Mercury Presiding Over The Arts – Flemish School Around 1600

Oil on oak panel, Flemish school from the beginning of the 17th century, follower of Hendrick Goltzius.
In order to facilitate the interpretation of our painting, we must integrate the idea that the notion of arts at the end of the Renaissance is not quite that of the modern period. It indeed integrates a classification which dates back to Antiquity, that of the liberal arts (which concern the power of language: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, and that of numbers: arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). Placed in the center of the composition, a sculpture representing the god Mercury is erected as a true “totem” protector of the arts. Thus a crowd of artists and intellectuals gathers in a square around the statue. While a painter prepares to put the first touches of color on the portrait he has drawn, a sculptor completes the modeling of a marble figure at the foot of the easel. Actors on a stage in the background give a performance and a speaker dressed in black, probably adept at rhetoric, harangues the crowd. Other intellectual disciplines are illustrated by the two protagonists, philosophers or poets, who converse in the foreground with a book in hand. Astronomy is not left out and the symbols of Gemini and Virgo in the sky remind us that Mercury is the protective star of these two zodiac signs. The composition testifies to the erudition that Renaissance humanism spread in society at the beginning of the 17th century, creating bridges between science and artistic creation, between knowledge and art. And so as not to make the viewer forget that Mercury presides over the destiny of travelers, a ship sets sail on the distant horizon. Our easel painting is a rare example of transposing an engraved subject into a painting. It uses the engraving made in 1596 by Jan Saenredam (1565 – 1607) after a drawing by Hendrick Goltzius (1558 – 1617), a copy of which is kept in the British Museum.

Our rich composition is magnified by its period guilloché frame in blackened wood.
Dimensions: 28.5 x 21.7 cm the panel – 56 x 49 cm with the frame
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Biography: Hendrick Goltzius (Mülbracht 1558 – Haarlem, January 1, 1617) was born into a family of painters but began his career as an artist by becoming the apprentice of the engraver Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert in 1574. He followed his master to Haarlem in 1577 where he worked until the end of his life, with the exception of a stay in Italy in 1591 which had a considerable impact on his art. His friend, Karel van Mander, thus relates the influence that the “gentle paintings of Raphael” had on him but especially the “naturalism of the skins of Correggio”, the “important shadow contrasts of Titian” and the “superb materials and fabrics of Veronese”. These discoveries pushed him to abandon the late mannerism of his early career in favor of a more classicizing approach based on the late Renaissance and to learn oil painting, a medium he had not practiced before. In 1582, Goltzius opened his own printing house, which allowed him to distribute his engravings and enrich himself considerably. Having had poor health all his life, he died in 1617, the city of Haarlem having celebrated his funeral by ringing the bells for half an hour.

Bibliography:
- DACOSTA KAUFMANN, Thomas, The Prague school: painting at the court of Rudolph II, Flammarion, 1984
- NICHOLS, Lawrence W., The Paintings of Hendrick Goltzius, 1558-1617, A Monograph and Catalog Raisonné, Davaco Publishers, 2013,
- BIALLER, Nancy, Chiaroscuro Woodcuts, Hendrick Goltzius and his time, Snoeck Ducaju et Zoon, 1992
- VELDMAN, Ilja M., Images for the eye and soul: function and meaning in Netherlandish prints (1450-1650), Primavera Pers, Leiden, 2006