Panel - 22 cmXVth and XVIth paintings , Landscapes
Provenance: private collection
This vast landscape, painted on a small-format tondo, is among the painter’s most accomplished works. With a truly astounding precision and refinement, this...
read moreProvenance: private collection
This vast landscape, painted on a small-format tondo, is among the painter’s most accomplished works. With a truly astounding precision and refinement, this panel brilliantly illustrates Bol’s virtuoso skill as a miniaturist.
The influence of Brueghel the Elder is combined here with an intimate and tactile rendering of naturalistic detail typical of the artist. With his unique genius, on this tiny surface, Bol is able to conjure up a richly detailed panoramic landscape with exceptional precision. The painting becomes a window upon an entire world that unfolds before the viewer’s eyes. The space literally pushes against the wooden frame. The sense of grand discovery that the wide-open space within this panorama conveys is as enthralling to the modern viewer as it would have been to the art collector of the sixteenth century. Of particular note is the precision of the topographical rendering of the urban landscape, a recurrent quality in the work of this artist, who is also recognized as the initiator of the city view as an independent pictorial genre. Antwerp, the great metropolis of the Netherlands, is displayed here in all its splendor. The economic capital of northern Europe is at the peak of its glory. In this painting, it draws the viewer's gaze, as indeed it must have attracted the hopes and desires of the men of the Renaissance. The city is the central axis of this panorama, around which the rest of the world seems to revolve. Painted with finesse and precision, the detail reveals a city buzzing with life, with its immense harbor, laborers’ districts and the magnificent Gothic tower of its cathedral. Nevertheless, Antwerp was not the only city painted by this great artist. Brussels, Bergen op Zoom, The Hague and even Amsterdam regularly appear in his landscapes.
Literature : Dr. Heinrich Gerhard Franz, Nederlandische Landschattsmalerei im Zeitalter des Manierismus, p 182 to 197.
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1534 Mechelen - Amsterdam 1593
In the years after the Calvinists gained control of Amsterdam, the city experienced an economic recovery and renewed interest in the arts. For this reason,...
read more1534 Mechelen - Amsterdam 1593
In the years after the Calvinists gained control of Amsterdam, the city experienced an economic recovery and renewed interest in the arts. For this reason, numerous painters from the southern provinces of the Netherlands (present-day Belgium) fleeing the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants, chose to settle in Amsterdam rather than Antwerp. They thus contributed to a renewal of landscape painting which reached an apogee in the seventeenth century. Among these Flemish emigre artists, Conninxloo, Vinckboons and Hans Bol were the first to settle in the Dutch metropolis.
Born in Mechelen, Hans Bol was a student of his two uncles, Jean and Jacques Bol. He is registered as a member of the Mechelen Guild in 1560. Following the sacking of his city in 1572, he moved to Antwerp where he gained citizenship. However, as again in the war caught up with him there in 1584, he began a series of travels that took him successively to Bergen-op-Zoom, Dordrecht and Delft. He would only settle definitively in Amsterdam in 1586.
Hans Bol achieved fame above all for his landscapes with broad panoramic views, populated by many small figures recalling the style of Pieter Bruegel the Elder whose paintings Bol was largely responsible for popularizing in the Netherlands, thus influencing an entire generation of Dutch painters.
His students included Jacob Savery of Kortrijk and Frans Boels.
