Exhibitions
Bruges and the Renaissance: Memling to Pourbus (Memlingmuseum/Oud-Sintjanshospital, Bruges, till 6 December)
The Italian connection
Robin Simon
If you get the feeling that Bruges is too good to be true, you would be right. Its uncanny perfection is the result of a 'make- over' in the second half of the 19th century, partly at the hands of post-Ruskinian Brits.
Their restoration involved 'improve- ment', correcting the 'mistakes' of the origi- nal builders, just as Viollet-le-Duc had done at Notre-Dame, or Scott at St David's (where he corrected both Nash's imagina- tive Gothic west front and the original). Where a hint of castellation survived, yards of immaculate machicolations now appeared. If one twisting turret was good, 20 looked far better. Photographs exist to show the difference between 'then' and `now', and so do measured architectural drawings. It is not, however, something that the city of Bruges tends to talk about much — and why should it? The stage-set time- lessness of it all, the absence of cars, the prevalence of horse-drawn charabancs and traps, is infinitely preferable to the noisome clutter of modern towns. And it was a close-run thing, for 20th-century 'improve- ment' schemes were far, far worse, threat- ening Bruges with the filling-in of its canals and replacement with tarmac roads (just as Di,irer's portrait of Jan Provoost Venice nearly lost the Grand Canal to a motorway).
The love affair between the British and Bruges has continued since James Weale, who lived in the city in the 19th century, sorted out so many of its painters and inspired in Bruges in 1902 the first great exhibition of what were tellingly called Les Primitifs Flamands. My father was born the year after that exhibition, and his was a generation which, aware of Italy, yet felt drawn to the North: to Bruges, of course, to Aachen, and to Maastricht. Vacations from Oxford would be spent pedalling about this ideally flat countryside on bicy- cles fitted, as he ruefully recalled, with wooden seats, visiting churches that had been so recently perfected. That quest for Gothic perfection could be fairly one-eyed, even more so than Ruskin in Venice, who would turn his affronted gaze from any building with a whiff of the Classical.
Wing of a diptych: a donor at prayer accompanied by St Peter and St Paul by Adriaan Isenbrant Such masters as Memling (before 1440- 1494) and Jan Van Eyck (active 1422-d. 1441) were seen as 'primitive', because they seemed to have so little in common with the Italian Renaissance, and therefore appeared as vague equivalents to the 'prim- itives' there, such as Giotto and Duccio. The architecture of the city was actually treasured as Gothic even when so much of it had been built in the Renaissance period. Such is the power of a proleptic view of the history of art, now tackled head-on by the massive exhibition in Bruges, aggressively entitled Bruges and the Renaissance.
The most striking thing that emerges is the familiarity of so many of these artists of the period with contemporary Italian art, yet how consistently they continued to paint in the very different way they pre- ferred. This apparent paradox affronted the tidy mind of Vasari: hence, in part, the much later use of the word 'primitive' for such sophisticates as Hans Memling, an artist who travelled to Cologne solely to check the accuracy of his depiction of the Cathedral on his exquisite 'Shrine of St Ursula'. Vasari was forced to admit that oil-painting was perfected in the Nether- lands long before it took hold in Italy. How baffling it was to him that these evidently gifted artists could also be acquainted with perspective, yet resolutely fail to paint like Florentines.
An artist such as Jan Provoost (c. 1465- 1529) delighted in the entanglements of fantastic architectural detail, much of it plainly derived from Italian models mud- dled up with Flemish sources. At the same time he persisted, as Vasari might have seen it, in showing an 'old-fashioned' multi- ple narrative within the one frame, ignor- ing the unities of time and place. Both these sadly irrational tastes are to be seen in two panels which at the same time por- tray with extreme naturalism the two donors on the surviving wings of his aston- ishing 'Death and the Miser' triptych. Con- versely, the purely imaginary meeting between the miser and Death is executed with scrupulous regard both to the demands of realism and to the unities.
All very puzzling to the Italian-minded. If it does nothing else, this deeply affecting exhibition forces us to acknowledge that many comfortable art-historical 'paradoxes' are merely perceived to be such within an inappropriate model of the past. There is plenty of food for thought. Provoost's two panels from a triptych with scenes of the life of St Catherine, here reunited from Antwerp and Rotterdam, is another exer- cise in realism and the fantastic, adorned with dwarves and cripples (one of them the executioner) and what looks suspiciously like a profile of Savonarola. As it happens, Provoost made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land via Italy, one possibility being between 1498, the date of Savonarola's death, and 1501. (He also knew Diirer, whose probable portrait drawing of Provoost can here be compared with the likely self-portrait in 'Death and the Miser'.) Adrien Isenbrant is another artist at home with the art of northern Italy in par- ticular, painting around 1520 a 'Rest on the Flight to Egypt' that combines the evening light of Titian or Giorgione, and even their landscape, with distinctly Flemish architec- ture. He also creates the single most pow- erful image on view, even allowing for the enduring magic of Memling and the enchantments of Gerard David or the dev- astating Master of the Holy Blood. Isen- brant's 'Virgin of Sorrows' of 1521 occupies the right hand of a diptych, where she appears in traditional Flemish guise, grave, withdrawn and majestic. The subject natu- rally lent itself, in the portrayal of the Seven Sorrows, to the continued use of the multiple narrative, and so, at first glance, it seems. But instead Isenbrant has brilliantly suggested a synthesis of the Flemish and the Italian, by painting a minimal architec- tural framework around the carefully clas- sicising throne of the Virgin, and setting . the seven scenes within it.
Don't miss this wonderful exhibition, but a word of warning: pace yourself. Much of it is set within the beamed and pillared hall and chapel of the Sintjanshospital and it would be easy, from sheer exhaustion, to miss the remainder on the next floor up, which is as big again — and it contains Isenbrant's masterpiece.
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