There's more to Jordaens than bawdy pleasures
(Allegory of Fertility - Lukas - Art in Flanders vzw, photo Hugo Maertens)
This is an exhibition that sets out to rectify an injustice – or, at least, to correct a distorted image. No, Jordaens – Jacques, not Jacob, by the way – was not just a painter of the feasts and bawdy pleasures of the 17th century. The Antwerp artist was also a connoisseur of the ancient world, every bit as sophisticated as his master, Peter Paul Rubens.
A ruddy-faced, bearded man with a beret on his head is seated at a table in the company of his wife, who is holding a chubby little child with plump legs. Behind him, an old woman is reaching him a mug of beer. The man’s cheeks are puffed out as, with a comical grimace, he blows on his soup. Seeing that, the satyr to his right, recognisable by his goat’s hooves and his crown of vine leaves, looks alarmed. Jordaens is drawing his inspiration here from a fable by Aesop, the Greek story-teller to whom Jean de La Fontaine owed much, in which a satyr renounces his friendship for a peasant after having seen him literally blow hot, to warm his hands, and cold, to cool his soup. Ah, the fickleness of human nature! While we can see in Satyr and peasant all the earthiness for which Jordaens has such a reputation, his source of inspiration and the character of the satyr show that the baroque painter did not limit himself to portraying his contemporaries and their many and varied excesses.
Virtual Rome
First and foremost, it should be noted that, just because Jordaens never made the supposedly indispensable journey to Rome, that doesn’t mean he knew nothing about what the Eternal City was like. The first section of the exhibition makes the point, presenting as it does a number of works that Jordaens would have had access to in Antwerp and that would have helped him to form a picture of Rome and, more generally, of the ancient world: paintings by Rubens, with whom Jordaens worked for a number of years, in which mythological figures like Ceres, Bacchus, Venus, and Cupid figure, as well as engravings of ancient sculptures by François Perrier, a view of the Belvedere Gardens by the Antwerp artist Hendrik van Cleve, etc. In a self-portrait, Jacques Jordaens – he did actually sign his letters as Jacques, rather than Jacob – shows himself holding an ancient statuette as a connoisseur, a collector. In another room, a series of drawings, demonstrating true maestria, show that Jordaens developed his knowledge of anatomy by asking his models to adopt poses from antiquity. OK, enough: we’re convinced!
This is an exhibition that sets out to rectify an injustice – or, at least, to correct a distorted image. No, Jordaens – Jacques, not Jacob, by the way – was not just a painter of the feasts and bawdy pleasures of the 17th century. The Antwerp artist was also a connoisseur of the ancient world, every bit as sophisticated as his master, Peter Paul Rubens.
A ruddy-faced, bearded man with a beret on his head is seated at a table in the company of his wife, who is holding a chubby little child with plump legs. Behind him, an old woman is reaching him a mug of beer. The man’s cheeks are puffed out as, with a comical grimace, he blows on his soup. Seeing that, the satyr to his right, recognisable by his goat’s hooves and his crown of vine leaves, looks alarmed. Jordaens is drawing his inspiration here from a fable by Aesop, the Greek story-teller to whom Jean de La Fontaine owed much, in which a satyr renounces his friendship for a peasant after having seen him literally blow hot, to warm his hands, and cold, to cool his soup. Ah, the fickleness of human nature! While we can see in Satyr and peasant all the earthiness for which Jordaens has such a reputation, his source of inspiration and the character of the satyr show that the baroque painter did not limit himself to portraying his contemporaries and their many and varied excesses.
Virtual Rome
First and foremost, it should be noted that, just because Jordaens never made the supposedly indispensable journey to Rome, that doesn’t mean he knew nothing about what the Eternal City was like. The first section of the exhibition makes the point, presenting as it does a number of works that Jordaens would have had access to in Antwerp and that would have helped him to form a picture of Rome and, more generally, of the ancient world: paintings by Rubens, with whom Jordaens worked for a number of years, in which mythological figures like Ceres, Bacchus, Venus, and Cupid figure, as well as engravings of ancient sculptures by François Perrier, a view of the Belvedere Gardens by the Antwerp artist Hendrik van Cleve, etc. In a self-portrait, Jacques Jordaens – he did actually sign his letters as Jacques, rather than Jacob – shows himself holding an ancient statuette as a connoisseur, a collector. In another room, a series of drawings, demonstrating true maestria, show that Jordaens developed his knowledge of anatomy by asking his models to adopt poses from antiquity. OK, enough: we’re convinced!
Excess
Antiquity, its deities, heroes, and its many myths contained plenty of material to fuel Jordaens’s sensual, expressive touch. Bacchus, for example: who better than the god of drunkenness and of varied excesses, here obese and perched on a lion, to lead a procession of voluptuous flesh, women sleeping nonchalantly and joyfully enraptured men. The allegories of fertility (like the one on the left page) that became a Jordaens speciality offered further opportunities to present opulent breasts, plump thighs, and mountains of fruit on the point of toppling over. All perfectly light and juicy – but the ancient legends are also brimful of cruelty. In his version of Prometheus Bound, Jordaens depicts the Titan lying on his rock, with his head back, his face dreadfully distorted by pain and terror, while the eagle delegated to torture him, perched on his torso, tears off a piece of flesh in order to reach his liver.
Antiquity, its deities, heroes, and its many myths contained plenty of material to fuel Jordaens’s sensual, expressive touch. Bacchus, for example: who better than the god of drunkenness and of varied excesses, here obese and perched on a lion, to lead a procession of voluptuous flesh, women sleeping nonchalantly and joyfully enraptured men. The allegories of fertility (like the one on the left page) that became a Jordaens speciality offered further opportunities to present opulent breasts, plump thighs, and mountains of fruit on the point of toppling over. All perfectly light and juicy – but the ancient legends are also brimful of cruelty. In his version of Prometheus Bound, Jordaens depicts the Titan lying on his rock, with his head back, his face dreadfully distorted by pain and terror, while the eagle delegated to torture him, perched on his torso, tears off a piece of flesh in order to reach his liver.
Influences and competitors
With a view to rescuing Jordaens from Rubens’s shadow, the exhibition directly compares the two painters, with connections occasionally being made to another Antwerp artist of the time, Abraham Janssens van Nuyssen. A trio of paintings devoted to Pan’s pursuit of the nymph Syrinx demonstrate the kind of vying for attention that went on between the three painters – and not just in terms of the size of their works. In the Rubens a coy Syrinx, fleeing amid the reeds, uses her veil to hide herself as far as possible. Janssens, for his part, presents in the foreground a sumptuous female posterior, further emphasised by the red cloth. Jordaens, however, clearly focuses on an erection, which attracts the fixed gaze of the two children either side of the nymph. Elsewhere, Rubens and Jordaens each present their interpretation of the story of Meleager and Atalanta (on the left), who had succeeded in slaying the terrible wild boar of Calydon, “a boar so enormous”, according to Ovid, “that grassy Epirus has no bulls that are bigger.” The chiaroscuro that further emphasises the dramatic nature of the scene – Meleager is on the point of killing his uncles in a rage – and the shades of colour of the flesh and clothing are incredibly reminiscent of Caravaggio, who (at least through one of his paintings) was present in Antwerp.
At the end of the circuit one discovers that Jordaens, still embroidering on themes from antiquity, also placed his talents as a draughtsman at the service of the tapestry workshops of Brussels, which were booming at the time. There were certainly many more aspects to this Antwerp artist than a certain over-simplified version of art history would lead one to suspect. QED.
(Meleager and Atalanta © J. Geleyns - www.roscan.be)
Jordaens and the antique • > 27/1, di/ma/Tu > zo/di/Su 10 > 17.00, €2,50/6,50/9, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België/Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Regentschapsstraat 3 rue de la Régence, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-508.32.11, www.fine-arts-museum.be
With a view to rescuing Jordaens from Rubens’s shadow, the exhibition directly compares the two painters, with connections occasionally being made to another Antwerp artist of the time, Abraham Janssens van Nuyssen. A trio of paintings devoted to Pan’s pursuit of the nymph Syrinx demonstrate the kind of vying for attention that went on between the three painters – and not just in terms of the size of their works. In the Rubens a coy Syrinx, fleeing amid the reeds, uses her veil to hide herself as far as possible. Janssens, for his part, presents in the foreground a sumptuous female posterior, further emphasised by the red cloth. Jordaens, however, clearly focuses on an erection, which attracts the fixed gaze of the two children either side of the nymph. Elsewhere, Rubens and Jordaens each present their interpretation of the story of Meleager and Atalanta (on the left), who had succeeded in slaying the terrible wild boar of Calydon, “a boar so enormous”, according to Ovid, “that grassy Epirus has no bulls that are bigger.” The chiaroscuro that further emphasises the dramatic nature of the scene – Meleager is on the point of killing his uncles in a rage – and the shades of colour of the flesh and clothing are incredibly reminiscent of Caravaggio, who (at least through one of his paintings) was present in Antwerp.
At the end of the circuit one discovers that Jordaens, still embroidering on themes from antiquity, also placed his talents as a draughtsman at the service of the tapestry workshops of Brussels, which were booming at the time. There were certainly many more aspects to this Antwerp artist than a certain over-simplified version of art history would lead one to suspect. QED.
(Meleager and Atalanta © J. Geleyns - www.roscan.be)
Jordaens and the antique • > 27/1, di/ma/Tu > zo/di/Su 10 > 17.00, €2,50/6,50/9, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België/Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Regentschapsstraat 3 rue de la Régence, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-508.32.11, www.fine-arts-museum.be
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