Landscape with Diana Surprised by Actaeon

Artist/Maker

DatesMade: Made 1590s

Material / Technique

Dimensionsh x w x d: Mått 37 x 27,5 x 0,1 cm h x w x d: Ram 49 x 40 x 5 cm

Inventory numberNM 367

AcqusitionTransferred 1865 Kongl. Museum

Other titlesTitle (sv): Landskap med Diana och Akteon Title (en): Landscape with Diana Surprised by Actaeon

DescriptionCatalogue raisonné: Description in Flemish paintings C. 1600-C. 1800 III, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2010, cat.no. 43: Technical notes: The support is a rectangular copper plate with a thickness of ±1 mm. The plate has a very high level of finish. It is free of any clue as to manufacture, such as hammer marks or rolls and has very regular parallel sides with well rounded edges and corners. The upper left corner is dented, and a small piece has broken off at the lower left corner. Paint is applied over a pale cream-coloured ground layer, but the metallic nature of the support is still evident in the warm glow of the copper showing through in many places. In addition to fine brushmarks, fingerprints were observed in the priming layer, in the moss-covered rocks at the lower left and in the cave wall at the upper left corner, indicating that the thumb or palm was also used in its application in order to achieve a smoother finish. Infrared reflectography revealed a detailed fine-line brush-applied underdrawing in the landscape, with the composition outlined and the trees in the middle ground crosshatched. Minor changes in the plants and flowers at the lower right are visible between the drawn and painted stages. Underdrawing in a dry medium delineates the contours of the main group of figures. There is a noticeable contrast between the handling in the landscape and the main group of figures. In the landscape translucent paint was applied thinly over the thin pale cream-coloured ground in small, precise fluid strokes blended wet into wet, with slightly impasted highlights, as in the plants and foliage. Tiny individual brushstrokes are visible in the tree trunks in the left middle ground. The outline of the figure of Actaeon is freely brushed in, painted over the sky area and cave wall, and his face is blocked in quite schematically, using an intense red colour for the flesh tone. Details applied at a later stage, such as the rider, hounds, stag and fowl in the background forest landscape, were not outlined first. In the main figures of Diana and her nymphs, on the other hand, paint is applied more thickly over a light grey underpaint, with craquelure observable in the smoothly blended flesh tones and in the draperies. As is typical for paintings on copper, build-up of paint layers can be observed when the surface catches the light, producing a sculptured effect of the forms. Several pentimenti are visible to the naked eye and in infrared reflectography. The red drapery of the seated figure on the right was originally more voluminous, painted as billowing out behind her back, and blue drapery was originally painted above the head of the kneeling figure on the left. The painting is in excellent condition. Abrasion is minimal, and scattered small losses are confined mainly to the edges. An aged but only slightly discoloured varnish layer is present. The painting underwent conservation treatment in 1935 and 2002. Provenance: Martelli; by purchase 1798 to KM 1803/1804, no. 422; KM 1816, no. 315. Exhibited: Essen/Vienna/Antwerp 1997/1998, no. 75 (as Jan Brueghel I, with figures by Jacob de Backer); Cremona 1998, no.53 (as Jan Brueghel I, with figures by Jacob de Backer); Stockholm 2010, no. 42. Bibliography: NM Cat.1841, no. 45 (as Jan Brueghel I); NM Cat. 1867, p. 25 (as Jan Brueghel I, with figures probably by Hans Rottenhammer); Sander III, pp. 64, 91, 133 (as Pieter Brueghel II); Göthe 1887, p. 35 (as Jan Brueghel I or his manner, with figures possibly by Hans Rottenhammer); Göthe 1893, p. 44 (as Jan Brueghel I or his manner); NM Cat. 1958, p. 31 (as manner of Jan Brueghel I); NM Cat. 1990, p. 59 (as manner of Jan Brueghel I, with figures by Hendrick van Balen I). The story of Diana and Actaeon, a popular theme for small-format mythological paintings in the late 16thand early 17th centuries,1 is derived primarily from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (III, 138–252). Actaeon had the misfortune of discovering Diana as she bathed with her nymphs in the nude. The chaste goddess, embarrassed and startled, splashed Actaeon with water and transformed him into a stag. As he stumbled through the woods, his own hunting dogs attacked him and tore him to pieces. This painting depicts the moment when Actaeon surprises the goddess and two of her companions as they emerge from their bath. The scene is set in the interior of a grotto, as described by Ovid. The figures of Diana and her nymphs are grouped around a natural spring or small underground stream surrounded by moss-covered rocks, water cascades down the interior wall of the grotto, and a variety of plants and flowers grow in the foreground. The figure of Actaeon appears in an opening at the upper right, silhouetted against the sky. In the verdant forest landscape in the background, visible through a larger opening on the left, a stag hunt is in progress – a reference to Actaeon’s fate. The luscious nudity of the goddess and her nymphs, their pale skin set off against the darkness inside the grotto, is a main focus of the painting. The viewer is also greatly rewarded by inspecting the meticulously rendered details of the natural world – such as the tiny snail and grasshopper perched on leaves in the extreme foreground, or the robin and magpie tucked away among the foliage in the middle ground – with a magnifying lens. Ertz (in Essen/Vienna/Antwerp 1997/1998) attributed the present painting to Jan Brueghel I and dated it in the early 1590s (“um 1591”), at the beginning of the artist’s stay in Italy. He pointed to the finely detailed landscape as characteristic of Jan, the meticulously rendered plants in the extreme foreground, water lilies, grasses and irises, being a kind of signature of the artist. However, Brueghel based his grotto and paradisiacal wooded landscape setting and the subject of Diana discovered by Actaeon within it, on a composition by Pauwels Franck, called Paolo Fiammingo, an Antwerp-born artist active in Venice from about 1573. That he knew Fiammingo’s original only in the form of the engraving by Flemish printmaker Aegidius Sadeler,2 is indicated by the fact that he copied it in the same sense as the print. While Brueghel chose a vertical rather than a horizontal format for his painting, adding the fastidiously detailed foreground vegetation and foliage at the top, the central portion of his landscape and the position of the principal figures correspond to the Fiammingo composition. At the same time, as suggested by Ertz, the landscape of the Stockholm picture recalls Jan’s early landscapes executed in Italy, small-format paintings on copper.3 Here we find not only a similar variety of meticulously rendered plants in the extreme foreground, announcing the artist’s later specialization as a painter of flower still lifes, but also the effect of a mysteriously darkened foreground with rocks and clinging tree roots opening rather abruptly onto a distant, finely detailed forest landscape of purely Northern inspiration, rendered in the blue-green tonality of Mannerist landscape painting. Brueghel’s minute individual brushstrokes are visible in the vigorous hatching in the tree trunks of the middle ground, but the brushwork is sometimes surprisingly free and fluent given the scale, for example, in the figure of Actaeon, painted over the sky and adjacent grotto wall, in the manner of a rapidly executed brush drawing, with the flesh tone rendered in a finely ground red pigment. The painting is a collaborative work (see Technical Notes) by Brueghel and an as yet unidentified Flemish artist who added the principal figures of Diana and her two companions. There is a palpable contrast between Brueghel’s fastidiously detailed depiction of the natural world and these somewhat stiffly posed, firmly modelled figures – inspired by, though not copied after, those of Fiammingo’s original.4 They have been attributed to several different artists, to Hans Rottenhammer, Hendrick van Balen I and Jacob de Backer, all of whom collaborated with Brueghel. Ertz (in Essen/Vienna/Antwerp 1997/1998) ascribed them to the Antwerp Mannerist painter Jacob de Backer, who is known to have worked with Jan on a “Badt van Diana”.5 This attribution is problematic not only on stylistic grounds: De Backer’s – undocumented – Italian journey is usually situated as early as 1565/1570. He is generally thought to have died around 1590/1591, although the exact date is unknown.6 The figures seem stylistically somewhat closer to works by Van Balen, Jan’s close friend and frequent collaborator, who specialized in paintings of female nudes (“nimfkens” or “naecte vrouwkens”), often providing the staffage (“stoffacy”) for Jan’s landscapes. Seated female figures seen from the back, functioning as repoussoir figures, constitute a favourite motif of Van Balen’s, and similar, if slightly fleshier, figures can be seen in his Ceres and the Four Elements (1604) in Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum),7 in Diana Transforming Actaeon into a Stag (1608) at Kassel (Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister),8 and in a drawing (1605) depicting the same subject at Antwerp (Stedelijk Prentenkabinet).9While the earliest collaborative pieces by the two artists are situated at Antwerp in the early 1600s,10 it is possible to imagine that the they formed a friendship and began their collaboration already during their years in Italy, where Van Balen travelled sometime between c. 1592/1593 and 1602.11 CF 1 See Sluijter 1985, pp. 61–72. 2 Hollstein XXII, p. 30 no. 104. And cf. Los Angeles/The Hague 2006/2007, pp. 55, 142–143 under no. 17, for another example of Brueghel’s use of prints after Pauwels Franck for the setting of one of his paintings, the Allegory of Fire of c. 1608–10 in Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilij. On Franck, see Mason Rinaldi 1978. 3 It was undoubtedly Brueghel’s exposure to the sophisticated artistic circles of Italy, where the practice of painting on copper was relatively well established, that first led him to experiment with this technique. When Brueghel arrived in Rome in 1592, he soon became acquainted with the Flemish painter Paul Bril, who had arrived there ten years earlier and whose earliest work on copper was done in 1592. The following year the two artists collaborated on a painting on copper. This contact established a pattern to which Brueghel would adhere for the rest of his career. Of the 388 works listed by Ertz in his 1979 catalogue raisonné of the artist, 177 (including collaborative works) are on copper. While in Italy, between 1592 and 1596, when he departed for Antwerp, he did approximately thirty paintings on copper. Most of these early works on copper are of approximately the same size, c. 25 x 35 cm (give or take a few centimeters), perhaps indicating that the artist had managed to lay his hands on a big batch of copper plates. 4 These figures were also clearly inspired by Antique sculptures. The pose of the nymph on the left, for example, is based on that of the “Venus Crouching”, which shows the goddess crouching on one heel, with arms adapted from the pose of the “Venus pudica”; for which see Bober and Rubinstein 1986, cat. no. 18. The figure of Diana herself was adapted from the “Venus at her Bath”, which shows Venus standing, bending slightly forward and looking to her left as if surprised in the act of taking up her mantle; see idem, cat. no.15. The position of her arms, however, was adapted from another source, namely, the “Ariadne Sleeping”, which shows a sleeping Ariadne, her head propped on the hand of her left arm with the elbow set on the ground, while the right arm stretches back to grasp the mantle drawn up over the back of her hair; see idem, no.79. This pose recurs in similar fashion in the Ceres and the Four Elements, a collaborative work by Jan Brueghel I and Hendrick van Balen I, in the standing figure of Amphitrite. 5 See Essen/Vienna/Antwerp 1997/1998, p. 258. For this “Badt van Diana”, see an account of the Antwerp art dealership of Forschoudt dated 4 August 1702, in Ertz 1979, p. 551, Doc. 532. 6 On De Backer, see also Müller Hofstede 1973, pp. 227–260; Van de Velde in Cologne/Vienna 1992, pp. 74–75; and Brussels/Rome 1995, pp. 68–69 [L. Huet]. 7 Oil on copper, 42 x 71 cm, signed “BRVEGHEL 1604”, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 815; see Essen/Vienna/Antwerp 1997/1998, cat. no. 77, repr. in colour on p. 263; and Werche 2004, pp. 187–188 no. A 128, illus. 8 Oil on copper, 35.5 x 47.0 cm, signed “H.V.BALEN 1608”, Kassel, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, inv. no. GK 64; see Werche 2004, p. 63 no. A 75, illus. 9 Pen and brown ink, blue and white wash, 201 x 267 mm, inscribed “Hendricus van balen/Anno 1605”, Antwerp, Stedelijk Prentenkabinet, inv. no. 537; for which see Werche 2004, cat. no. C 10, illus. Cf. the correspon- ding painting by Van Balen and Jan Brueghel I from the same period in Austin, University of Texas, Archer M. Huntington Gallery; see idem, cat. no. A78, illus. 10 For the collaboration between Jan Brueghel I and Hendrick van Balen I, see Jost 1963, pp. 93–95; Ertz 1979, pp. 408–415; and Werche 2004, pp. 60–62. The earliest dated collaborative works are: the Judgment of Paris of 1600 in Berlin (Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. B204), and Ceres and the Four Elements of 1604 in Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 815); for which see Ertz 1979, pp. 365, 367, 575 no. 110, fig. 435; and Werche 2004, pp. 177–178 no. A 106, 187–88 no. A 128, illus. 11 Another possible candidate might perhaps be considered, namely Paolo Fiammingo, whose composition served as inspiration for Brueghel. Cf., for example, his Landscape with Gods and Goddesses of c. 1582/1585 at Innsbruck, Schloss Ambras, inv. no. 66 8026; for which see Mason Rinaldi 1978, no. 8, fig. 20.[End]

Exhibited

Motif categoryLandscape

Collection

MaterialCopper (Metal), Oil paint

TechniquePainting

Object category

Keyword