St Jerome In The Ruins Of Rome - The Netherlands End 16th Century

"St. Jerome in a wide view of Rome in ruins". Oil on oak panel. School of the Netherlands North circa 1600. Our painting is the work of a follower of Marteen van Heemskerck. A certificate of expertise drawn up for a large Parisian gallery and dated 1968 attributed to the master himself. It would be a reduction that served as a model for the future masterpiece preserved today at the Schönborn Palace in Vienna.

Among the remarkable monuments that help to situate the scene, we recognize the disemboweled Coliseum (second plan on the right), the famous God Tiber leaning on the wolf with Remus and Romulus (lower right) or the broken statue of Hercules and Antaeus (left under the arch). To give life to his work, the painter integrates merchants crossing the ruins with their animals and tribunes who converse near the fountain. While Saint-Jerome is praying in an anfractuosity (bottom left) before this apocalyptic vision of the world.

Dimensions of the panel 32 x 41,5 cm - 42 x 52 cm with the frame.

Maarten van Heemskerck (Heemskerk 1498 - Haarlem 1574) is a painter and engraver of major history of the Netherlands in the 16th century. Scorel's main disciple in whose studio he stayed from 1527 to 1529 (previously he had been to Cornelis Willemsz in Haarlem and to Jan Lucasz in Delft), Maerten van Heemskerck is, after his master, the most important representative of the Italianism in the northern Netherlands in the sixteenth century. Visiting Italy (from 1532 to 1536), like so many other Nordic artists, he draws extensively after the ancient and after Michelangelo, and his careful sketches (including two great albums of Roman views, preserved at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin) retain an admirable topographical value that betrays the militant enthusiasm of the young Romanist ...

On his return from Italy, he becomes the most prominent artist of Haarlem (he is dean of the Gilde of painters in 1540). He executes huge altarpieces teeming with tormented characters with an overly salient pattern, in acid metallic tones (triptych of the Crucifixion, Linköping cathedral in Sweden, Saint Luke depicting the Virgin, at the Rennes museum, astonishing potpourri of elements borrowed from the ancient archeology of a marvelous chiseled work (see Universalis).