Creating the Composite: Combinatory Artistry and the Notion of Style in Antwerp, c. 1510-1585

Abstract

Stylistic plurality and creative mixing are hallmarks of sixteenth-century art produced in Antwerp. A rich, dynamic urban environment, Antwerp attracting attracted countless artists from the surrounding Low Countries and further afield, making possible an intensely creative, fruitful artistic culture. This dissertation examines how artists in Antwerp understood their participation in this context, and in a shared Netherlandish artistic tradition, through deliberate manipulations of style in their works. I treat stylistic innovation as the result of a locally specific, combinatory process of artistic invention, here termed composite. I draw on terminology in Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s 1539 translation of Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise on the classical architectural orders, particularly the Composite order. As a process and a visual strategy, the Composite provides a framework for studying distinctive Antwerp practices, including reference to and canonization of past Netherlandish images, “prestige collaboration,” acts of visual and linguistic translation, and politicized reframing of earlier works. Putting these practices in conversation, my dissertation reveals that they are part of an intentional visual strategy to define a local mode of invention that posits the source material as canonical, and then enfolds the resulting new work into that extant canon. The chapters attend to discrete instances of stylistic experimentation and theorization in works by Quinten Metsys, Joachim Patinir, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and Hans Vredeman de Vries. Each employed specific pictorial and intermedial strategies in their work, and positioned stylistic innovation as a key component of local artistry. Chapter 1 invokes Mercury and Vertumnus, depicted on a print of the city’s skyline, as a framework for thinking about Antwerp’s treatment in early modern literature and present-day scholarship. Chapter 2 establishes Metsys’s Saint John Altarpiece (1508-11), made for the Antwerp Joiners Guild, as an influential, public-facing commission engaging stylistic questions and pictorial construction in novel ways. The altarpiece established key pictorial values and priorities that other Antwerp artists took up after its completion. After the work’s completion, both visual and textual reception of the altarpiece affirmed Metsys as a celebrated Antwerp artist. Chapter 3 treats prestige collaboration as practiced by Patinir, who regularly collaborated with other artists, including Metsys. Their dually authored Temptation of Saint Anthony (1520-24) forms a case study from among Patinir’s numerous collaborative works: this picture shows how knowledgeable viewers appreciated social dimensions of style at high levels. Chapter 4 examines Coecke’s 1539 translations of Serlio, and the resulting theorization for the first time in Flemish of the Composite order’s creative capacity, famously without set rules prescribing its design. The book’s visual and typographic design also embodied a Composite process of making. I demonstrate the resonance of this theorization for Coecke’s local audience, already accustomed to thinking in these terms because earlier artists, like Metsys and Patinir, had employed similar processes in their paintings. I conclude by examining the Saint John Altarpiece’s afterlife during Antwerp’s Calvinist Republic (1577-1585). During this time the altarpiece was moved from Antwerp’s cathedral to its city hall. Its display was recontextualized within a series of perspectival wall paintings by artist and architect Vredeman de Vries. In rendering Metsys’s initially Catholic work legible to Antwerp’s now-Calvinist city government, the installation’s visual program briefly staged a clash of styles until it was destroyed in the 1580s, though not before this clash productively demonstrated the close intertwining in Antwerp of style and artistic identity.