Portraits of Regents
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See also:
Frans Hals
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Frans Hals:
The Governors of the Old
Men's
Almshouse at Haarlem
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Frans Hals
The Lady-Governors of the Old Men's Almshouse at Haarlem
1664
Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem
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The governors of hospitals and almshouses were among
the most important patrons of the Netherlandish group portrait.
Unlike the sitters for paintings of militia companies or archers'
guilds, however, these regents and regentesses, as they were called,
were not members of traditional professional associations, but the
honorary governing bodies of charitable institutions; men and women,
usually of aristocratic background, who were appointed by the citv's
ruling elite.
Since the late Middle Ages, the care of the aged in towns had become
a matter of public concern. The growth in commodity relations and
the partly violent expropriation of peasant farmers had led to the
lat-ters' rum and consequent migration to towns, where they were
exposed to a ruthless system of capitalist exploitation and
extortion. Poverty and begging now increased to such an extent that
traditional forms of charity, which had existed since the Middle
Aees, such as those based on the ideas of Francis of Assisi or
Elizabeth of Marburg, no longer sufficed. Following Luther's
example, reformers began to put pressure on municipal councils to
seek a long-term solution to the problem by setting aside
appropriate funds to cover the cost of looking after old people.
Wittenberg itself, with its edict of 1521 proclaiming the founding
of a "common purse", was exemplary in this respect, and Nuremberg,
with its "Rules for the Dispensation of Alms", perhaps even more so.
Nuremberg even appointed public servants to care for the needy. In
the Netherlands, the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives demanded the
endowment of charitable institutions in his book "De subventione
pauperum" (On Supporting the Poor).
The mass phenomenon of begging was a source of constant irritation
to the burghers and ruling strata of the towns, who found beggars
difficult to distinguish from the "traditional" poor. This presented
a moral dilemma, since the poor had never been held responsible for
their plight. In the Middle Ages, after all, poverty had been
accepted as God's will. Soon, however, the ruling strata began to
view persons who were suffering hardship, or who were socially
marginalised, as lazy or unwilling to work. The upper classes, whose
economic interests, based on the principle of wealth accumulation,
had led to the widening of the gulf between rich and poor in the
first place, thus tended to see the resultant misery as deriving
from a congenital ignobility of character in members of the lower
classes.
While early sixteenth-century charitable practice had adhered to
Martin Luther's dictum "Love serves without regard to reward",
increasing penetration of every sphere of human life by the
capitalist principles of wages and profit soon undermined ideals of
chanty and encouraged demands for the poor to be detained in
institutions which would serve their correction. The poorhouses were
little more than prisons - sometimes even called so - and were
organised according to the principle of centralised manufacture.
Their inmates were forced into gruellingly hard labour in return for
a mere pittance. Some of the worst working conditions were found in
the rasp-houses, where dyeing powder was extracted by rasping
logwood. The exploitation of this cheap labour force led to grand
profits. Orphanages, or foundling hospitals, and sometimes mental
asylums, each with their own regents, or governing bodies, were
often found attached to the workhouses. However, there were also
charitable institutions offering asylum to those who had fallen on
hard times. These included homes of refuge for the ill and aged.
In the sixteenth century, it had been customary for works of art to
show the poor in the company of their benefactors - in The Seven
Works of Charity, for example, or in the scenes accompanying
The Last Judgement. In seventeenth-century Netherlandish
portraits of the governors of charitable institutions, however,
human misery itself, with few exceptions, was evidently subject to
taboo, or at least was banished from sight; an invisible barrier
thus existed between "selflessly" or "generously" acting dignitaries
on the one hand, and the inmates of institutions on the other. The
governors remained aloof, avoiding prejudice to their social status
which might derive from being seen in company with those whom the
age had already branded as virtually criminal: the company, in other
words, of persons entrusted into their care. The most they could
bear was the presence of a servant, or a wardress; and even then,
the servant's lower status was clearly indicated by their being
shown bareheaded. The governors would usually sit for their
portraits at one of their regular meetings, and they would have
themselves shown keeping the minutes, or counting money.
Frans Hals's pair of large-format group portraits of The
Governors and Lady-Governors of the Old Men's Almshouse at Haarlem,
painted in 1664, were among the last works commissioned from him.
Indeed, he had now become a pensioner himself, receiving, during the
last four years of his life, an annual stipend of 200 guilders,
awarded by the municipal authorities. Hals executed the portraits in
the manner outlined above, at the same time modifying the dominant
portrait type: the "regents and regentesses" were no longer placed
in a narrative context, depicted carrying out certain typical forms
of activity. This had been a compositional achievement of the first
half of the century, to whose attainment Hals himself had greatly
contributed. Here, however, he showed the sitters in full-face view:
plain, rather formal figures, without the faintest hint of swagger.
In deference to the sitters' wishes, each of whom paid the artist
individually, Hals retained the principle of showing their faces
separately. On the other hand, a new quality now entered his work
via an unconventional, pre-Impressionist mode of painting: the
direct, spontaneous application of paint to the ground ("alia
prima"), with its tendency to favour more open forms.
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Frans Hals
The Lady-Governors of the Old Men's
Almshouse at Haarlem
(detail)
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Frans Hals
The Lady-Governors of the Old Men's
Almshouse at Haarlem
(detail)
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Scholars have frequently suggested that these structural innovations
- appearing as they do to anticipate the (aesthetic) rebelliousness
of a later avant-garde — must be seen in conjunction with Hals's
allegedly critical attitude towards the governors and lady-governors
of the almshouse. It has been said, for example, that the governor
whose hat sits askew was given to drunkenness, or to the abuse of
drugs, and that Hals wanted to poke fun at him. However, it is
demonstrable that the man was actually suffering from facial palsy.
It is therefore misleading to indulge this late nineteenth-century
cliche by attributing to Hals the motive of revenge for
ill-treatment he is reputed to have endured at the hands of his
patrons.
As usual in genre portraits of "regents and regentesses", the
figures in both paintings are shown against a dark background. On
the wall behind the lady-governors is a landscape painting. This
probably represents a "paysage moralise", a morally significant
landscape, whose purpose is to provide a "clavis interpretandi", a
key to understanding the work: the narrow path winding upwards into
the mountains may be an allusion to the "path of virtue", a symbol
often encountered in Renaissance art and "emblem books". If so, it
may indicate what kind of behaviour was expected of the inmates by
the lady-governors.
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Frans Hals
The Governors of the Old Men's Almshouse at Haarlem
1664
Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem
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Anatomy Lessons
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see also:
Rembrandt
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Rembrandt:
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes
Tulp
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Rembrandt
Doctor Nicolaes Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the Arm
1632
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In his "Introduction to Anatomy" Leonardo da Vinci wrote that he
had "dissected more than ten human bodies, dismembering every other
part and removing every tiny piece of flesh surrounding the arteries
without spilling more than a few drops of blood from one or two
capillary veins... And even if you are interested in such matters,
you may well be deterred by a feeling of disgust; and should this
not repulse you, you still might be disturbed by fear of spending
your nights in the company of horribly flayed and mutilated corpses;
and if this prospect does not put you off, you may yet have failed
to acquire the proficiency in drawing which is necessary for such
studies..."
Leonardo was by no means the first artist to study pathological
anatomy in order to perfect his ability to depict the human body.
His teacher Andrea Verrocchio, and Andrea Mantegna, painter to the
Mantuan court, had both experimented in this field. Century-old
church prohibitions against the dissection of human corpses had
gradually relaxed during the last decades of the quattrocento.
Various tentative postmortem examinations had been carried out in
the Middle Ages, too - by Mondino de Luzzi (c. 1275-1326) at Bologna
(1306), for example. A textbook based on his examinations had
somehow managed to escape prohibition for over two centuries.
However, Pope Boniface VIII had forbidden, under penalty of
excommunication, all further experiments involving the dismembering
or boiling down of human corpses. Leonardo's words, cited above,
reveal the sense of novelty, disgust and horror which accompanied
the first breaches of this prohibition to be undertaken in the
spirit of "curiositas", or scientific curiosity. For even teachers
of medicine at the universities had avoided all contact with human
corpses. In the late fifteenth century Italian woodcuts had depicted
professors of medicine removed from their listeners behind raised
lecterns, as they delivered abstract lectures based on anatomical
knowledge derived solely from Classical sources like Hippocrates,
Galen or Dioscurides, while beneath them, surgical assistants
dissected real corpses.
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Rembrandt
Doctor Nicolaes Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the Arm
(detail)
1632
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Johannes de Ketham Anatomical Section
1493-94
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This did not change until the sixteenth century. One of the most
important testimonies to new developments in anthropotomy, or human
anatomy, is the work, based almost entirely on his own observations,
of the Netherlandish anatomist Andreas Vesalius ("De corporis humani
fabrica", 1543). This work also expressed its author's theological
views, for Vesalius saw the human body as a "product of divine
handiwork". One interesting aspect of the woodcuts (possibly by Jan
Stephan van Calcar) which accompanied the book is the way in which
the corpses, depicted to illustrate various systems of arteries,
tendons, muscles and bones etc., seem paradoxically vital, moving
and behaving as if they were living beings, indeed even reflecting -
in a manner possibly also illustating the artist's macabre sense of
humour - on the transience of all earthly life.
Rembrandt's famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes
Tulp (1632), an example of a type of group portrait
cultivated particularly by Netherlandish artists, shows the changing
relationship of medical science to the human corpse in the early
days of empiricism. A more secular view of death is apparent here in
the matter-of-fact attitude towards the corpse demonstrated by the
professor and his students. The professor, the only figure shown
wearing a hat, has exposed to view the tendons and muscles of the
left arm. The corpse - dissections were usually performed on the
bodies of executed criminals - lies almost diagonally across the
picture space. The listeners, some portrayed in profile, others "en
face", are grouped around the dead man's head. They are bending over
to compare the empirical data with an open textbook, placed rather
inconspicuously in the shadows at the foot of the bed.
"Rembrandt met his sitters' demands to portray each one of them
individually. He also enabled his main subject, an anatomy lesson,
to be seen for the first time in its own right." The truth of this
statement can only be fully appreciated by comparing Rembrandt's
painting with the earliest known painting of an anatomy lesson,
executed by Aert Pietersz in 1603, in which the 28 members of the
Amsterdam Surgeons' Guild, together with their lecturer, are shown
standing in three paratactic rows. The arrangement reveals their
desire to be portrayed as separately from one another as possible.
The effect is partly to conceal the corpse, making the assembled
company look as if it has been engaged in some form of clandestine
pursuit.
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Gerard David
The Flaying of the Corrupt Judge Sisamnes
1498-99
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Attention has too rarely been called to the fact that
Rembrandt's composition builds on an earlier type of
painting, developed by Gerard David to depict the course of
justice when the corrupt Judge Sisamnes was flayed alive at
the behest of King Cambyses (The Flaying of the
Corrupt Judge Sisamnes). The humorous parallel
suggested here by Rembrandt - between an executioner's
assistant flaying someone alive and a professor of anatomy
dissecting a corpse - may have introduced a latent element
of criticism in the painting.
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Rembrandt
The Anatomy Class of Dr. Joan Deyman
1656
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 Andrea Mantegna
The Dead Christ
1480
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The appropriate sense of sobriety brought by Rembrandt to
this painting does not seem to have precluded his imbuing it
with an equally apparent emotional depth. This is confirmed
in a second - albeit fragmentary - "anatomy lesson",
presided over by a Dr. Joan Deyman (The Anatomy Class
of Dr. Joan Deyman) and executed in 1656. A
preliminary study in bistre and ink (now in the
Rijksprentenkabinett, Amsterdam) shows that the painting,
which was largely destroyed by fire in 1723, was composed
symmetrically. Small groups of figures are shown standing to
the left and right. Behind the corpse - which belonged to a
certain Joris Fontein, condemned to death for robbery on 27
January 1656 - is the lecturer, whose hands, holding a
scalpel, are all that now remain of him. The top of the
skull has been lifted off to reveal the cerebral
hemispheres. When viewed from a distance, the scalp, peeled
off and hanging down at either side of the head, resembles
long, flowing hair, so that the frontal view of the dead
man's face recalls certain renderings of Christ. Indeed the
compositional arrangement of the dead body, with its feet
stretched out towards the spectator, closely follows that of
Mantegna's Christo in scurto (c. 1480), one of
the most impressive devotional paintings of the early
Renaissance. The formal parallel here implies that the dead
man in Rembrandt's painting, who has been outlawed by
society, and whose mortal remains have been denied all
sanctuary and due respect, is redeemed in Christ's words:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (Matth. 25, 40).
Spirituality, and, by extension in Rembrandt's painting,
social pathos, had played an increasingly important role in
the artist's work during the 1650s. The subject of the
painting may even have been a deliberate reference to the
biblical passage cited above.
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Portraits of Fools and Dwarfs
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see also:
Velazquez
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Diego Velazquez:
The Dwarf "El Primo"
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 Velazquez
The Dwarf "El Primo"
1644
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It was customary at the courts of Europe during the seventeenth
century - indeed, right up to the French Revolution - for monarchs
to keep dwarfs. Together with other "prodigia" (monsters), these
"errors of Nature", as one contemporary referred to them, provided a
source of amusement. "Considered rare attractions at the royal
courts, dwarfs were bought and sold throughout Europe. They were
decked with finery, adorned with jewellery and gold, and shown off
at ceremonies of state, or on festive occasions. Often, they were
presented as gifts, or as a surprise spectacle, a fashion to which
not even church dignitaries were immune."218
This "fashion", which had spread to Europe from the Ottoman court,
was linked to yet another, similar custom. For their entertainment
aristocratic households would keep a number of fools who were
privileged to make witty or pointed remarks and to engage in
provocative parodies, thus challenging legal and conventional taboos
and providing an anarchic counter-balance to the vacuum of critical
opinion at court. Undoubtedly, this showed the survival - albeit in
isolated pockets, and in much reduced form - of the medieval
tradition of "fooles", whose carnivalesque origins probably lay in
the Roman Saturnalia, and whose burlesque goings-on set up a kind of
popular political and ecclesiastical opposition for a short period
of every year (between the end of December and Epiphany on 6
January), exposing many feudal institutions, especially those of the
church, to ridicule and criticism. The tradition of oppositional
jest had then entered the early absolutist courts via the travelling
conjurers, the "loculatores".
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Velazquez
Sebastian de Morra
1645
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Since the late fifteenth century there had been an increasing demand
for the normative ideals of logic in reason and regularity in
appearance - the attempt, for example, to establish a canon of
proportions for the expression of ideal beauty has been referred to
above. Deviations from such norms must increasingly have come to
appear comical, or grotesque, or as crimes against a nature whose
very essence was thought to be ordered uniformity. Indeed, without
the existence of norms, the mere sight of deformed, crippled or mad
people, or the lack, or imaginary lack, of "iudicum" (powers of
discernment), could not have provided occasion for scorn and
ridicule. At the same time, the image of the fool tended to
oscillate between one that saw him as unnatural, the representive of
everything that was evil and sinful, and its opposite, in which the
fool's wisdom lay precisely in his innate access to a language
mentally distorted enough to adequately describe the absurdity of
reality. The latter notion played a role in Erasmiamsm, a humanist
school of thought, widespread among the Spanish, educated elite of
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, based on works such
as Erasmus's. "In Praise of Folly" (Monae encomion). Enlightened
parodies of conventional thinking now began to attribute a positive
meaning to terms such as "stultitia" (stupidity) and "insania"
(madness).
It is not known whether Diego Velazquez sympathised with Erasmiamsm.
Nonetheless, his sympathy for the fools and dwarfs of the Spanish
court is obvious: in the pathos and humane understanding
demonstrated by the single portraits with which he (and he alone)
paid tribute to them. It has been pointed out that courtly etiquette
- for seating arrangements at audiences, for example, or for
seat-numbering at bull-fights - placed Velazquez in the same
category as dwarfs and fools. As "Pintor del Rey" (Painter to the
King) he was relegated to the fourth row among the barbers and
footmen.
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Velazquez
The Court Dwarf Don Antonio el Ingles
1642
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A particularly impressive portrait is Velazquez's painting of the
dwarf Don Diego de Acedo, alias El Primo (The Cousin),
probably commissioned by the court and executed at Fraga in about
1644. Like the midget Sebastian de Morra, who served in the retinue
of the Infante Don Fernando and Prince Baltasar Carlos, El Primo is
shown sitting, and is viewed slightly from below. The effect of
presenting them from this dignified aspect is to raise their status
in the eyes of the spectator. El Primo is portrayed leafing through
the pages of an enormous tome. His small size makes the books
surrounding him appear even more gigantic than they are. His
occupation here is undoubtedly a reference to his administrative
duties at the court. At the same time, it is probably an example of
humanist satirical jest, which would often decry the senseless
writing and reading of books as a contemptible vice. Contemporary
spectators would never have accepted that a dwarf knew how to use
the attributes of a scholar; the artist thus seems to be using an
apparently grotesque discrepency to poke fun at the pseudo-scholars
of his day. The satirical tradition had spread throughout Europe via
the humanists, and Velazquez's knowledge of it is evident in his use
of ideal types in portraits of the Cynic philosopher Menippus (MOENIPPVS,
c. 1636-40) and the Greek composer of fables Aesop (AESOPVS, c.
1636-40), possibly painted for the hunting lodge Torre de la Parada,
near the Buen Retiro Palace. It was here, too, that many of his
portraits of court fools and dwarfs were hung, possibly including
that of El Primo. Aesop's face with its flattened nose was probably
not — as is commonly thought — painted after a man of the people
(even if the painting did attempt to show a simple man whose
features were marked by toil, and who therefore represented the
Cynic ideal of the modesty and wisdom of the people). The portrait
seems rather more reminiscent of Giovanni Battista della Porta's
physiognomic parallels between various types of human faces and the
heads of animals associated with certain temperaments. Aesop had,
during Classical antiquity, been seen in conjunction with the Seven
Sages; Menippus was known as a castigator of hack philosophers, whom
he satirised in different literary genres.226 It is to the vice of
sham scholarship, too, that Velazquez's portrait of the dwarf El
Pnmo seems to allude.
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Diego Velazquez
Menippus
1640
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Diego Velazquez
Aesop
1640
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According to Plutarch, Aesop was a counsellor to the Lydian King Croesus
(6th century).
Velazquez was suggesting a parallel with the situation at the Spanish
court.
The two portraits of philosophers, together with the portraits of fools
and dwarfs,
were intended to warn the king not to lose touch with the common people
and their wisdom.
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