The Minoan and Mycenaean element in Hellenic life / [Sir Arthur Evans].
- Evans, Arthur, Sir, 1851-1941.
- Date:
- 1914
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The Minoan and Mycenaean element in Hellenic life / [Sir Arthur Evans]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![jH’ominent, were almost completely dominated i)y the genius of the Van Eycks and the other early Flemings. In fact, in their early stages, the two schools can scarcely be considered separately. Then came the Reformation and the War of Independence, which resulted, in 1648, in the final shaking off of the Spanish yoke. The long period of warfare and bloodshed was not favourable to extensive art production, but when Protestant Holland issued victorious, a great jjeriod of art commenced—of art led into new channels, since Protestantism looked askance at religious painting, and preferred bare, white- washed walls in the churches to an imagery of glowing colour. On the other hand, a demand for art arose in the civic community. The well- to-do citizens enlisted art for the adornment of their living rooms, and the subjects favoured were no longer, as may well be imagined, flagella- tions and cruci- fixions, and images of the Virgin and saints, but por- traits, landscapes, fenre scenes de- )icting the daily ife of the burghers md peasants, and, or the guild halls md other official buildings, large por- trait groups of pro- minent burghers. Pictures in the Dutch Home. Of idealism and ideology, there is little or nothing in Dutch art which is entirely based on love of nature and on the keen appreciation of the value of pigment. 'I’he rich quality of the paint, the sub- tlety with which the play of light and shade on ob- jeets and textures is observed—these were the chief points that appealed to the Dutchmen. These little genre scenes—interiors of burghers’ houses, with ladies l^efore a mirror, or occupied with books or nusical instruments ; or tavern scenes de- ■‘oicting the life of the humbler classes—arc I’Sver of anecdotal or literary character; they ■ e just glimpses of real life stated in terms (If ornamental craftsmanship. Of this nature Uire the precious gemlike pieces of Terburg, Vermeer van Deft, Metzu, Jan Steen, Mieris. Oerard Dow, and, in Flanders, of the Teniers, who had more in common with the Dutch “ small masters ” than with the Flemings. Frans Hals. But the seventeenth cen- tury small masters were preceded by a few men who must rank among the very giants in the realm of painting. Rembrandt is one, and by no means the least brilliant, of the great triple constellation that stands out from the firmament of art, the compeer of Velasquez and Titian. Before him, Frans Hals (a.d. 1584-1666) had achieved the greatest triumphs in bold, daring portrait painting. For sheer bravura and dashing brushwork and brilliant characterisation, Hals has probably never been equalled, and his large “Doelen” groups at Haarlem are an inex- haustible source of delight to all who can appre- ciate masterly brushwork. Then, Van der Heist (a.d. 1613-1670) may be taken as the most capable of the numerous serious portrait painters who recorded with faultless coascientiousness in a somewhat tight manner the fea- tures of civic dig- nitaries and their buxom housewives. Rembrandt the Revealer. But with Rem- brandt (a.d. 1606- 1669), all hardness, one might almost say all linear design, was abandoned, and everything that the artist’s eye could see, or his brain conceive, expre.ssed in terms of soft lights and shadows and golden, liquid half - shadows. Everything is given plastic form through the play of light on the surfaces which are seen through the surrounding at- mosphere . In his golden illumina- tion and forced con- trasts, Rembrandt is, perhaps, not al- ways strictly true to nature, but he has the power to make us feel that, if such conditions of light wei-e possible, faces and objects would appear just as he has set them down [see “ The Night Watch,’ repro- duced on page 1617]. Rembrandt is the anti- thesis to the Italians of the Renaissanee, who were ever striving^ for beauty. With him character is ■’eveiry'^hlng. but the mastery of his brush and his sympathetic insight into the very soul of his sitters give beauty even to subjects repellent in themselves, .-^part from his paint- ings, Rembrandt’s etchings alone would entitle him to one of the most exalted positions among the world’s great artists. P. G. KONODY “ST. MATTHEW,” BY REMBRANDT The Louvre, Paris](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24878959_0056.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
