” In Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print. Eds. Joris van Grieken, et. al., 42–51. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. del Fontaine Verwey, Herman. “Pieter Coecke van Aelst and the Publication of Serlio’s Book on Architecture.” Quaerendo 6:2 (1976): 167–194. DiFuria, Arthur. “Remembering the Eternal in 1553: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Self Portrait Before the Colosseum.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 59 (2010): 91–108. Dray, William H. History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It.” Critical Inquiry 20:1 (1993): 10–35. Guicciardini, Lodovico. Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi. Antwerp: 1567. Gylfi Magnússon, Sigurdur. “‘The Singularization of History’: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern state of Knowledge.” Journal of Social History 36:3 (2003): 707–710. Heuer, Christopher. “Hieronymus Cock’s Aesthetics of Collapse.” Oxford University Press 32:3 (2009): 387, 389–408. King, Catherine. “Looking a Sight: Sixteenth-Century Portraits of Woman Artists.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58:H3 (1995): 394–395. Kurz, Otto and Ernst Kris. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. LeZotte, Annette. “Moralizing Dialogues on the Northern Market Economy: Women’s Directives in Sixteenth-Century Genre Imagery of the Antwerp Marketplace.” In Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives. Ed. Arthur J. DiFuria, 51–66. London: Ashgate / Routledge, 2016. Marlier, Georges. La Renaissance Flamand: Pierre Coecke d’Alost. Brussels: R. Finck, 1966. Meadow, Mark. “Ritual and civic identity in Philip II’s 1549 Antwerp Blidje incompst.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 49 (1998): 36–67. Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News (January, 1971): 22–39, 67–71. Pon, Lisa. Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. op de Beek, Jan. Mayken Verhulst (1518–1599): The Turkish Manners of an Artistic Lady. Mechelen: Museum Het Zotte Kunstkabinet, 2005. Orenstein, Nadine. “Customs and Fashions of the Turks.” In Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry. Ed. Elizabeth Cleland, 176–183. New Haven / New York: Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. Pollock, Griselda. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed., Griselda Pollock. New York: Routledge, 1996. Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 1957. Riggs, Timothy. Hieronymus Cock: Printmaker and Publisher. New York: 1977. Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. The Birth of Feminism:Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

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Silver, Larry. “Review of Jan op de Beek, Mayken Verhulst (1518–1599): The Turkish Manners of an Artistic Lady (Mechelen: Museum Het Zotte Kunstkabinet, 2005).” HNA Reviews, 2006. https://hnanews.org/hnar/ reviews/mayken-verhulst-1518-1599-turkish-manners-artistic-lady/. [Accessed 5/25/2018]. Silver, Larry. “Review of Jan op de Beek, Mayken Verhulst (1518–1599): The Turkish Manners of an Artistic Lady (Mechelen: Museum Het Zotte Kunstkabinet, 2005).” HNA Reviews. https://hnanews.org/hnar/reviews/ mayken-verhulst-1518-1599-turkish-manners-artistic-lady/.[Accessed May 25, 2018]. Silver, Larry. Peasant Scenes and Landscapes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Stanley Holton, Sandra. “Challenging Masculinism: Personal History and Microhistory in Feminist Studies of the Women’s Suffrage Movement.” Women’s History Review 20:5 (2011): 829–841. Van der Stock, Jan. “Hieronymus Cock and Volcxken Diericx: Print Publishers in Antwerp.” In Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print. Ed. Joris van Grieken, 12–15. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Van Grieken, Joris, ed. Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Van Mander, Karel. Het Schilder-Boeck. Haarlem: 1604. Vandevelde, Pol. “The Notions of ‘Discourse’ and ‘Text’ in Postmodernism: Some Historical Roots.” Philosophy and Theology 6:3 (1992): 181–200. Veldman, Ilja, comp. and 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. Wikipedia. “Mayken Verhulst.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayken_Verhulst. [Accessed April 28, 2018]. Wikipedia. “Volcxken Diericx.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcxken_Diericx#. [Accessed May 5, 2018]. Williamson, Timothy. Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Woodall, Joanna. “Sovereign Bodies: The Reality of Status in Seventeenth-century Dutch Portraiture.” Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Ed. Joanna Woodall, 75–100. New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1997.

About the Author Arthur J. DiFuria obtained his Ph.D from the University of Delaware, specializing in the Italianate studies of Maarten van Heemskerk. He is Professor and Department Chair of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design.

Index Aelst, Pieter Coecke van: 23, 157–9, 159, 165–7, 170–4, 172 alba amicorum: 75 Alberti, Leon Battista: 30, 48–51, 95 Anguissola, Sofonisba: 31, 43, 47, 48, 49–50 Antwerp: 28–30, 32, 35–6, 104n60, 147, 160, 167, 170, 173–4 Arachne: 21–3, 113, 117, 124–32, 137 Arachne of Colophon: 57 Artemisia: 21–2, 86–8, 103, 107, 151 Atalanta see Meleager Backer, Jacob de: 133 Baltens, Pieter: 168 Beaumont, Francis: 131, 132n75–8, 137 Boccaccio: 32–35 Borch, Gerard ter: 69, 80 Borch, Gesina ter: 15, 22, 55–8, 69, 70–73, 70, 72, 75–80, 78–9 Boyceau, Jacques: 105 Bredius, Abraham: 82 Brugghen, Hendrick ter: 64 Brunswick Monogrammist: 167–8, 172n43 Buytewech, Willem: 96, 97, 101–2 Campen, Jacob van: 86, 92, 94n25, 103–5 Caravaggisti, Utrecht: 61 Castiglione, Baldassare: 31, 47 Caterina Vigri of Bologna: 35 Cats, Jacob: 59, 60n19 Cennini, Cennino: 39–42 Cereta, Laura: 57–60, 81 Cleve, Joos van: 29 Cock, Hieronymus: 23, 159–160, 165, 167–8, 171, 174–5 Coligny, Louise de: 89 Coppola, Eleanor: 81 Crael, Clara de: 161 Dans, Johan van: 76 Diericx, Volcxken: 15, 18, 21, 23, 159–61, 162, 163–71, 174–5 Dou, Gerrit: 56, 60, 68 Dürer, Albrecht: 29, 146 Dyck, Antony van: 47, 104, 143n1 Elsheimer, Adam: 150–2 Erasmus, Desiderius: 31 Everdingen, Cesar van: 92 Fontana, Lavinia: 31 Goltzius, Hendrick: 135, 146–7, 166 Gool, J. van: 82 Gossaert, Jan: 30n9–10, 31 Goudt, Hendrick: 150–2 Grebber, Pieter de: 61, 92n17 Grey, Lady Jane: 144 Hals, Dirck: 61 Harrington, James: 122

Heerschop, Hendrick: 133 Hemessen, Catharina van: 154, 21–2, 27–9, 31–9, 38, 41–3, 45, 47, 49–50 Hendrik, Frederik: 85–6, 88–9, 92, 104n60, 105–6 Henrietta Maria: 95, 119, 121–2 Herp the Elder, Willem van: 133 Heussen, Frans den: 74 Heyden, Jan van der: 87, 92, 94, 99–100 Hollandine, Louisa: 15, 22–3, 113–19, 114–17, 121–39 Honthorst, Gerrit (Gerard) van: 64, 86, 92, 105, 113–4, 118–9, 120, 123 Horenbout, Susanna: 29, 42 Hotchkiss, Mary: 117, 133, 136 Houbraken, Arnold: 82 Huis ten Bosch: 22, 85–8, 90n13, 93, 95, 98–105, 106–8 Huygens, Constantijn: 86, 94, 98, 105 Jordaens, Jacob: 92, 133, 135 Joris, Hendrick: 58 Keyser, Hendrik de: 100 Keyser, Pieter de: 100 Koerten, Joanna: 17 Lanen, Jasper van der: 133 Lely, Peter: 122 Lescailje, Katharyne: 57, 77 Lescaille, Catharina see Lescailje, Katharyne Leyden, Lucas van: 29, 146 Leyster, Judith: 15, 21–2, 55–8, 60–9, 62, 65, 67, 80–2, 118 Lovelace, Richard: 22–3, 113, 115, 116n7–8, 117, 117–24, 126–32, 135, 137–8 Lyly, John: 130–1, 137 Mander, Karel van: 29, 31, 37, 50, 63, 146n9, 158n4, 166n22, 167 Marcia see Boccaccio Maurits of Nassau, Prince of Orange: 88–9, 96 Mausolus: 86–7, 103, 151 Medici, Catherine de: 104 Medici, Cosimo III: 87, 103 Medici, Marie de: 87, 95, 104–5 Meleager (and Atalanta): 123 Merian, Maria Sibylla: 14 Mieris, Frans van: 56 Minerva: 113, 117, 124–7, 129–30, 133–4, 138 miniature painting: 42–3, 45, 71, 78, 158 Molenaer, Jan Miense: 61, 64, 67–8 Montagu, Mary Wortley: 74 More, Thomas: 31 Moryson, Fynes: 74 Mountague, William: 66, 74 needlework: 17, 21, 57–9, 64, 68, 131 Nieuburch, Huis ter: 89n10, 98, 101 night, use or depiction of: 15, 21–2, 55–66, 68–9, 72–82 Nochlin, Linda: 13, 154, 158, 161, 164n17

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Oostsanen, Jacob Cornelisz.: 29 Oranjezaal: 85–6, 92–4, 98–9, 102, 105–7 Ostade, Adriaen: 61 Ovid: 22–3, 79, 113, 116–17, 118n10, 123–37, 151–2 paper cutting: 17, 59 Passe the Elder, Crispijn de: 79, 143, 147–9, 152 Passe the Younger, Crispijn de: 147–9 Passe, Magdalena de: 15, 17, 21, 23, 79, 143–4, 145, 147–55, 150 Passe, Simon de: 147–9 Pizan, Christine de: 31–2, 35n26 poetry albums: 69, 71, 75–7 see also Gesina ter Borch Post, Pieter: 85–7, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94–5, 98, 99, 100–4, 106–7 Quatre Vents: 23, 160, 167–8, 171, 174–5 Ring, Ludger tom the Younger: 43, 44, 47, 49–50 Ripa, Cesare: 100 Roghman, Geertruyd: 68 Rubens, Pieter Paul: 56, 130, 133, 135, 151–2 Saint Luke, Guild of: 28, 30, 35, 39, 45 Saint Luke, representations of: 30–2, 36, 39, 43, 45, 49–50

Scamozzi, Vincenzo: 93, 95–6, 103, 106 Schalcken, Godefridus: 56 Serlio, Sebastiano: 95, 96n34, 100, 165n20, 167n29 Skeysers, Clara of Ghent: 29, 42 Sluiter, Willem: 76 Solms, Amalia van: 85–90, 92, 94–5, 97–8, 100, 102–8 Sophia of Hanover: 114, 122 Soutman, Pieter: 92 Stanley, Thomas: 120 Stuart, Mary: 89 Treaty of Westphalia: 89 Uyttenbroeck, Moses van: 133 Vasari, Giorgio: 29, 31, 43, 50, 166n22, 167 Venne, Adriaan van de: 153 Verhulst, Maycken: 15, 18, 21, 23, 157–61, 163–74 Visscher, Anna Roemers: 57, 59, 60n19, 68 Weyden, Rogier van der: 30 Weyerman, Jacob Campo: 82 Wiericx, Johannes: 161, 162, 174 Willem II of Orange: 89–90, 106 Willem of Nassau (the Silent): 88–9, 100–1 Woutier, Michaelina: 14