The Garden Of Love. Workshop Of Carel Van Mander (1548-1606)

Oil on copper from the 16th century. Presented in a beautiful 17th century frame in carved wood with its original gilding. Total dimensions: 57 x 72 cm. The copper alone: 40 x 55 cm. This painting with its astonishing subject was painted in the Netherlands in the middle of the Mannerist period around 1580. In a hilly landscape and in the center of a clearing crossed by a river, undressed figures gather in couples under the chariot of love pulled by two unicorns. The latter, standing, shoots his arrows. At the bottom left, a river god is lying down partially covered in a red drape, in the center a second love frolics in the water with a young woman. On the far left, sitting in the grass, another young woman takes a swan in her arms. Did the commissioner have this painting done on the occasion of his wedding? Mannerism, an artistic movement, began around 1520 and ended in the early 17th century. Its main characteristics were twisted bodies, often naked, giving a languid softness, acid and raw tones, an art of codes, symbols, and quotes from classical artists. The proliferation of engravings during the 16th century spread the Mannerist style more quickly than any previous style. *Carel van Mander (1548-1606) Many Flemish people took refuge in the Northern Netherlands because of their sympathy for the Reformed during the political-religious unrest of the 1580s, and among them artists such as Carel van Mander, Coninxloo, Savery. After training for a time with Lucas de Heere in Ghent and then with Pieter Vlerick in Courtrai and Tournai, Van Mander went to Italy in 1573, where he remained—mainly in Rome, but in Florence he would see Vasari—until 1577. Having met Spranger in Rome, who was decisive for his Mannerist orientation, and who transmitted Parmesan art to him, he joined him in Vienna where he worked on the triumphal decorations erected in honour of Rudolf II. His definitive establishment in Haarlem in 1583 after stops in 1581 and 1582 in Courtrai and Bruges, from where he fled because of political and religious unrest, was of capital importance, because Van Mander would thus meet Goltzius and reveal to him Spranger's stimulating message, which immediately fascinated him; Together, they founded and ran the famous Haarlem Academy of Drawing with Cornelis van Haarlem, where, for the first time in Holland, the study of the nude was practiced from a live model. Stylistically, Van Mander then participated in this virtuoso and exacerbated mannerism made fashionable by Spranger and Hans von Aachen, which would have so much consequence and success in Holland, but with a note of graceful and elegant eclecticism that came from his Italian culture (Parmesan). Thus he leaves shimmering and supplely painted scenes in vast, pleasantly balanced landscapes such as Joseph and his brothers before Pharaoh (Dunkirk), the Preaching of Saint John (1597, Hanover), to be compared with the first Mannerist landscapes of Bril, or even the charming Adoration of the Shepherds of Haarlem (1598), of a picturesque neo-Bassan luminism but more intimate and which prefigures in a certain way the realistic familiarity of Rembrandt's nocturnes. Even more than a painter, Van Mander is a draughtsman and a good number of his drawings were engraved, at the same time, by J. Matham, J. Saenredam or J. de Gheyn, among others. In some works, especially after 1590, after the breakup of the Haarlem trio, caused by Goltzius' departure for Italy, Van Mander engaged, with eclecticism and in parallel with Goltzius' new naturalist evolution, in very different exercises, sometimes opting for a kind of popular Flemish realism which brings him closer, in his Kermesse for example, to Vinckboons (a drawing at the École des beaux-arts in Paris). The young Frans Hals worked in his studio around 1600. Van Mander is also known today for his famous Book of Painters. Published in 1604, this precious collection is a biography of Nordic artists. Very well preserved. Sold with detailed invoice and certificate of expertise