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EXHIBITIONS
the Vic catalogue is perfect.
3 H. Duchemin: ‘A Tours, un La Tour bien caché’, in
Album amicorum: œuvres choisies pour Arnauld Brejon de
Lavergnée, Trouville-sur-Mer 2012.
Michiel Coxie
Leuven
by MARYAN W. AINSWORTH
THE EX HIBITIO N Michiel Coxie: Raphael of the
North at Museum M, Leuven (closed 23rd
February), aimed to reclaim a primary position for Michiel Coxie (1499–1592) among
those undeservedly forgotten artists who lived
and worked in the years between the giants of
Flemish painting, Jan van Eyck and Peter Paul
Rubens. The Museum provided the venue
for this first retrospective of Coxie’s works
because it houses two of his large altarpieces,
the Morillon triptych (cat. no.39), probably produced between 1556 and 1567, and the Crucifixion triptych (Hosden triptych; no.28) of 1571.
This re-evaluation of Coxie was the ambitious undertaking of Koenraad Jonckheere,
guest curator of the exhibition, and Peter
Carpeau, senior curator of Museum M. The
exhibition itself was accompanied by a booklet in Dutch for the general public as well
as a scholarly volume in English edited by
Jonckheere that contains eight excellent essays
dealing with most of the major problems in
Coxie’s œuvre.1 This volume augments the
pioneering work carried out by Raphäel
De Smedt on the artist.2 The second accompanying volume was especially helpful in
navigating Coxie’s career, as the exhibition
understandably faced several challenges in
presenting a balanced view. One factor was
the number of monumental altarpieces that
were too large to travel. But the resolute
viewer could augment the Leuven exhibition
by visiting the Musées Royaux des BeauxArts, Brussels, where two additional monumental altarpieces, the Triptych of the life of
Christ, signed and dated 1567, and the Triptych
of the Brussels Crossbowmen’s Guild had
been brought out of storage for the occasion,
as well as the cathedrals of Sts Michael
and Gudula in Brussels and St Rombouts
in Mechelen, where additional altarpieces
remain in situ. Secondly, in order to evaluate
the major achievements of Coxie’s seminal
ten-year sojourn in Rome, one must travel to
see the frescos of the life of St Barbara made
in the 1530s for the St Barbara chapel in S.
Maria dell’Anima commissioned by Cardinal
Willem van Enckevoirt, the most important
Netherlandish patron of the arts living there at
the time. What Coxie learned in Italy as a
fresco painter was once visible alongside
paintings by Titian at Mary of Hungary’s
palace at Binche, which the Governess of the
Netherlands had rebuilt in the Renaissance
style as the first palace in the Low Countries
to be executed all’antica. But sadly Coxie’s
frescos were badly damaged in a fire of 1554,
and in 1704 the ruins of the castle were
demolished. This significant loss was compounded by the iconoclasm of 1566, coming
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42. Christ carrying the cross,
by Michiel Coxie. c.1530.
Canvas, 207 by 143 cm.
(Patrimonio Nacional,
Real Monasterio de El
Escorial, Madrid; exh.
Museum M, Leuven).
late in Coxie’s career when he was about
seventy, which wiped out a substantial number of his post-Roman works, especially in
Antwerp and Mechelen.
Coxie’s career followed that of two other
peintre-inventeurs, Bernard van Orley and
Pieter Coecke van Aelst, who worked as
painters, as well as designers of tapestry,
stained glass and prints. Karel van Mander
claimed that Coxie was the pupil of Van
Orley, and this was supported at the beginning of the exhibition by two works, an early
Van Orley, the polyptych of the life and
death of the Virgin (CPAS/OCMW Collection, Brussels; no.2), and a late fragment, The
holy women and St John (private collection,
Antwerp; no.14). The latter’s figures give a
sense of Coxie’s introduction to the Italianate
style through Van Orley’s works and before
his trip to Rome in the 1530s, although
Van Orley’s emphatically Raphaelesque Holy
family of 1522 (Museo del Prado, Madrid)
would have made the point more clearly. A
compelling illustration of this master–pupil
relationship was demonstrated by Coxie’s
early Christ carrying the cross (no.45; Fig.42),
influenced in part by Van Orley’s figure types
as well as in the tapestry series after Raphael’s
Lo spasimo di Sicilia (Fundação Medeiros e
Almeida, Lisbon) of c.1520–30, woven in
Brussels and based on the Italian’s painting
of c.1515–17 (Museo del Prado, Madrid).
But this early connection with Van Orley
and Raphael might have been missed by
most visitors as Coxie’s painting was exhibited
several rooms further along together with
other similar themes in later paintings.
The initial gallery also immediately confronted the viewer with the undeniable
stars of the show, the Holy kinship altarpiece
(no.10; Fig.43), dated 1540, and David and
Goliath (no.1; Fig.44), also from the 1540s,
after Coxie’s return from Rome. These two
extraordinary loans, from El Escorial, Madrid,
and the Benediktinerstift, Stiftssammlung,
Kremsmünster, respectively, set the bar high
for Coxie’s œuvre and exemplified the artist at
his peak. The Italian Renaissance is boldly
represented – but it is not primarily the influence of Raphael in the Holy kinship, as the
exhibition’s title suggests, but that of Leonardo from three different sources (the Virgin and
Child with St Anne, the cartoon for the Virgin
and Child with Sts Anne and John the Baptist,
and the Virgin of the rocks) as well as hints
of Raphael and Michelangelo. David and
Goliath, on the other hand, showed Coxie’s
masterly combination of classical sculpture
prototypes with a Venetian palette derived
from Giorgione and the realism of Netherlandish landscape painting (p.95). These first
rooms of the exhibition were a little confusing
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EXHIBITIONS
43. Holy kinship
altarpiece,
by Michiel
Coxie. 1540.
Canvas, 245
by 191 cm.
(Benediktinerstift,
Stiftssammlung,
Kremsmünster;
exh. Museum
M, Leuven).
– was the theme Coxie as the pupil of Van
Orley or the Italianate Coxie? Also included
here was the fascinating painting Plato’s cave
(Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai; no.3), which
brought into focus an important Platonic and
Neo-platonic art-theoretical argument of the
early sixteenth century (pp.73–79). However,
the attribution of the painting to Coxie is
very much in dispute, a matter not resolved by
the secure authorship of the other paintings in
this room.
The second half of the 1530s in Rome
experienced a significant increase in printmaking in which Coxie took part by designing various series. Still debated is his authorship
of designs for a series of Cupid and Psyche,
but unquestionably accepted are the ten
drawings that he made for the Loves of Jupiter
(British Museum, London; no.17), and these
sheets were splendidly on view along with the
associated engravings by Agostino Veneziano
and the so-called Master of the Die. Coxie
as a designer of stained glass was briefly
acknowledged in the adjoining gallery. Following Van Orley’s death in 1541, Coxie
assumed the responsibilities for the designs of
the windows for the Chapel of the Miraculous
Sacrament in Sts Michel et Gudule, Brussels.
This earned him further commissions from
the Habsburg court for Brussels (no.12) and
for the Church of St Bavo in Ghent, which
was illustrated through a few sketches and
drawn copies after the windows (no.13).
Compared to the œuvre of Coxie’s contemporary Pieter Coecke van Aelst, there are far
fewer preparatory drawings so far identified.
The introduction of Coxie as a draughtsman
in this exhibition will no doubt lead to new
discoveries.
Coxie’s production as a tapestry designer
was introduced by two splendid examples
from the Patrimonio Nacional in La Granja
and in Madrid’s Palacio Real, The rape of
Ganymede (no.21) from the Ovid or Poesie
series, and Queen Thomyris has the decapitated
head of Cyrus dipped in blood (no.25) from the
Cyrus series. These were beautifully installed
in a room with the requisite expansive walls.
Here were also an exquisite tapestry cartoon,
Scipio landing in Africa (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; no.22), a cartoon fragment, Head of a
man (no.24), for the Reunion of Pompey and
Cornelia in the Caesar series,3 and a preparatory
drawing for Abraham and Lot dividing the lands
(no.23), the last two from private collections
in Brussels. As Thomas Campbell pointed out
in the 2002 exhibition Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, although Coxie
worked for the Habsburgs and in the 1550s
received a stipend from the city to provide
Brussels’ tapestry weavers with cartoons, few
of his tapestry designs are documented, mak-
ing it difficult to establish the extent of his
work in this medium.4 It is fair to say that this
room presented more questions than answers
concerning this aspect of Coxie’s activities.
Missing was any reference to Coxie’s most
securely attributed tapestry designs, those for
the Genesis series at Wawel Castle.5 The Scipio
cartoon has been published as after a design by
Coxie,6 but its relationship to those by Giulio
Romano in the Louvre,7 for example, should
be further discussed. The superb cartoon fragment Head of a man will be presented in the
October 2014 exhibition on Pieter Coecke
van Aelst at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, as by that artist.8 As Cecilia
Paredes has demonstrated, the Ovid or Poesie
series, which includes The rape of Ganymede,
also has more in common with the style of
Coecke than with Coxie,9 especially when
compared with Coxie’s drawing of the same
theme for the Loves of Jupiter print series,
where the dynamic and muscular body of
Ganymede is after a model by Michelangelo.
Key to the clarification of Coxie’s postRoman painting production and his contribution to Counter-Reformation art are the
altarpieces now housed in Museum M (the
Morrilon triptych and the Crucifixion triptych
or Hosden triptych) and other local Belgian
collections. Certainly the question here is to
what extent these works of Coxie’s later years
(he lived until he fell to his death from scaffolding in Antwerp at the age of ninety-three)
are the product of the workshop. Little is
known about Coxie’s assistants, although his
sons Raphael and Willem were certainly
among them, and three others are named
as members of the Mechelen painters’ guild
(Lodewijk Crowies, Jacus Dauvoers and
Shasper Derwoers). A technical examination
of Coxie’s works has only recently been
initiated by David Lainé which should
reveal further information about the habitual
methods of Coxie and his workshop. It
would be interesting to know, for example,
whether, like his teacher Bernard van Orley,
Coxie learned and employed aspects of the
working procedures of the Italian painters
whose style he emulated.10
The last room of the exhibition was
devoted to what Coxie is perhaps best
known for, that is, his work as a copyist
while in the service of the Habsburg courts
of Mary of Hungary and Philip II.11 For the
former, Coxie had produced a copy of
Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the
cross as compensation to the Crossbowman’s
Guild from whom she had acquired the
original. After receiving an initial payment
in 1556, Coxie began work on a copy of
Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the
mystic lamb altarpiece for Philip II, which
took him two years to complete. In a great
coup, the exhibition’s organisers achieved
the unimaginable by reuniting all the interior
panels of Coxie’s copy from Berlin, Munich
and Brussels. Although a number of changes
have been introduced (St Cecilia is gone,
Coxie himself, Charles V and Philip II appear
among the Christian Knights, and the donors
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Making and Marketing: Studies of the Painting Process in
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Workshops,
Turnhout 2006, pp.99–118.
11 See R. Suykerbuyk: ‘Coxie’s copies of old masters: an
addition and analysis’, Simiolus 37/1 (2013–14), pp.5–24.
Florence!
Bonn
by ALISON WRIGHT
44. David and Goliath, by
Michiel Coxie. c.1540s.
Canvas, 139 by 106 cm.
(Patrimonio Nacional,
Real Monasterio de El
Escorial, Madrid; exh.
Museum M, Leuven).
and saints on the exterior wings were
replaced by the Four Evangelists), Coxie’s
copy is remarkably faithful to the original. It
would have been equally interesting to have
installed in the same gallery Coxie’s copy of
Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the
cross (Museo de Pintura de San Lorenzo de
El Escorial, on loan from the Prado, Madrid)
to judge more fully the painter’s ability to
replicate the style and technique of the two
very different Netherlandish masters. After
the exhibition the Mystic lamb panels will
be studied with infra-red reflectography,
which should reveal more fully the details of
Coxie’s copying procedures. The ability to
study Coxie’s Mystic lamb is timely, as the
cleaning and restoration of the Van Eyck
panels is currently underway in Ghent by
a team of conservators from the Institut
Royal du Patrimoine Artistique, Brussels. In
the same final gallery were the altarpiece
wings of Sts Luke and John the Evangelist
that Coxie was commissioned to make in
c.1560–65 by the Mechelen painters’ guild to
join Jan Gossaert’s St Luke drawing the Virgin
in St Rombouts Cathedral. But here Coxie
eschewed Gossaert’s eclectic conflation of
antique and modern (i.e. Gothic) style in
favour of a Raphaelesque High Renaissance
mode, which was the direction in which the
local painters’ guild was heading.
Koenraad Jonkheere and Peter Carpeau
are to be congratulated for having brought
the œuvre of Michel Coxie to our attention,
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and for boldly having raised the questions
that remain to be more fully discussed. The
exhibition and accompanying publications
are sure to promote further inquiries into
this important peintre-inventeur who, although
clearly renowned in his own time, has undeservedly slipped into obscurity.
1 Michiel Coxcie (1499–1592) and the Giants of His Age.
Edited by Koenraad Jonckheere. 208 pp. incl. 231 col.
ills. (Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2013), €75. ISBN
978–1–909400–14–6.
2 See especially R. De Smedt: ‘Autopsie de
Michiel Coxie, Nouveaux horizons bibliographiques
1565–2010’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire d’art
80/2 (2011–12), pp.1–255.
3 T.P. Campbell: ‘New Light on a Set of History of
Julius Caesar Tapestries in Henry VIII’s Collection’,
Studies in the Decorative Arts 5/2 (1998), pp.2–39.
4 Idem: ‘Michiel Coxie’, in idem, ed.: exh. cat. Tapestry
in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, New York
(Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2002, pp.394–402.
5 Ibid., pp.397 and 399; and M. Hennel-Bernasikova in
ibid., pp.441–47.
6 E. Hartkamp-Jonxis: ‘Een geschilderd patroon voor
een wandtapijt met de “Landing van Scipio op de kust
van Afrika” uit het midden van de 16de eeuw’, Bulletin
van het Rijksmuseum 56 (2008), pp.83–101.
7 See Campbell, op. cit. (note 4), pp.341–49.
8 This cartoon fragment was first attributed to Coecke
in ibid., pp.383–84, fig.175.
9 See C. Paredes in ibid., pp.424–28, no.49.
10 On Van Orley and his adoption of Raphael’s and
Raphael’s workshop methods, see M.W. Ainsworth:
‘Romanism as a Catalyst for Change in Bernard
van Orley’s Workshop Practices’, in M. Faries, ed.:
THE PRE-PUBLICITY for the exhibition Florenz!
at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (to 9th
March), gave little idea of what that exclamation mark might stand for. By the middle of
the complex installation, it was safe to say that
one cause for exclamation are the exceptional
Florentine loans – Botticelli’s Pallas and the
Centaur (cat. no.113), Pollaiuolo’s rarely lent
Hercules and Antaeus (no.116), the illuminated
Medici Pliny (no.70), magnificent even when
tucked in a corner, the document of Giotto’s
appointment as capomaestro of the cathedral
(ex-catalogue), the earliest oval-projected
map of the world, the first tapestry to be
woven in Florence. At the same time, a more
surprising explanation for that exclamation
mark emerged: that it signifies ‘everything’, or
almost. Gerhard Wolf’s introductory essay
to the catalogue registers some deliberate
lacunae, but the exhibition nonetheless offers
a rapid and remarkable tour through the
city’s commercial activities and organisation,
its religious movements, its arts (all of them),
its greatest poets, humanism, scientific discoveries, leaders and lords, as well as its
interpreters and collectors.1 All this unfolds
over some six hundred years, for the show
only ends in the late nineteenth century
when the city relinquished its brief glory as
capital of Italy and its last claim to creative
invention. From such a panoramic perspective, the exhibition’s emphasis on Florence as
a city of constant change is inevitable.
The visitor is welcomed to the city,
somewhat obtusely, by Giambologna’s Venus
‘Anadyomene’ (no.5) in a bashful face off with
Andrea del Sarto’s young St John the Baptist
(no.4) and by the life-size portrait of Dante in
the 1465 memorial canvas from Florence
Cathedral. Domenico di Michelino’s painting
(no.1; Fig.45) presents the walled city of the
1460s allegorically illuminated as a Paradise –
literally showered with gold highlights cast
by the great Divine Comedy in the poet’s hand.
It is the earlier Florence of Dante’s era that
is then evoked in the succeeding rotundashaped room, which exploits an existing
feature of the Kunsthalle’s postmodern architecture to allude to the Baptistery and the
cathedral’s crossing. But if the intention is
paradisiacal, the peculiarly purgatorial shade
of mauve on walls and floor produces a
contrary effect, one that not even the reliefs
of Astronomy and Building (nos.12 and 13)
from the cathedral’s Campanile could combat.
Emerging from a medieval corner, which
includes the perfectly preserved penitential
Crucifixion by Lorenzo Monaco from Altenburg (no.55) and a number of early illuminated Dante manuscripts, visitors find themselves