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Workshop Summaries
Mythological Imagery in the
Netherlands 1500-1600
Ethan Matt Kavaler, University of
Toronto
Presentations by Giancarlo
Fiorenza, Ellen Konowitz, and Fiona
Healy.
Mythological imagery enjoyed
considerable status in
Netherlandish culture of the
sixteenth century as in other
European lands. Paintings of
mythological subjects were early
collectables, destined for the
living room or cabinet rather than
the chapel. From the courtly owners
of Gossaert's early Ovidian
panels, to the bourgeois patronage
of Frans Floris and Marten van
Heemskerck, to the international
vogue for the creations of Hendrik
Goltzius and Karel van Mander, such
pictures continued to attract a
select and significant public.
Prints appreciably widened the
audience for these themes.
Frans Floris (c1520-70) was one of
the greatest exponents of
mythological painting in
mid-century Antwerp. As Dr.
Fiorenza showed, there is a
tendency in the literature to cast
an over-arching, defensive
allegorical net over Floris’s work—i
nterpretations that risk covering
up the often witty, ironic, and
self reflexive aspects of his
paintings. Instead, Floris made
imaginative use of fictions
established in ancient poetry for
novel expressive purposes. He mined
these texts for their rhetorical
potential: narrative, variety,
ornament, sensuality, and energy
(enargeia). Notably, his own
secular works were cited as
argumentative or topical examples
in professional and theoretical
debates involving the arts.
Paintings as his Venus at Vulcan’>
s Forge and Feast of the
Gods underscore the
transformative powers of art and
speak to the themes of regeneration
and renewal in art and society.
Dr. Konowitz explained how Dirck
Vellert’s early etchings of unusual
mythological subjects ring in the
new century and initiate the role
of prints as disseminators of
mythological imagery to a new
public. And Dr. Healy
demonstrated how Maerten van
Heemskerck’s subjects drawn from
classical poetry are, on the one
hand, unusually close to Italian
models and, on the other,
peculiarly given to a mode of
humanist allegory favored in
Haarlem. His pictures of
Vulcan’s Forge, Thetis
Presenting Aeneas with Arms,
and Mars and Venus Caught in the
Web of Vulcan represent
distinctive interpretations of
these subjects and may, in fact,
have comprised an unusual secular
polyptych.
Central to much of this imagery was
its erotic appeal, its presentation
of the female body as an object of
desire and a term of reference in
Renaissance aesthetics. In
this session, we explored the
evolution and reception of this
enterprise in the context of
artistic and literary traditions
cultivated in cosmopolitan Antwerp,
Haarlem, and other centers of the
Low Countries.
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