Pieter Aertsen: Renaissance Paintings - Northern Renaissance

Pieter Aertsen

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After beginning by painting religious works, in the s he developed the painting of domestic scenes in which he reproduced articles of furniture, cooking utensils, and food with great flair and realism. His Butcher's Shop, with the Flight into Egypt Uppsala , "has been called the earliest example of Mannerist inversion of still life in Northern painting", showing the "lower" subject matter far more prominently than the subject from history painting.

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Unlike these, in Aertsen's works the genre material dominates the front of the image, with the history scene, normally religious, easy to overlook in the background. This pictorial technique drew on the paintings of another Antwerp artist, Jan Sanders van Hemessen , whose genre treatments of religious and moral scenes had smaller scenes inset into the background in a similar way. In the Uppsala painting the zones behind the butcher's stall show from left a view through a window of a church, the Holy Family distributing alms on their journey, a worker in the mid-ground, with a merry company eating mussels and oysters believed to promote lust in a back room behind.

The sign at top right advertises the land behind as for sale. The painting offers the viewer a range of options for life, in an allegory on physical and spiritual food.

The painting carries the coat of arms of Antwerp, suggesting it was a civic commission, perhaps by the rich Butcher's Guild. In the Renaissance, the classical example of the painter Peiraikos , known only from Pliny the Elder , was important in justifying genre and other "low" subjects in painting. Aertsen was compared to Peiraikos by the Dutch Renaissance humanist Hadrianus Junius Adriaen de Jonghe, — in his Batavia , published posthumously in , which compares Aertsen at each point of Pliny's description in a wholly laudatory manner.

Later in life, he also painted more conventional treatments of religious subjects, now mostly lost as during the iconoclasm of the beeldenstorm several paintings that had been commissioned for Catholic churches were destroyed. Several of his best works, including altarpieces in various churches in Amsterdam, were also destroyed during the days surrounding the event known as the Alteratie , or "Changeover", when Amsterdam formally reverted to Protestantism from Catholicism on 26 May at the start of the Eighty Years' War.

Aersten's exact formula of still life and genre figures in the foreground, with small scenes from history painting in the background only persisted for the next generation or two, as Joachim Wtewael painted some similar works , but history paintings with very prominent and profuse still life elements in the foreground were produced by Rubens and his generation, and in the 17th century both Flemish Baroque painting and Dutch Golden Age painting developed important genres of independent still life subjects, which were just occasionally produced in Aertsen's day.

Unlike Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Aertsen's genre figures especially the women were mostly depicted idealized with considerable dignity and no effort at comedy, using poses that ultimately derived from classical art.

Northern European

In some cases they appear to have been borrowed from the contemporary court portraiture of artists such as Anthonis Mor. Two unusual individual genre portraits probably not actual individuals of female cooks in Genoa and Brussels , one full-length and the other in the three-quarter length format devised by Titian for royal portraits, show them holding roasting spits with poultry as if they were marshall's batons.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. From Bosch to Rubens , A. Luther repudiated all devotional images, which brought an end to religious painting and hence a drastic statis in Northern Renaissance German art. The first few decades of the sixteenth century saw a major turning point in Low Countries art.

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The decline of the last generation of great masters in the fifteenth century tradition made way for a new current, based on the reworking of the novel trends in Italian art, experienced first-hand in journeys to the south and combined with the decorative exuberance and descriptive detail typical of Flemish art, Antwerp became the center along the North Sea coast. In the Netherlands, painters were improving upon oil paint, which had before been used for painting on leather because animal hides needed a flexible paint that would not crack and flake off.

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Before using oils, painters had used tempera, but when they began to use the oil they far surpassed the range of techniques they had been working with. Oil allowed for variation in light, texture, tone, and value and because it can be thinned with oil and create one effect and thinned with turpentine to create another, it gave them the ability to paint light, mist, fog, chiffon and other ephemeral elements into their art. Oil techniques were spread to Italy and then from there to Venice.

The Northern painters wanted to explore the magical mystery of nature and objects and present it to the world in detail.

This paved the way for a modern understanding of how space, distance, and time affect color and how to manipulate that knowledge of canvas. To explain, this effect is seen in the differing colors of mountains in a photograph, with the foreground mountains in their true colors, but more distant mountains showing in purples and blues. Through these two areas of focus, color, and perspective, they were able to devise aerial and color perspectives as well and these four things became standard artistic tools in later Realism movements.

With the Roman Catholic Church losing power to the Protestant Reformation and the whims of kings and other points of contention, secular thought and freedom of mind were becoming more prevalent. Exchanges of ideas such as Humanism and the enjoyment and investigation of science, music, art, and literature helped foster the foundation for creating philosophy based on new discovery and more open minds.

Secular literature and art broke away from the forbidding nature of the Church and works were created that would have never seen the light in the centuries before. Previous styles of religious artwork had placed God in the Heavens or were singular figures. This period saw painters placing Biblical figures in earthly contexts.

4 Pieter Aertsen (Dutch Northern Renaissance Painter, c 1508-1575) Martha Preparing Dinner

That era also saw the rise of non-religious individual portraits, of people who were rich and famous. Johannes Vermeer did oil paintings of servants and everyday people such as Girl With a Pearl Earring. If you don't see the oil painting reproduction you want, no problem, just let us know and we can paint it, you can also request made to order oil paintings.

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