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| DEATH:
1660 MAFFEI |
BIRTH:
1597 ROMBOUTS |
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Died on 02 July 1660: Francesco Maffei,
Italian Baroque
painter, active mainly in the Veneto, born in 1610, give or take ten years.
— He probably was trained by his father, Giacomo Maffei, before joining the workshop of the Maganza family in Vicenza. His early works, such as the Ecce homo, were influenced by the eclectic style, between Veronese and the Bassani, of Alessandro Maganza. The Saint Nicholas and the Angel (1626), with colors like those of Veronese, yet lighter, suggests Maffei’s rapid development of an independent style that is both rugged and moving. His interest in narrative, already evident in scenes from the Life of Saint Cajetan, was developed in the later Martyrdom of the Franciscan Minors at Nagasaki (1630). Here, the contrast between the pale, silvery tones of the background and the darker foreground figures is derived from Tintoretto, but the exaggerated Mannerist treatment of the main figures also recalls the art of such French engravers as Jacques Bellange and Pierre Brébiette. At the same time there is also an echo of the extreme stylizations of Giovanni Demio and, in the angels above, the marked influence of Veronese. — Maffei had a refreshingly individualistic style, carrying on the great painterly tradition of Tintoretto and Bassano, reinforced by the example of Liss, Feti, and Strozzi, to which he added his own note of mysterious and sometimes bizarre fantasy. He painted mythological scenes and also allegorical portraits of local officials. Maffei's fluid style combined the richness and splendor of the Baroque, the elegance and exaggeration of Mannerism, and his own flair for the visually dramatic. He probably trained in Vicenza with his father and with a local Mannerist painter. Active in Vicenza for most of his career, he also left intermittently to work in other Italian cities, including Venice, Rovido, and Brescia. Maffei specialized in civic allegories, elaborate machines that glorified the region's dignitaries. He painted religious works as well, like Crucifixion Supported by God the Father, where his debt to Jacopo Bassano's figure types and exaggerated lighting is evident. Maffei painted with a nervous and rapid brush in flashes of brilliant color, often achieving a hallucinatory effect. He studied a wide variety of Baroque and Mannerist painters, including Paolo Veronese, Alessandro Magnasco, Parmigianino, and Jacques Bellange. Tintoretto's attenuated forms and sudden lunges into space were also an influence. Maffei left Vicenza in 1657 and settled in Padua, where he died of the plague. A contemporary critic judged him a painter "not of dwarfs but of giants . . . whose style stupefied everyone." — LINKS — Perseus Cuts Off the Medusa's Head (1650, 130x161cm; 720x892pix, 118kb) _ After studying in Vicenza under Maganza, a late Mannerist painter of limited importance, Francesco Maffei turned to the paintings of Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano and soon achieved a personal style based on a Baroque reworking of the lessons taught by the great artists of the sixteenth century. Maffei moved to Venice in 1638, was attracted by the painters Liss, Fetti and Strozzi and developed his own version of their free and fanciful modern painting with a gifted, exuberant dreamlike quality. Amongst the most significant examples of this period is the painting of Perseus cutting the head off the Medusa. The figures, painted with impetuous, disdainful passion, crowd on the surface of the picture and are completely lacking in perspective relationship and in precise setting in their surroundings. The bright tones seem to swell as if as the result of some internal pressure, offering themselves as incandescent magma to the light which breaks them up into iridescent chromatic ornamental units. The sensual brightness of the colors underlines the emphatic strain on the links between the figures, lending the whole an emotional theatricality which was amongst the most visionary and unbiassed of the Baroque age in Venice. — Rinaldo and the Mirror-Shield (1655, 30x34cm; 845x960pix, 72kb) _ In the 1581 epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata [translation] of Torquato Tasso [11 Mar 1544 – 25 Apr 1595], the legendary medieval knight Rinaldo is bewitched by the beautiful sorceress Armida and lulled into a life of easy sensuality on the Fortunate Isles. His friends, the knights Carlo and Ubaldo, enter her garden and break her spell by showing Rinaldo a magic mirror-shield. His military spirit reawakened, he later rejoins his companions in the enchanted forest. — Rinaldo's Conquest of the Enchanted Forest (1655, 30x34cm; 844x960pix, 61kb) _ The medieval Christian knight Rinaldo has entered the enchanted forest, where monstrous apparitions have prevented his men from gathering wood to build their war-machines. Earlier, his companions had rescued him from the sorceress Armida's garden, and now they in turn require his assistance. Suddenly, hundreds of tree nymphs appear, surrounding Rinaldo, and the sorceress Armida appears from within a large myrtle tree, begging the knight to renew their love. His sword unsheathed, Rinaldo advances to strike the tree, thus overcoming the enchantment and enabling the Crusaders' liberation of Jerusalem to proceed. Combining themes of chivalric love with tales of Christian heroism, Torquato Tasso's 1581 epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata celebrated the First Crusade of 1099 nearly five hundred years after it had taken place. Some seventy years after the famous book was written, Maffei applied his energetic brushwork and rich color to enhance the drama of Tasso's Renaissance epic. — Joseph Sold by His Brothers (50x81cm; 775x1200pix, 53kb) — Compare: _ Joseph Being Sold by his Brothers (569x700pix, 147kb) by Overbeck [03 Jul 1789 – 12 Nov 1869] _ Joseph Sold by his Brethren (1838, 31x41cm; 222x300pix, 16kb) by Decamps [1803-1860] _ Joseph sold to Potiphar (1518, 58x50cm; 1023x875pix, 130kb) by Pontorno [1494-1557] |
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Born on 02 July 1597: Theodor Rombouts
(or Rombout), Flemish artist who died on 14 September 1637. He
was a brother-in-law of Jan
Philips van Thielen. — In his native Antwerp he was a pupil of Janssens, an Italianate painter of merit, then from about 1616 to about 1625 he was in Italy. In Rome, he came under the strong influence of the art of Caravaggio. Among others, two paintings by Rombouts, The Luteplayer and The Fortuneteller, are characterized by a Caravaggesque dramatic contrast of light and dark. Upon his return to Antwerp, he continued to paint genre scenes of musicians and cardplayers, as well as religious subjects, using a strong tenebroso (heavily shadowed) style. In later years, Rombouts adopted a lighter, looser palette that suggests the influence of both Pieter Pauwel Rubens and Anthony van Dyck . Cavalier and a Market Girl, the painting of a market girl confronted with the amorous advances of a young cavalier, dates from this later period. The scene may may be an allegory of the sense of touch; the artichoke in the foreground is a reminder that if not handled carefully, a beautiful and delicious thing can be a source of pleasure or pain. Perhaps the artist is telling us that relationships can be like the artichoke-attractive and yet potentially painful. — The Backgammon Players (1634, 160 x 235cm; 460x700pix, 42kb — ZOOM to 794x1400pix, 77kb) Two works by Theodoor Rombouts are among his most intriguing and unusual. As another painter drawn to Italy following his training in Antwerp, Rombouts quickly adopted many of Caravaggio's most superficial traits. Stylistic lessons learned by Rombouts in Italy are clearly evident in the work exhibited here. Caravaggesque lighting and figure placement are among the elements marking the new direction seen in his oeuvre at the time. When comparing The Backgammon Players the viewer is struck by how these and other features soon become tempered as Flemish influences reassert themselves in pictures by Rombouts. Two motifs — a drawn curtain and the raking light on the back wall-serve as signposts for this transition. In The Musicians (648x386pix, 35kb — ZOOM to 1111x772pix, 59kb), for example, where Caravaggio's influence is more evident, a heavy drape is pulled back to reveal an unarticulated wall. Only the strong contrasts of the raking light across this wall give any indication of the relative depth of the room. The Raleigh picture again finds Rombouts pressing his figures to the extreme foreground of the composition, but the room is deeper, the curtain all but eliminated, and the raking light reduced to a minimum. Here, the mildly classicizing Flemish style of Rubens and Van Dyck assumes a greater presence. The deeper space and monumental yet mildly classicizing figures found in The Backgammon Players effectively remove it from the more Caravaggesque manner seen in The Musicians. The painter's capitulation in The Backgammon Players to the manner of the great Flemish masters of the seventeenth century is almost complete. Although it falls within the mainstream of the Flemish Baroque style, the painting is not entirely divorced from the innovations of Caravaggio. There are many reminders of this Antwerp painter's sojourn in Italy and his waning attraction for the art of Caravaggio, including the placement of the figures, the rustic character given to some of them, and the hint of Caravaggesque tenebrism. Recent scholarship on The Backgammon Players has centered on two aspects of its composition: the identification of some of the figures and an interpretation of the game of backgammon, or tric-trac. Genre scenes with moralizing overtones, both in paintings and prints, have long been associated with Rombouts, and interpretation of these scenes, including the Raleigh picture, has emphasized the negative qualities connected with games, be they cards or backgammon. Slatkes, for example, in explaining early misunderstandings of the imagery, linked the two games. There was some early confusion concerning both the subject matter and date of this late work by Rombouts when Roggen described it as depicting chess players and incorrectly read the date as 1632. The error regarding the subject was understandable, given the unusually elegant rendering of the various figures, in addition to their elaborate costumes, graceful gestures, and upper-class demeanor. Indeed, these are exactly what one would expect to find in a painting of the courtly game of chess rather than in one of backgammon, much less highly regarded. Except for the inclusion of the backgammon board, everything in the manner in which Rombouts has handled his subject matter, including the attitude of the three onlookers to the viewer's right, suggests that he may have originally had the old allegorical chess game of the sexes in mind. Backgammon, in contrast, was usually associated with, at best, idle time-wasting and at worst, gambling and violent behavior. Do the colorful costume and feathered hat of the work's principal "player" in the Raleigh picture, including the sword at his waist, link him to the more aristocratic figures of the woman and her young daughter? Or should the viewer instead come to more negative conclusions regarding the character of this man, and by association his followers? It remains to be seen whether messages related to other sins, to games of love, or to backgammon's condemnation by the church can be read into the scene. Among the obstacles interfering with such interpretations for The Backgammon Players are the portraits found within the composition. The three prominent figures in the painting have been linked to known portraits of the painter, his wife, and young daughter. Their presence calls into question any possible negative tone of the imagery. Vlieghe, in citing professional pride and marital harmony as reasons behind some of Rombouts's other images of himself and family, is not as certain about the function of this work. Consequently, the difficulty encountered by scholars in trying to reconcile the two opposing faces of The Backgammon Players leaves the full significance of this mature work by Rombouts lost within the shadows of the seventeenth century. — LINKS — Allegory of the Five Senses (207x288cm; 870x1199pix, 168kb) _ detail: Hearing (1121x820pix, 119kb) _ Art-lovers in the 16th and 17th centuries were very fond of emblematic paintings, although the content of a work of art often served merely as a pretext for a display of painterly ingenuity. The Allegory of the Five Senses by Theodore Rombouts fits this pattern perfectly. From left to right, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are represented by figures and attributes set in a lively and colourful composition. The painting was commissioned by Bishop Anton Triest, a well-known patron of the arts in Ghent. — Two Card Players and Three Bystanders (152x206cm; 800x1123pix, 136kb) _ As far as the subject matter is concerned, this is a genre painting, depicting as it does a jolly scene from everyday life probably with a moralizing undertone. The painting is large in format, realistic in conception and traditional in style, and its subject is portrayed in sober and monumental fashion. — Two Card Players (850x997pix, 102kb) _ The influence of Rubens, the best painter in all genres in the 17th-century Flanders, overlaid that of Caravaggio which had swept over north European painting since before 1600. Rombouts hesitated between Caravaggio and Rubens as can be detected in this picture. |
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