Old Masters Brought to Light European Pantings the National Museum of Art of Romania 1997

Behind the Icon Pall
Dutch and Flemish Art in Cardinal and Eastern Europe

1 of several Russian postage postage stamp serial featuring work of Rembrandt.

When in 1998 the Pushkin Museum in Moscow historic its hundredth birthday, information technology did then in an unexpected manner. The museum undertook a complete cataloguing and exhibition project of its paintings and drawings from Flanders and the Netherlands. Nether hard financial circumstances, the museum managed in the grade of four years to publish and display these precious holdings in three awe-inspiring, fully illustrated volumes, accompanying 3 big exhibitions. The series began with the late Xenia Egorova'due south catalogue of 66 fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings from the Northern and Southern Netherlands, 194 Flemish paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and 40 Belgian paintings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In add-on to works by the well-known masters, these included such obscure masterpieces, to take a striking case, equally an Apologue of Patience - ane sees merely after a long expect that this evening mural is an allegory at all - by the extremely rare artist Engelbert Ergo.

400 Dutch paintings of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries followed in the year 2000, catalogued by Marina Senenko. (1 of the images looks more Russian than Dutch: Vincent van Gogh's Prison Courtyard matches to perfection the popular conception of the Lubyanka, the infamous kgb prison not a mile from the Pushkin museum. Really, the painting is a copy of a Doré engraving of Newgate Prison in London.) Finally, in 2002 came the exhibition of Depression Countries drawings of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries and Belgian and Dutch drawings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The curator who compiled the catalogue of the 627 sheets from the

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Prison house Courtyard. Canvas, 80 × 64 cm. Country Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Depression Countries is Vadim Sadkov, former head of the department of prints and drawings and now head of the department of European and American paintings. The catalogue is full of discoveries. Such as the coincidental juxtaposition of ii unrelated drawings of immature ladies, next to each in the catalogue: La Mère des Satyrions past Félicien Rops and the most identically posed Girl Knitting by Hobbe Smith.

With this campaign successfully completed, the Pushkin Museum has become the only major museum to have brought out complete new scholarly catalogues of all its paintings and drawings from the Low Countries.

West winds from Holland

How did 1,327 Dutch and Flemish paintings and drawings end up in the Pushkin Museum, and why should the museum take given them pride of place in its own celebrations? The story begins in the seventeenth century,

at the very first of the Europeanisation of Russia. This phrase is not to be taken lightly. Until the late seventeenth century, at a time when Dutch and Flemish art was thoroughly international, Russian artists worked very much from their own books. They were trained in the Arsenal Schoolhouse in Moscow and worked in a closed, Byzantine-inspired iconographic and stylistic system that was controlled by the church and the court. When a twowave Westernisation occurred, first in the later part of the seventeenth and then in the early eighteenth centuries, both sources came from Holland. Equally Igor Grabar discovered in the 1920s, the new narrative formulas of the 1670s in icon and mural painting were based on a single source: the illustrated Theatrum Biblicum of Claes Jansz. Visscher, also known as Nicolaus Johannes Piscator. This anthology of prints with captions was outset published in Amsterdam in 1639 and was reprinted several times in the grade of the seventeenth century. The engravings are based on compositions past sixteenthcentury masters such as Maarten de Vos and Maarten van Heemskerck. A typical accommodation of one of these prints for Russian monumental art is a painting of the Prophet Elisha and the son of the Shunamite woman (2 Kings 4:viii-37) in the Church of the Prophet Elijah in Yaroslavl. All the main

The juxtapostion of Rops and Smith in the Depression Countries catalogue of the Pushkin Museum.

Engraving of an Erstwhile Attestation scene (ii Kings 4:eighteen-twenty) by C.J. Visscher after a painting by Martin de Vos (c.1531-1603), with Latin inscription, in Theatrum Biblicum (Amsterdam, 1643).

Fragment of a landscape depicting the same scene, with Slavonic inscription. Church of the Prophet Elisha, Yaroslavl.

elements of the composition are taken over, simply flattened and stylised in native modes. For the artists who painted this piece of work, a 40-year-old Dutch engraving afterwards a 120-year-onetime Dutch model was the marker of the Russian time to come.

Even if this is non what we mean in the first place when we speak of Dutch fine art in Russia, it does indicate that Dutch art meant more to the Russians than just an interesting novelty. It was the get-go European school that penetrated the artistic sensation of Russian artists, at a time when they were still railroad train-

ing in the Moscow Armory. It also shows that Dutch art did not necessarily have the connotations that it later acquired: an art of the everyday, distinguished for its secularism and realism. The kickoff employ to which information technology was put in Russia, as nosotros see, was not secular at all.

Nor was the 2d, more famous wave of Dutch fine art in Russian federation primarily secular. In the revolution of Russian imagery engineered quite deliberately past Tsar Peter the Great (who reigned from 1682 on) subsequently his One thousand Embassy to N-Western Europe in 1697-98, religious paintings were merely every bit important as portraits and genre scenes. The first known reference in a Russian source to a European painter mentioned by proper name occurs in the journal of Peter's ambassador to the netherlands, A.A. Matveev. Visiting the Jesuit church building in Antwerp in 1705 - as late equally that! - he wrote that it was hung with works 'by the most glorious painters of the by century, especially the worthy Robens and Vandeik'. In undermining the dominance of the Armory Schoolhouse, Peter's intention was not to do away with religious art for Russia only to reform it in a western mode.

The earliest directly purchase of art in Europe for the Russian court - 121 not very distinguished paintings, including Rembrandt's shortly disputed David and Jonathan - was likewise carried out in the Low Countries, by Peter'due south emissary Boris Kurakin in 1716 in Brussels and Antwerp. Yet, it would be a mistake to call back that Peter's Occidentalisation toward the Low Countries represented an artistic, let alone aesthetic choice for Netherlandish art as such. Information technology was part of a grand importation of Western science, scholarship, education and technique via the Netherlands, not different the way the Japanese acquired their knowledge of the West through the Dutch connexion. For Peter, who imported into Russia not only art but artists, the documentary and instructive value of his collections was paramount. Maria Sibylla Merian was collected every bit a naturalist, and Adam Silo every bit a maritime skilful. This specialist artist, who is at present known simply to specialist art historians, was Peter's favourite Dutch painter. His canvases occupied pride of place in Peter'due south palace Monplaisir - 'the ancestor of all other art galleries in Russia' - fifty-fifty in a higher place his one Rembrandt. (Which goes to evidence that the standard canon should non be taken as a guide in judging the choices of collectors with priorities of their own.)

Warfare by other means

In terms of sheer collection-building nothing in Russian history can compare to the campaign of Peter'due south most dynamic successor, the German princess Sophie August Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst who in 1762 became Empress Catherine the Great. In fact, the qualification is misplaced. There is naught in world history that can compare to Catherine's art buying. Art collecting for Catherine was not just a affair of acquisition; it was an extension of warfare by other means. Catherine derived immense satisfaction from taking out of France and England collections that were considered national treasures. The consternation left behind in Paris and London by her legal marauding of the art market must have given her at least every bit much pleasure equally unpacking the crates when they arrived. The sheer mass and sheer overwhelmingness of the brandish has made the Hermitage in St Petersburg

ane of the great world symbols of artistic possession. The collections she assembled have never been properly catalogued, from her solar day to ours. The present-day Hermitage, even after several major depletions to which we will render in a moment, requires the services of hundreds of specialist curators to keep track of its treasures. They work with hand-written inventories that are passed on from one generation of functionaries to the next.

At the calibration at which Catherine built and filled the Hermitage, there could be no question of fine distinctions betwixt European schools. Masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish art came with the territory that she conquered. While the paintings and drawings are reasonably well known to strange specialists, they nonetheless do not figure in Western art history at the level they deserve. The value in nineteenth-century terms of Catherine's Rembrandt paintings, bought not individually but as office of her package purchases, exceeds that of whatsoever other royal or imperial collection of its kind. To single out a work or two is foolish in historical terms, but it allows united states to indulge in the superior pleasure that is our inheritance from Catherine's astounding extravagance. Two of the rarest paintings in the Hermitage are group portraits by Dirck Jacobsz. of Amsterdam musketeers, which Catherine caused in Dresden in 1769 equally role of the Heinrich Brühl collection from Berlin. How he caused them the Lord knows. All the other known 57 surviving Amsterdam civic guard portraits are withal in that urban center, where they belong.

Following Catherine's expiry only 1 pre-Revolutionary addition of Dutch and Flemish art to the Russian state collections can be called more than marginal. Nonetheless, this exception is worthy of notice. The only Russian who can be mentioned in one breath with Catherine the Slap-up as a collector of art from the netherlands was (I quote from the indispensable Dutch Paintings in Soviet Museums of 1982 by Yuri Kuznetsov and his wife Irina Linnik) the 'famous Russian scholar and explorer, Piotr Semionov-Tien-Shansky, [who] began collecting pictures by Dutch masters in 1861. Aided by his extensive cognition of painting, he prepare out with an amazing perseverance to gather works by minor Dutch and Flemish masters largely or totally unrepresented in the Hermitage. By 1910 he had acquired 719 works past 340 artists of whom 190 had non formerly been exhibited at that place'. His collections entered the Imperial Hermitage in 1915. In the 1981 catalogue of paintings of the Hermitage I counted 1773 pieces by Dutch and Flemish Masters.

Antidotes and new icons

The nationalisations and forced donations that took place from 1918 on added significantly to the state holdings. Collections of aristocratic families dating from the eighteenth century on, also as the nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections assembled by merchants and bankers, found their way into public museums. The Communist authorities besides depleted the nation's holdings in the 1930s by selling off large parts of the Hermitage to raise greenbacks. Some world treasures - think merely of January van Eyck's Madonna in a Church at present in the National Gallery of Art in Washington - were de-accessioned in connexion with oil deals with Western capitalists.

Rembrandt H. van Rijn (1606-1669), The Render of the Prodigal Son. Canvas, 262 × 206 cm. Hermitage, St Petersburg.

However, the greatest impact of the Revolution on Russian collections of Dutch and Flemish fine art was to spread them out over the land. In January 1918 the Third Congress of Soviets adopted broad-ranging resolutions to improve education and preserve the national heritage. Every bit function of this plan, museums were set upwards all over the vast territories of the land. Some of the new institutions were stocked with works from local public or nationalised private collections, but much art was too transferred from the main repository in the country, the Hermitage. Good samples of seventeenth-century art from holland found their way to public museums in provincial capitals deep into the immense Soviet Union. Of grade this great migration was non limited to fine art from the Netherlands, but Dutch art had a detail place in the project. Kuznetsov and Linnik report that a special fund was set up to facilitate the study of Dutch art, a fund that was used to train Soviet art historians.

'The same period,' they wrote, 'saw the inauguration of museums in

Jan van Scorel (1495-1562), Madonna and Child. Sheet, 66 × 44 cm. Regional Picture Gallery, Tambov.

Ulyanovsk, Gorky, Tambov, and Perm. The Soviet government's prime achievement in the museum field, though, was the organisation of art galleries in the outlying areas of the former Russian Empire - the cities of Central Asia and Transcaucasia, Siberia and the Far East'. The rediscovery of these dispersed works, which does not seem to take been accounted for with published lists of the transferred objects, is still in progress. It was an exciting moment when one of the well-nigh famous of them, a Madonna and Child by Jan van Scorel from the Tambov museum, was displayed in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht in 2000 in the company of other, better-known paintings by the Utrecht primary. It was during this period that the Pushkin

Museum acquired many of the objects that went into those three catalogues in 1998-2001.

The Leninist project resembles a continuation in an easterly direction of Peter the Slap-up's didactic import into St Petersburg of paintings from the Depression Countries. Information technology too can be seen as a secularising mission civilisatrice, a challenge to the powerful tradition of sacred imagery of the Russian Orthodox Church, which occasionally borders on the idolatrous. The Communist propagation of Dutch art in particular had a stronger ideological component than that of Peter the Groovy. The themes of Dutch fine art were seen to exist closer to the people, to workers and peasants, than those of other schools. In manner of production equally well it was interpreted every bit a revolutionary breakaway from a culture dominated past the church and the aristocracy. The 'realism' of Dutch art was claimed past Soviet art history as a benign bourgeois foreshadowing of socialist realism.

Insofar as they brought Dutch art into play equally an antitoxin to idolatry, the projects of Peter and Lenin cruel short of their full aim. In a forthcoming essay on Rembrandt in Russian federation, Irina Sokolova, chief curator of Dutch painting at the Hermitage, shows that the reception of the artist in her country betrays a potent tendency toward iconicisation. His old men and women are seen as mirrors of the Russian soul, serving for semi-lapsed believers the function that the faces of Christ and the Madonna and the saints might practise for the Orthodox. The painting of his that has made the greatest bear upon in Russian federation, The Return of the Prodigal Son, has functioned in ways that defied Tsarist and later Stalinist authorization, offer a promise of reconciliation with a heavenly father placed above the lords of the country. Sokolova: 'In the eternal duality of Russian artistic culture, of which Dostoevsky wrote "We have two native lands. 1 is Russia, the other Europe," [Rembrandt] occupies a unique and perhaps even now non fully comprehended role.'

From Transylvania to Bucharest

Russia was not the only state where collections of Netherlandish art were brought in by the authorities to push dorsum Orthodoxy. Similar motives lay behind the import of Western art in Romania. An endeavour of this kind that deserves more attending than it has received was the establishment in the 1780s in the German-speaking capital letter of Transylvania of a full-fledged gallery of Western painting. The owner of the collection was the newly appointed governor of the Habsburg province of Transylvania, Samuel von Brukenthal. Appointed in 1777 by the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa to conductor Transylvania into the modern world, Brukenthal brought to Hermannstadt (today the Romanian-speaking city of Sibiu) his acclaimed collection of no fewer than 1300 Western European paintings, including some 450 from the Northern and Southern Netherlands. In the years 1778-1786 he congenital a palatial residence and gallery on the main square of the city. In 1817 it became a public museum, making it one of the oldest continuously performance institutions of this kind in Europe. Because Transylvania is no longer a focus of general involvement, the Brukenthal Museum has escaped the attention not only of tourists but even of specialists. The kickoff visit of a major delegation of museum curators to the museum took place equally late as March 2000, when

25 members of codart, a worldwide network of curators of Dutch and Flemish art, came to the urban center and were amazed at what they institute there. A checklist of the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the museum, with images of 77 of them, can be seen on the codart website, www.codart.nl. One painting that stands out for its idiosyncratic characterisations is a small panel by Jan van der Venne of the story of the satyr and the peasant (encounter p. 249).

One reason that Sibiu is so little known to the art world is that xix of the most important paintings in the collection were removed after the Second Earth War. In a reverse impulse to that which led the Russian Communists to disperse art treasures throughout the country, the Romanian Communists brought the virtually of import objects from the hinterland to the capital, Bucharest. Amid them is the portrait of a homo in a chapeau by Jan van Eyck that adorned the cover of the catalogue of the exhibition in Bruges in 2002, January van Eyck, Early Netherlandish Painting and the Southward. The grouping also includes pendant portraits by Hans Memling. The Brukenthal Museum is awaiting the right opportunity to lay claim once more to these works.

The National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest is the repository of a 2d major group of Dutch and Flemish paintings as well, from the sometime purple collection. Like the Brukenthal holdings, these works too entered Romania through a Germanic imperial connexion, in this case not the Habsburgs simply the Hohenzollerns. In 1866 the government of the United Romanian Principalities, in an act of nation-forming, invited Karl Eitel Friedrich von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen to go prince and in 1881 king of Romania as Ballad i. Carol, who had studied art history in Berlin under Anton Springer, brought to his task a belief in the value of artistic culture in getting his new subjects up to European speed. In 1875-83 he built a legendary German language Renaissance Revival palace in the resort village of Sinaia, Peleş Castle. Many of the rooms in this vast pile are furnished with objects from and recreations of a different period or centre of world art. Information technology goes without saying that among the treasures put into identify in this yet-impressive ensemble were paintings and objets d'art from Holland and Flanders. In the same post-World War Two centralisation campaign that saw the removal to Bucharest of Sibiu's 19 peak paintings, the imperial collections too were moved to the new National Museum of Art of Romania, in the one-time imperial palace of Bucharest. The building and its collections were so badly damaged in the revolution of 1989 that put an end to the reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu that the Foreign Art Galleries remained closed until May 2000, when they were reopened with the partial assistance of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and other Dutch and Flemish institutions, among others.

Ur-Netherlandish fine art in Prague

Russia and Romania are infrequent cases in our perspective. They are both countries in which the tension betwixt Eastern Orthodoxy and the Western churches finds significant expression - witting, programmatic expression - in art collections and their implementation. The other culturally developed countries of Eastern Europe, the nations of the Caucasus, Greece and Bulgaria, never even began to import Western European art. With all due reservation, ane can hypothesise that the icon tradition and the easel-painting tradition,

Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), Portrait of a Man with Blue Hat. Muzeul National de Arta al României, Bucharest.

exemplified par excellence in Dutch and Flemish art, are mutually antagonistic. Some other fascinating shared characteristic of the Russian and Romanian collections is that in one case they were in place, they remained. Many fewer of the paintings imported by the Romanovs, Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns into Russian federation and Romania were afterwards lost than in the Catholic countries to be discussed below. That this also might reverberate a form of iconicisation is a more speculative suggestion, only it is worth keeping in mind.

Seen in this low-cal, Dutch and Flemish fine art in the Catholic territories of Central and Eastern Europe - the Baltic lands, Poland, the Czechia and Republic of hungary - take long been more closely integrated into local society and culture than in Russia and Romania. The import of fine art and artists from the netherlands into these territories required no special ideological justification, nor did it obtain i. The integration of Netherlandish art into the local culture could not become much further than it did in the Prague of Emperor Rudolf ii (emperor from 1576 to 1661). During the formative menstruum of

Golden Age fine art Prague was in fact one of the peachy centres of Dutch and Flemish fine art. Alongside the Italian and French masters that Rudolf brought to his court, he also became a major patron of such influential Dutch and Flemish artists as Joris Hoefnagel, Pieter Isaacsz., Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn, Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries and Adriaen de Vries.

The art of these masters is ordinarily seen in a certain light. They are thought of as Mannerists, over-refined creatures of the court, creators of an un-Netherlandish fine art of exaggeration and decadence. The Apologue of the Court of Rudolf Ii by the Hague artist Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn in Prague goes quite a way to support that thesis. That is however not the whole story. According to ane of the leading experts in Rudolfine art, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, the courtroom in Prague was as well the crucible in which the ur-Netherlandish specialties of landscape, still life and genre matured or were invented. The interests of the emperor and his court were not exclusively sophisticated. The court as well cultivated a sense of wonder before simple plants, animals and people, a taste that was shared and cultivated by his artists. When their terms at court came to an end, and they returned to Western Europe (non all of them did), they brought with them new specialties that later came to be identified with their home countries. Roelant Savery's bloom yet lifes, a genre that originated in Prague though all the world thinks of it as Dutch, is a example in indicate.

One reason this demonstrable truth is no longer apparent to the world is that so little piece of work from the Rudolfine period has remained in Prague. Had it done so, the castle, museums, churches and palaces of Prague would have formed an ensemble of swell international art of about 1600 on a par with Rome for the art of 1500. Of the 422 items in DaCosta Kaufmann'southward catalogue of all surviving paintings by Rudolfine court artists washed during their menstruation of regal service, only 45 are still in Prague today. The dispersal began in Rudolf's fourth dimension, as art was taken away by artists or sent abroad past patrons, spreading the reputation and bear upon of his artistic policies. Yet, it is subsequently Rudolf'southward death that Prague was emptied. The largest single group of Rudolfine art is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where it was taken by Rudolf's imperial Habsburg successors. The residue is spread over more than 130 collections in Europe and America. The big bang that initiated this dispersal took place in 1648, when Swedish troops looted Prague and took its treasures habitation. From in that location they were sold off over the class of time.

The poignancy of this diaspora came across to me 2 years agone, on a written report trip to Spain with codart. One of the participants was Eliška Fučíková, curator of the present-day collections of the erstwhile purple castle in Prague, the slap-up Hrad. At the Cloister of the Descalzas Reales she recognised some sixteenth-century paintings every bit having come from the collection of Rudolf. They were probably brought to Madrid, she surmised, by Habsburg patrons of the curtilage, which was founded by Joanna of Austria, the daughter of Charles v. Wherever Fučíková travels, she encounters and notes the dispersed remnants of the fabled Habsburg holdings in Prague, which in its time was probably the greatest single collection of Dutch and Flemish art in existence. The Netherlandish paintings in Czech museums today come more than often from individual collections than from the court.

Dirk de Quade van Ravesteyn (1589-1619), Allegory of the Courtroom of Rudolf II. Sail, 213 × 142 cm. Strahov, Prague.

Lost art

Like the Czech story, that of Dutch and Flemish fine art in Poland is largely a tale of past glory. In the mid-sixteenth century the Jagellonians ruled over a kingdom that stretched from Western Prussia to the Black Sea, and maintained a capital in Kraków and a ability base at Wawel Castle that was far more sophisticated than any courtroom further due east. The Flemish tapestries in Wawel form to this 24-hour interval one of the greatest ensembles of its kind in the globe. Concerning the collecting of paintings by the Jagellonians there is a contradiction in the secondary sources. Jan Białostocki and Michal Walicki remark with regret in their 1957 overview of the history of painting col-

lecting in Poland that the powerful tardily Jagellonians, who spent fortunes on palaces and jewellery and tapestries, showed no detectable interest in painting. A different tone was struck in 1988, in the exhibition catalogue Europäische Malerei des Barock, which travelled to Braunschweig, Utrecht, Munich and Cologne. In her introduction, Janina Michalkowa reports that the sixteenth-century palace was adorned with paintings, mainly Italian paintings, which however were destroyed in the fires of 1595 and 1702. Exist that every bit it may, non a single painting tin today exist traced to that legendary house.

That the succeeding dynasty of the Wasas did collect on a lavish scale is no cause for lasting joy in Poland. The holdings they accumulated were lost in even more than annoying ways than fires. In 1655 Swedish armies occupied Poland, dragging off, as Michalkowa puts it, annihilation that was draggable: piece of furniture, sculptures, paintings, marble. When the last Wasa abdicated in 1672, he took his collection with him to France, where 150 paintings were sold for a song and dispersed. The collections of the Sobieski kings ended up in Rome, those of the Saxons in Dresden, and of the Poniatowskis, including 2000 paintings, in miscellaneous sales.

It took patricians and patriots rather than potentates to help Poland build national art collections. Michalkowa described the quite manic collecting behaviour of wealthy Polish burgers and aristocrats. The Czartoryskis and Ossolinskis, in the nineteenth century, founded museums based on nationalistic premises. The art historian and diplomat Atanazy Raczynski congenital a fantabulous collection during his missions as legate of the King of Prussia. The palace in Berlin where information technology was preserved was demolished in 1884 to brand mode for the Reichstag. The paintings were then moved to five rooms of their own in the Nationalgalerie, but in 1903 the citizens of Posen held a entrada to build a museum at their own expense and succeeded in luring the collection back to Poland, in a rare reversal of a long and sad tendency.

The founding in 1862 of the immense National Museum in Warsaw (until 1916 the Museum of Fine Arts) was a straight expression of Smoothen nationalism on the eve of the 1863 insurrection against Russian federation. The late date of founding did not prevent the museum from acquiring an important drove of Dutch and Flemish painting. Nearly symbolic of this is the oil sketch by the Fleming Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) for The Apotheosis of Frederick Henry, the painting itself however in the Oranjezaal in Huis 10 Bosch, for which it was painted in 1652. The Jordaens was purchased by the Warsaw museum in 1871.

The final cracking drove of art from the Low Countries in Fundamental and Eastern Europe is in Republic of hungary. The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest boasts a gallery of 755 Dutch and Flemish paintings. Most of them are from the remnants of the Esterházy collection, purchased by the Hungarian state in 1871. The Esterházys were an ancient family of Hungarian aristocrats who, in the words of the Dictionary of Art, 'rose to prominence during the Turkish wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to get one of the leading, nigh influential and richest families of eastern Europe. Their absolute loyalty to the Habsburgs secured for them not bad power and wealth'. Although they had lost much of their wealth and belongings past the latter nineteenth century, what was left by the time of the purchase was enough to clinch Budapest of a perpetual major office in the international excursion of museums

Jan van der Venne (1616-1650), Satyr and Peasant in a Tavern. Panel, 38 × 54 cm. Bruckenthal Museum, Sibiu.

of fine arts. Jan Miense Molenaer's jolly Tavern of the Crescent Moon from the Esterházy collection is a bright evocation of the European family having the kind of fun that fifty-fifty an Esterházy could share with their peasant dependents.

A cosmetic conclusion

This quick look at Dutch and Flemish fine art in Central and Eastern Europe is bitty and arbitrary in any number of means. For i affair, it is limited mainly to paintings. The collections of drawings and prints would multiply the numbers of objects and collections considerably. An augmentation of another order altogether would be obtained were nosotros to look at the arts of sculpture, architecture and tapestry. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ateliers in or from the Low Countries were the leading purveyors of these monumental arts to courts and cities to the north and eastward of their mother land. 1 reason this has not penetrated the consciousness of the Western art earth is that Dutch and Flemish sculptors, masons and architects did not piece of work in recognisably Netherlandish styles but in the current international idioms, peculiarly classicism. For entire provinces not only of Eastern Europe simply also Scandinavia and the British Isles, nearly all art was Dutch and Flemish art.

In another sense every bit well, this bird's-eye view is insufficient. In keeping with nowadays-day usage, it is restricted to the countries behind the tardily, unlamented Iron Curtain. Before the 1940s no European would have understood

a discussion of Central Europe that dealt with Prague and Budapest and not Vienna. Or for that thing with Berlin and Dresden, Leipzig and Munich too. With that corrective in mind, we can only cease by concluding that Central and Eastern Europe are inseparable not simply from our continent but near emphatically from the part of European cultural heritage that we call Dutch and Flemish art.

gary schwartz

Bibliography

Catalogues of the museums discussed in the article

cracraft, james, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery. Chicago / London, 1997.

folga-januszewska, dorota and katarzyna murawska-muthesius, National Museum in Warsaw: Guide. Warsaw, 2001.

kauffmann, thomas dacosta, The Schoolhouse of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf 2. Chicago / London, 1988.

kuznetsov, yury and irene linnik, Dutch Painting in Soviet Museums. Amsterdam and Leningrad, 1982.

mankinveackell.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_low001200301_01/_low001200301_01_0035.php

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