CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 120
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Simultaneous vision in Paolo Fiammingo's A Vision of the Holy Family near Verona
Simultaneous vision in Paolo Fiammingo's A Vision of the Holy Family near Verona
Fig. 6 / Pauwels Franck, called
Paolo Fiammingo, Landscape
with Pilgrims and a View
of a City, ca. 1581, pen and
brown ink on paper, 20.8 x
30.5 cm, Munich, Staatlichen
Graphischen Sammlung.
Fig. 5 / Pauwels Franck, called
Paolo Fiammingo, Landscape
with a View of Verona, ca. 1581,
oil on canvas, 86 x 115 cm,
formerly with Im Kinsky auction
house, Vienna (2014).
Fiammingo excelled at mythological, allegorical, and
religious subjects situated in expansive verdant landscapes,
but he also produced pure landscape paintings. One
of the city of Verona, accepted by Stefania Mason
and Daniele Benati as an autograph work, came up at
auction in 2010 and again in 2014 (fig. 5).11 Although
this Landscape with a View of Verona has a more poetic
than topographical quality to it, it nevertheless depicts
the major monuments and landmarks of the city, such
as the Adige River, Ponte Romano, and the Castello
San Pietro, but seemingly from the opposite direction
as the vantage point of Oberlin’s A Vision of the Holy
Family near Verona. The View of Verona and the Oberlin
composition share several similarities in handling, such
as the summarily rendered sheep and shepherd, the
dramatically staged sky with beaming rays of sunlight
that create golden ribbon-like patterns in the clouds,
and the familiar feathery foliage. Both works have
similarly dark backgrounds against which the silvery
highlights and jewel-toned colours resonate.
The 2010 and 2014 sales catalogue entries note
a connection between the View of Verona and a
landscape drawing by Fiammingo in the Staatlichen
Graphischen Sammlung in Munich (fig. 6), which
shows a similar bird’s eye view of a city – probably
based on Verona – nestled in a river valley with
travellers visible in the foreground.12 While details
of the city view depicted in the Munich drawing
diverge from the Oberlin painting, the works do
share a striking detail in the right foreground: a
seated traveller resting with his elbow raised over
his knapsack and leaning staff, a type of figure
that often functions in this period as a point of
entry into landscape imagery. This convergence
of details and subject matter within this group of
depictions of Verona on canvas and on paper suggests
the possibility that they were created around the
same time, cross-pollinating the artist’s portrayal
of different viewpoints around Verona. Given the
inscription of the date 1581 on the Oberlin painting,
it is worth considering this work as a benchmark by
which to date the other two.
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The compositional complexity of A Vision of the
Holy Family near Verona also fits well with the types
of subjects that Fiammingo treated throughout his
career. In his 1648 biography of the artist, Carlo
Ridolfi lauded Fiammingo for his inventive landscape
compositions, noting that he created “numerosi
capricci (numerous capricci)”.13 Aside from the works
he made for Venice’s churches and civic spaces, the
majority of Fiammingo’s paintings are landscapes with
allegorical or mythological subjects, which Stefania
Mason has described as often containing a “second
level of reading”; such works undoubtedly appealed
to connoisseurs who engaged in an intellectual and
artistic culture preoccupied with conceptualized
tropes and veiled meanings.14 Some of Fiammingo’s
most elaborate subjects can be found in the numerous
mythological and allegorical landscape paintings
he created in the 1580s for the German banker and
patron of the arts Hans Fugger (1531-1598), intended
for his Schloss Kirchheim, near Augsburg.15 Created
at the same time as the Oberlin painting, these
landscape cycles are characterized by Mason as
“pure landscapes that did not have equals in Venetian
painting of the time”.16 While complicated, even
bizarre interpretations might be expected for works
with secular subject matter made for a private patron,
Fiammingo also created a fanciful interpretation of
a religious subject on at least one other occasion. A
painting depicting the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich
Man (formerly on the Florentine art market), datable to
the artist’s last years, shows a fantastical rendering of a
sacred theme.17 Despite the odd juxtaposition of figures
and details in this painting, it functions as a fairly
straightforward illustration of the biblical parable.
To this author’s knowledge, however, no other work
given to Fiammingo approaches the compositional
complexity and illusionism found in the Oberlin
painting. Nevertheless, the attribution of this work
to Fiammingo is credible on the basis of the stylistic
comparisons cited above and the visual and theoretical
contexts from which the artist originated.
