by Jan Baptist Bedaux

On 12 October 1767 De Philosooph, a spectatorial periodical characteristic of the Dutch En-lightenment, published an article which was, to put it mildly, provocative. The author, who signed himself with the initial "C", was severely critical of "the Dutch lack of taste."

Jan van Noordt's artistic caliber has hitherto been underrated. There are two reasons for this. In the first place there is no complete survey of his oeuvre — many documented pictures have been lost, his unsigned works are often erroneously attributed to other artists, and as yet there is no firm idea of his style and productivity. Secondly, the essence of his painting, its high standard of coloring and presentation, is still not appreciated, even in our own century with its cult of formal autonomy. A monograph on Jan van Noordt is one of the most urgent desiderata of art scholarship. Research for this project is still only in the preliminary stages, and my article represents no more than a contribution towards the collation of material.

It is a curious paradox that the addition to an artist's oeuvre of a previously unknown or unrecognized picture is both illuminating and mystifying. As to be expected, the appearance of a heretofore unrecorded painting or the identification of a misattributed picture supplements our knowledge of the scope and character of a painter's activity. But simultaneously such a discovery suggests just how deceptively incomplete this understanding may in fact be. This phenomenon is well illustrated by the many recent developments concerning the paintings of Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). It is the purpose of this essay to publish another such finding.

During his visit to the Low Countries in 1667-1669, granprincipe Cosimo de'Medici was deeply impressed by the earnestness and piety of the Roman Catholic community. And when serious problems arose between the Dutch Catholics and Rome around the year 1700 Cosimo, now Grand Duke, felt called upon to mediate in the conflict. In 1703 he sent one of his most astute diplomats, Marquis Carlo Rinuccini, to the Dutch Republic.

One of Jan Victors' finest works, representing the Old Testament subject of Ruth and Naomi, is, at the time of writing (April 1985), on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, having recently been acquired by a private collector in New York. The signed and dated painting, executed on canvas and measuring an impressive 108.5 x 137 cm., has not been seen in public since 1967, when it last appeared on the Dutch art market.

Looking through the numerous boxes containing photographs of works by Nicolaes Berchem at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague, one is apt to pay little attention to a painting known only from a small illustration in the catalogue of an auction held in Brussels in 1955. The panel, which the catalogue lists as signed, shows a hilly Italianate landscape with a double arched bridge and some houses on the left. In the foreground are five figures, while the righthand side of the painting is dominated by a towering group of trees.

In her 1984 dissertation on Cornelis van Poelenburch, Nicolette Sluijter-Seijffert came to the conclusion that this Utrecht painter, who is especially well-known for his Italianate landscapes, must have been born around 1593. Until recently Van Poelenburch's date of birth was assumed to have been 1586, on the basis of information supplied by Roger de Piles in 1699, which was taken over by Houbraken. The first scholar to cast doubt on this date was Hoogewerff (1952), who proposed 1595 instead, although without presenting any arguments. It was not until 1959-1960 that Schaar made an attempt to substantiate Hoogewerff's hypothesis with the aid of archive material. Schaar was inclined to agree with Hoogewerff, firstly because Van Poelenburch was known to have been in Rome in 1617, and the most usual age at which artists sojourned in Italy was between 20 and 25, and secondly because there were no known signed works by Van Poelenburch predating 1620.

In the catalogue of the exhibition Mostra di Disegni Fiamminghi e Olandesi, held in the Uffizi printroom in Florence in 1964, I attributed drawing no. 38, The Apotheosis of Aeneas (Ovid, Metamorphoses 14:581) to Bartolomeus Spranger.

This large and handsome drawing, for which the artist used bistre, pen and brush, and some watercolor in gray and pink wash with white heightening, is entirely laid down, and bears an old, apocryphal inscription at bottom right: "Barthelmi Spranger".

The name of Cornelis Stangerus will be unfamiliar to most people. He is one of the many artists whom we know primarily from documents. Bredius succeeded in identifying a number of paintings by this artist. In the sixty-odd years that have elapsed since, this small oeuvre has been supplemented by a few other works. Once again it has become clear that a painter who was merely one of the legion of unknown artists in the seventeenth century produced some pictures of outstanding quality.

Muses making music in the company of Apollo are a recurrent theme in the work of Maarten van Heemskerck: three pictures and a print survive; in addition two separate paintings of this subject are described in old auction catalogues. Heemskerck was one of the few northern painters to have been fascinated by this theme, which was especially popular in Italy. In the following we shall discuss a number of artistic precedents that were of importance for Heemskerck's compositions. With the aid of sixteenth-century literature, an attempt will be made to throw some light on the deeper motivations of the artist in choosing this theme. For a painter of Heemskerck's caliber it is rather unlikely that such a classical subject should have been chosen purely for reasons of fashion, as a sort of „genre painting a l'antique". In his other work, too, it appears that a moralizing undertone is characteristic of his northern adaption of a classical Italian theme.