Herri Met de Bles

Inscription: 'HERTOGHE·VAN·WLLE·BERGEG' (bottom right on a tent), 'BISCOP·VANTVRNAXX[I?]GRA[F?]' (centre left, on a tent), 'NOMEN [...]' (bottom right, on the tabard of a commander) and...

Inscription: 'HERTOGHE·VAN·WLLE·BERGEG' (bottom right on a tent), 'BISCOP·VANTVRNAXX[I?]GRA[F?]' (centre left, on a tent), 'NOMEN [...]' (bottom right, on the tabard of a commander) and 'MOROSVSDEVISSE' (centre, on a tent)

Provenance:

Karl August Lingner (1861-1916), circa 1880; bequeathed to his heirs.

The siege of Therouanne, with the army led by Charles V camping at the foot of the town is a rare and exceptional work. It is indeed one of the biggest panoramas known to us from this era and most certainly the biggest painting by Herri Met de Bles. It is also one of the first landscape paintings not to include a religious subject. Leaving behind scenes taken from the bible, which up until then had allowed him to develop his taste for landscape, Herri Met de Bles became the chronicler of a historic event by creating this extraordinary painting of the siege of Therouanne. This original work is looked upon as a unicum in the artist’s oeuvre but also in the painting of his era. Of an exceptionally large format for its time, this landscape is the most recognised work by the artist . Its size as well as its subject leads us to believe that the painting was a commissioned work whose aim was to extol the military strength of the Habsburg Empire.

Worthy of his greatest works, this painting goes beyond a simple landscape and opens up into a true epic. It is teeming with details on the life of soldiers during the first half of the 16th century. The countryside seems to be bustling in a skilfully organised tumult: cavalry parades, maintenance of the pieces of artillery, big game hunting to feed the troops, skirmishes with the enemy lines, dwellings in ruins and a mill on fire… However, this very lively description of military life is not intended to be an exact copy of historical reality. Geographical elements and historical details have been added or removed by the artist in an effort to make the painting more timeless and certainly more allegorical: Met de Bles goes beyond the siege of Therouanne to pay homage, above all, to the might of Charles V.

Since its foundation, Therouanne, a mediaeval town in the county of Artois, was a strategic place during conflicts between the Empire and the kingdom of France. While the capturing of the town during the Italian wars is a certified fact, the same cannot be said of this work by Met de Bles, who has conveyed a more fanaticized vision of the stronghold. He drew inspiration for the subject from an engraving by Cornelis Anthonisz, (1499-1557), the father of modern cartography. This science, which expanded rapidly at the University of Louvain around 1530, developed to facilitate the management of the hydrographic structures that crisscrossed the Netherlands in the form of waterways, rivers and canals. These numerous administrative maps were rapidly hijacked for military purposes. It was Charles V himself who encouraged discipline and systematically set off on expeditions accompanied by his own cartographers. In 1547, Cornelis Anthonisz made a map of the siege of Algiers for him, followed in 1553 by one of the storming of the ancient city of Therouanne. And yet, after having studied it, specialists agree that the siege portrayed is not that of 1553, but that of 1537. On the basis of this map, Herri Met de Bles has furnished a view of the city such as it was twenty years before the said events. The figure of Charles V, whom we see proudly parading on horseback on the far left of the painting, is thus entirely fictitious since the emperor was not present at the siege.

Herri Met de Bles’ starting point for his own painting is clearly the engraving by Cornelis Anthonisz. However, he reconstructs the view of Therouanne with detachment and singularity. X-rays and infrared examinations have shown that the engraving’s motifs have been squared beneath the pictorial layer, but as we have seen, historical exactitude was not the artist’s intention. He was seeking to recreate the effervescence such an event generates. While the town nestles in the heart of a vast plain, the artist places it at the heart of hills and mountains; as usual, he draws inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s technique.

In the centre of the painting, the rocky peak rises up in the same way as in the Landscape with miners at work (Uffizi, Florence), the Sacrifice of Abraham (Cincinnati Museum, USA) and the Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). With a perfect mastery of changes in scale, Met de Bles uses a clever effect of vertiginous diagonals, asymmetric openings and multiple vanishing points to integrate the various sections of his painting. Respecting the ternary chromatic structure particular to Patenier, the artist establishes several distances: the foreground, painted with precision, is composed of the camp’s tents, the mass of cavalrymen… the bronze tints of the small rocks and the path’s yellow dust set the tone. The middleground is dominated by the green and bluish nuances of the foliage and the hills. Finally, a high, immense and vaporous horizon is composed of evanescent clouds and mountains.

The castle, positioned higher up than on the engraving, overlooks the expanses of the site. It can also be found in the painting of Working in the mine in the Uffizi and in the Good Samaritan in the museum of Capodimente. Not far from this castle, at the gates to the city ramparts, the army sets fire to a suburb. The red flames echo the tents in the camp. The numerous characters, expressed in sparkling, multi-coloured touches, are painted with great skill and an eye for detail, showing similarities with an equally masterful work by Met de Bles kept in Namur, portraying the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. Just like the Ascent to Calvary kept in Rome, where the town of Jerusalem is portrayed in a mountainous cirque, the town of Therouanne extends in a vast panorama. The artist depicts a military campaign of his era in a dreamlike atmosphere, making the most of his greatest qualities as a painter. The beauty of his landscape associated with the delicacy of the details make this work a milestone in his oeuvre, a principal piece in his corpus, thanks to the harmony of forms and the poetic force it exudes.