notes from lecture 6

THESE NOTES ARE A STUDY AID ONLY. DO NOT QUOTE FROM THESE NOTES OR COPY THEM IN ANY WAY, AS THEY ARE NOT REFERENCED. 

Rubens was a Flemish Baroque painter, with a style that emphasised movement, colour, and sensuality. As a young apprentice he studied with two Mannerist painters, and subsequently he travelled to Italy. In September 1609 Rubens was appointed as court painter by the monarchs of Spain and Austria who were sovereigns of the Low Countries.  

The Northern provinces of the Netherlands, which were largely Protestant, rebelled against the rule of the Catholic Spanish king, and following years of revolt they declared an independent Dutch republic in 1581. People no longer wanted Catholic artworks linked to Spanish rule and many artists turned to painting the flat, recognisable landscape of the Dutch Republic, which reflected national pride.

The Dutch Republic, which was initially led by William of Orange, did not favour a nobility or monarchy, instead it saw the rise of a merchant class, what would later become known as the bourgeoisie or middle-class. The Dutch Republic was informed by a Protestant ethic that favoured hard work and the accumulation of capital. They developed the largest merchant navy in the world and began to establish colonies, particularly in the East Indies. Amsterdam has the oldest stock exchange in the world, dating from 1602.The work of Rembrandt shows the typical strong contrasts of light and shade that we see in the period, and a strong sense of drama and foreshortening. We also see a lot of attention to the details of the real world. Sometimes the figures in the work seem to be the source of the light. In his early years he was a very successful portrait painter, famed for an ability to capture a physical likeness and a kind of psychological insight, not unlike the work of Holbein which we looked at before. He lived beyond his means and had a number of common-law relationships that he subsequently had to support financially he ran into financial troubles towards the end of his life, and was actually buried as a pauper in an unmarked grave. His self-portraits, of which there are at least forty, show him progressing from an uncertain young man, through the dapper and very successful portrait-painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but massively powerful portraits of his old age. Together they give a remarkably clear picture of the man, his appearance and his psychological make-up, revealed through the face, pose and costumes.

The representation of everyday life is something that we have seen emerging through this period, and we see it again here in the work of Gerrit van Honthorst. This painting shows the inside of a brothel, not an unusual thing for a 17^th C Dutch painting, but given that prostitution, procuring and adultery were criminal offences and the word whoredom referred to any kind of nonmarital sex, it’s very odd that a market existed for these kinds of images. These paintings are a kind of puzzle, displaying a certain double standard amongst the supposedly pious Calvinists of the region.

The status of the painter varied considerably, from day labourers all the way to independent masters with their own schools, some of whom would have been court painters. These two paintings by van Honthorst are very unusual; first he represents a woman as the figure of Pictura, an allegory for painting; second he paints a portrait of an amateur artists Margarita xx, well-to-do, painting for pleasure. The vast majority of painters were men, but a few dozen women in the Dutch republic are recorded as having received Master status; Judith Leyster was probably the most famous, her first known work is dated 1629, by 1633 she is recorded as a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, the artists’ guild.
In great contrast to much of the work that was happening around him, Vermeer was a painter of light, specializing in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He made a series of paintings in this particular interior, which is his own studio.

While landscape was emerging as a force in Dutch art, it was not regarded as a subject worthy of high painting in Catholic Europe. The counter-reformation urged painters to use instructive themes – typically religious or mythical. Pure landscape was thought to lack moral seriousness. The Italian painter Anniable CAracci had made some landscape paintings, although he was better known for his typical Baroque religious works.

Nonetheless, landscape began to emerge in the works of some French painters, who obeyed convention by including classical ruins or figures. Poussin spent many years working in Rome, he learned an orientation towards Disegno, the drawing as opposed to the colour. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Claude Lorrain’s paintings also use elements of classicism to justify his interest in landscape – precursor to the Romantic movement.

We have already looked at the Baroque in architecture in Italy in the early 1600s. There was a love of complex shapes, extravagant ornament, opulent illusionist paintings, and bold contrasts. The Baroque style became more restrained in France. While lavish details were used, French buildings were usually symmetrical and orderly. The Palace of Versailles is a landmark example, as is the Louvre. The Hall of Mirrors was commissioned by Louis XIV.

 The rapidly expanding mercantile culture produced class divisions far more destructive than those of earlier periods and the legal status of women declined seriously in the process. The Italian Renaissance was also the period that Europeans rediscovered slavery. The market in human slave labor in southern Europe began as early as the 12th century. Initially the Spaniards were the key trafficers in human life, but as the Italian city-states grew, their demand for slaves also grew and they became one of the largest consumers of human slaves. The slavery that they practiced was not yet racial slavery: most slaves sold in Italy were Muslims from Spain, North Africa, Crete, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. There was a trickle of black slaves into Spain, Portugal, and Italy, but they were only a very small minority.

Almost all the slaves in Italy were domestic servants and most wealthy in most cities had at least one. When a slave was acquired, the owner acquired full rights, including the right to sell and "enjoy," that slave. For the most part, the slaves were incorporated into the household and their children were always born free. In many cases when a slave-owner produced a child with a slave, the slave-owner would raise the child as a legitimate child. A more insidious side of slavery was developing, however, in this period. In the Venetian sugar cane plantations in Cyprus and Crete, a new kind of "plantation slave" grew into existence. Since sugar is a labor intensive industry, this new type of slave was acquired for purely economical reasons: the cheapest labor possible.

The practice of abducting slaves from Africa began with the Portuguese in the 15^th C. In 1539 12,000 slaves were sold in the main market in Lisbon. The Transatlantic slave trade began in the 16^th C. The French involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade is thought to have begun with small traders in the 1540s bringing enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies, but increased dramatically with the development of France's own colonies in Saint Domingue (today's Haiti) Martinique, and Guadeloupe in the 1660s through to the 1680s. In 1700 there were roughly 30,000 slaves in the French colonies.In 1631 a band of North African pirates, led by a Dutch captain, sacked the village of Baltimore in Co. Cork, making off with around 120 people, who spent the rest of thelr lives in slavery in the Maghreb region of North Africa.