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| Bartolomé de Cárdenas, a.k.a. Bartolomé Bermejo: Virgin of Montserrat, Acqui Terme Cathedral |
She’s young and gorgeous, dressed in rich royal robes with
brocade and ermine, and even wears a crown.
Her kid, maybe a year old, sits in the buff on her lap. It could be a royal portrait from a long time
ago but it’s not, really. Not only do
both of them have rays coming from their heads, but her chair is a really
jagged carpenter’s two-handed saw. She
doesn’t mind, and the merchant kneeling by her side doesn’t think anything is
out of line. Behind and around them is
the most amazing landscape, with cliffs and monasteries, and a long grassy
vista leading to the shore, on which distant boats are anchored. It’s sunrise, and the clouds reflect the red
and yellow of the sun, still below the horizon.
All of this glamor has a religious subtext. After all, it’s
over 500 years old, and most of the European pictures we have from that time—or
at least those that we know about now, are religious paintings—many of them
showing Christianity’s favorite girl, the Virgin Mary, and the infant
Jesus. Nothing strange here, except that
nature seems to have equal billing. The
saw refers to a mountain in Catalonia called Montserrat (sawed up mountain)—a
sacred spot with a miracle-working medieval image of the Virgin, and this play
on words would have particularly resonated with the merchant. His name was Francesco della Chiesa (Francis
of the Church), and he was an Italian from a town named Acqui Terme, working in
his firm’s branch office in Valencia. He
ordered this piece, along with two attached folding wings with other images,
for his hometown church.
This was a time when painters and paintings were not the
self-driven, gallery-traded artists as they are viewed today. In the 1480’s, and for centuries before this
and a century or two after, at least in Europe, painting was a craft, and
generally paintings were made-to-order, whether as religious offerings for
churches, or myth and romance-driven interior decoration for houses. In either case, paintings were viewed as
somewhat down-scale; if you were really rich, you would have ordered your
picture in enameled metal, precious metal, alabaster or marble for churches, or
for residences as well as places of worship, richly-colored tapestries or embroidery,
this last often with the addition or pearls, beads or even jewels. In imitation
of the more precious things, paintings were brightly colored. In the case of religious ones, thin, very
thin sheets of gold leaf would stand in for the real thing, and the paintings done
on wood, in egg tempera and other binding media where necessary, to last
awhile. Most of the domestic ones were
done on cloth, and like so much like interior decorator art now, not meant to
outlast current décor.
The 15th century had seen a technical revolution,
particularly in the area of Flanders in Northern Europe, in which the
traditional binding medium, egg yolk, which acted as the binding medium for
painting on wood, was replaced by oil, usually linseed, but occasionally walnut.
Tempera, the egg-yolk medium, produced
very durable, quick-drying color (thinking of washing egg off a breakfast plate
if you’ve left it for a few days). The
oils permitted slower drying, blending on the painting surface, and much
greater depth and richness because of their greater transparency, and often
required many coats of glazing to achieve this.
During the first half of the century, Flemish master painters such as
Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin and Roger van der Weyden began to push the
possibilities of this new medium, and developed techniques that produced the
most amazing simulations of all sorts of textures and atmospheric gradations,
making the simulation of gold and jewels something that could nearly rival the
real thing.
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| Jan van Eyck, Virgin of Canon George van der Paele, Bruges, Groninge Museum, Bruges |
All this was produced by a long and laborious process, which
involved the mixing of dried processed In the case of that
anal-retentive superstar, Jan van Eyck, this could involve tiny brushes of just
a few hairs in some fine details and certainly also magnifying glasses.
minerals, vegetable and even animal
colors, some of them extremely toxic, with the oil medium, after grinding the
pigment lumps into a power of varying fineness, and then applying these colors
layer by layer.
As Master Eyck produced his miracles, these paintings, many
of which were as small as jeweled relics as well as big ones, he became an
international superstar, a prestigious painter to the local Duke, Philip the
Good of Burgundy, with orders from rich Italians and other magnates and
merchants, domestic and foreign. He
became so famous that even after his death, the name “Master Johannes” became
synonymous with the best of Flemish production throughout the continent.
It isn’t surprising that Flanders had an early monopoly on
the technique, and few foreign practitioners really got the hang of how to do
it well for the next half-century.
Actually, you had to go to Flanders to learn it properly for a long
training period, and even if you understood its principles, you might not have the
talent to exploit it properly.
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| Lluís Dalmau, The Virgin of the Councilors, Barcelona, Museo Nacional d'Art de Catalunya |
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| Dalmau: Saint Baudel |
Here are two examples of foreign wannabe oilmasters, both
with connections that gave them an advantage: The first is a Spanish painter, who
enjoyed the title of City Painter in Valencia, named Lluís Dalmau. He also enjoyed the favor of his King,
Alfonso “the Magnanimous” of Aragon, who sent him to Bruges in Flanders (home
of Jan van Eyck) in 1431. He stayed
there, apparently in the But soon after, Alfonso took on an official
court painter, and it wasn’t Dalmau, but rather another local, Jaume Baço
Jacomart, whom he would abandon in turn after he conquered Naples. Nothing at all is known about Dalmau’s work for
the King, the city of Valencia or anybody else, until 1443, when, in Barcelona,
he took on a municipal commission to paint an altarpiece for the City Hall
chapel that featured the Virgin and Child, plus two other saints of relevance
to the council, and the five councilors of the year 1443. The Virgin of the Councilors is a sort of
reprise of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin of Canon van der Paele with quotes from the
über famous Ghent Altarpiece, that he would have seen a decade earlier, but
nowhere as good, even though it is done with oil medium. Somehow it turns out as a sort of Eyck
paint-by-numbers from a ten-year old pattern.
And the only other paintings known to be by Dalmau, without the
advantage of Eyck’s prototype, are more traditional, and certainly less
exploitive of the possibilities of oil glazes.
This is Saint Baudel, painted in a very traditionally Catalan way,
encased in gold-leaf brocade; handsome, but flat, except maybe in his face.
Eyck studio for a number of years, coming back to
Valencia to decorate a pavilion for his king six years later. |
| Zanetto Bugatto, Galeazzo Sforza, Milan, Castello Sforzesco |
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| Weyden, Anthony, "Great Bastard of Burgundy" |
The second is an Italian named Zanetto Bugatto, court
painter to the ducal Sforza family of Milan.
He was sent to Roger van der Weyden’s studio by Bianca Maria Visconti,
wife of Francesco Sforza between 1460 and 1463, and later became the official
portraitist of their son and successor, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. As a court painter and designer, he was
responsible for many tasks, of which painting portraits was just a part,
including medallions with the Duke’s “official” image. Only a few painted fragments are linked with
him with any security, one being a portrait of Galeazzo Maria, and the fragment
of an altarpiece with his plump wife Bona and a patron saint. I haven’t seen a
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| Zanetto: Bona and her Patron Saint, Milan, Museum of Applied Arts |
Both of these cases show that local traditions and tastes
both win over the precious and detailed Flemish oil glaze products: foreign
buyers may have collected imported works from the likes of Eyck and van der
Weyden, but they preferred more familiar adaptation by their home-grown
painters; in any case, neither Dalmau nor Bugatto approached those northern
paragons in what they could do with their newly acquired skills.
One of the very few who pulled it off was the guy
responsible for painting the wonderful Virgin of Montserrat (or at least her
metaphor), made around 1480. He was a
master painter named Bartolomé de Cárdenas, originally, it seems, from Córdoba
in southern Spain, but by 1468 practicing his trade in Valencia. He must have spent some time in a Flemish
studio (my own inclination was with Roger van der Weyden), but there was no
aristocratic sponsor in his case. In
part deux of this tale, I’ll describe Bartolomé’s singular painting skills and
eccentric career and lifestyle. Just to
give you a clue, after painting the wonderful main painting of the Virgin of
Montserrat, he walked from the rest of the commission, and the side paintings,
which he may have sketched out, had to be finished by someone else.
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| Bartolomé de Cardenas and Rodrigo the Osona, the entire Virgin of Montserrat Triptych |
Material on Lluís Dalmau is harder to find in English: A brief comment on the Virgin of the Councilors is available from the website of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya: http://www.museunacional.cat/en/9-lluis-dalmau-virgin-consellers-1443-1445
For Master Bartolomé de Cárdenas, a.k.a. Bartolomé Bermejo, wait for part deux.
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