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Catalogue 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]

Foto: Erik Cornelius / Nationalmuseum 2009

Landskap med Diana och Akteon