The art of the Low Countries; studies by Wilhelm R. Valentiner;

Author's Preface

HIS American edition of Aus der niederlandischen Kunst, which is to appear simultaneously

JL in Germany (Bruno Cassirer, Berlin), contains two articles that are not included in the German edition : the one on Go vert and Raphel Camphuysen, which was first published in Art in America, and the hitherto unpublished list of the Rembrandts in American collections.

Several of the other articles were first published in German, French, or English periodicals: the one on Quentin Metsys in Les Anciens Arts de Flandres, Rembrandt at the Latin School in the Jahrbuch der koniglichpreussischen Kunstsammlungen, Rembrandt's Blinding of Samson in the Burlington Magazine, and Rembrandt's Representations of Susanna, part of the article on van Dyck, and the one on Rubens in the Zeitschrift fur bildende Kunst.

The lists of the paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and van Dyck in American collections are possibly not complete. Although most of the works of these artists that have come from Europe during the last twenty years have been traced to public or private collections, vn author's preface

there may be some in private hands that are still unknown to me.

I feel it to be a piece of good fortune that a book written in a foreign language should be presented to the public in a translation which not only does full justice to the author's meaning but has a charm of its own, and I beg to express to Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer my most grateful appreciation.

WlLHELM R. VALENTINER.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

IT should be explained, I think, that as, at the outbreak of the war, Mr. Valentiner remained in Germany to do his part for his country as a volunteer, he has seen none of the pages of this book in type. Nor has he seen in their present form any of the illustrations, which, owing to the different size of the American volume, have necessarily been made anew. Before he left New York, however, he read in the manuscript almost the whole of the translation, and sanctioned the few changes which would be found were it compared with the original.

It was not possible to translate more literally the German title of the book, Aus der niederlandischen Kunst. In English " the Netherlands " is the true name of the kingdom to which, colloquially, we give the name of its chief provinces, Holland. "The Low Countries" is the only English term that covers the Flemish as well as the Dutch provinces, Belgium as well as the Netherlands. This distinction has, of course, been respected in the text as well as in the title of the book.

The names of many Dutch and Flemish artists were written in their time in diverse ways, and are so written

ix translator's preface

in our own. I have been careful to preserve the forms selected by Mr. Valentiner excepting in a few cases where another form chances to be much more familiar to the readers of English. In writing the names of Dutchmen and Flemings I have, as is proper, written van with a small v, but in citing American names of Dutch origin I have used, as is customary with us, a capital V.

M. G. Van Rensselaer.

9 West Tenth Street, New York,

September, 1914.

Table Of Contents

PAGE

Author's Preface vii

Translator's Preface ix

II The Church Architecture Of The Netherlands In The Middle Ages

A HISTORY of architecture in the Netherlands /% would necessarily take into account the results JL ML of the unending struggle of the people with the encroaching waters. It would consider the achievements of hydraulic engineering and the influence that they exerted upon architectural monuments, for the building of canals and dikes helped both to determine the artistic character of the landscape and to develop in the architect the qualities that it demanded of him — a sense for sober and correct ways of building, for regularity in planning, and for the accurate estimating of structural strength.

The earliest constructions of which we know in the Netherlands were works of engineering. When Rome conquered the country of the Batavians they were living upon hills which they had thrown up along the coast and which still exist to-day, notably in Groningen and Friesland. So vast in extent are these so-called Terpen or Wierden, in certain regions stretching out for miles, that the labour of building them has been not unreasonably compared with the task of erecting the pyramids of Egypt.

The earliest canals seem to have been the work of the Romans, although a systematic development of inland waterways was postponed to a later day and accomplished by the Netherlanders themselves. With this exception the Romans built in the Netherlands much as they did in their other provinces, constructing camps and citadels, market-places, temples, and cemeteries, which, of course, can hardly be credited to Dutch architecture. Some of them still survive in ruins — submerged in the sea like the Nehalennia temple near Domburg and the citadel of Brittenburg near Katwijk- Buiten, or on inland sites like the Forum of Hadrian near Voorburg and the citadel of Romburg at Ley den.

In the Netherlands, as in other Germanic countries, the earliest efforts at self-expression in art followed the great racial migrations which, fertilizing the land with new blood, developed new powers and energies. Of the result, however, exceptionally little is known in just these regions. The Franks, the Saxons, and the Frisians distributed themselves over the territory of the Holland of to-day in a way that held good ever after, and in the planning of their houses soon displayed their racial peculiarities. Even now the farmsteads of the three races differ, in so far that among the Frisians the dwelling is separated from the stables and barns and among the Saxons is united with them under one roof, while among the leading people, the Franks, the separation of the domestic and the farm buildings is but partially effected.

The houses still had no touch of art. They were

P. SAENREDAM, CHURCH OF ST. MARY, UTRECHT

AMSTERDAM caves, pile-dwellings, or mere huts of mud and wattle. Although nothing is left of them we may imagine their aspect, for even now in certain parts of Holland similar primitive ways of building survive — for example, at Assen, where pile-dwellings are still erected, and at Maastricht, where houses are excavated in the soft marl of the Pietersberg.

The first impulse toward a somewhat more ambitious manner of building was the desire for a waterproof structure for the worship of the gods. Early Christian sources declare that, especially in Friesland and Drenthe, there were numerous heathen temples containing statues that stood on the high altars in honour of Wotan and Thor. They also tell how the monks came, shattered the figures, overturned the altars, and in the stead of the temples erected small wooden churches, and how, when the heathen took up arms, returned, and destroyed the churches of the little congregations, the conflict long surged hither and thither before the Frisians abandoned a religion which, as it seems to us to-day, gave a soul to local nature and valued human wisdom less than a sensitiveness to the hidden life of field and forest.

We may form an approximate idea of the heathen temple from recent comparative investigations which have established, for the pre-Carolingian period, the existence of a common style in all the northerly Germanic countries and have found a clue to their temple architecture in the surviving ancient churches of Iceland. According to the description given by Albrecht Haupt,

They consisted of two contiguous rectangular rooms. The smaller choir-like room was intended for the erection of the altars of the gods and was the place of actual sacrifice; in the larger room the worshippers assembled, and here, drawn up after the sacrifice in long rows along the walls about the central hearth, they celebrated the sacrificial feast under the leadership of the priest who had his official seat against the wall toward the room in which the altar stood.

This ground-plan seems to have influenced the arrangement of the earliest Christian churches. Indeed, it is obvious that, in spite of all spiritual disagreements, the Christian architect must in practical life have conformed as much as possible to existing conditions. According to Haupt, the earliest wooden churches of the Netherlands, which can be reconstructed upon the evidence of the oldest existing Scandinavian buildings, consisted like the pagan temple of two rooms of unequal size, but these rooms were connected at first by a narrow opening and later by the chancel-arch uniting choir and nave. It was an influence from the south, the influence of the basilican type of church, that first developed a more elaborate arrangement with a narrow choir and a broad nave. Then chapels were sometimes added to the choir, and occasionally a vestibule stretched in front of the nave.

Nor is the existence of a consistent Early-Germanic art of the north our only warrant for assuming analogies between the early buildings of the Netherlands and of Scandinavia. The two countries were in actual and close relations. The Frisians were often allied with the Northmen, and in the early Middle Ages several Danish kings believed that they had a right to East Friesland and North Holland. Moreover, coins have been found, struck at Dorestadt near Utrecht, which show a resemblance to those of Danish and of Finnish origin.

SAENREDAM, CHURCH OF ST. MARY, UTRECHT AMSTERDAM

In the Netherlands Christian civilization spread more tardily and more slowly than elsewhere — roughly speaking, between the sixth and the eighth centuries; and even then it was unable for a long time to establish firm roots except in the southern parts of the country. For an understanding of the development of Dutch art it is important to remember that during the Middle Ages and even later the Netherlands lay on the confines of European civilization, and that, strong though the influence of neighbouring peoples was in the border districts, frequently though the overlordship changed in the Netherlands themselves, the old stocks were able to preserve their independence. Thus it had already been in Roman times, for although in the days of Drusus and Germanicus the authority of Rome imposed itself even upon the Frisians, it was a precarious power as the uprising of the Batavians made plain. In fact, Roman civilization merely touched the Netherlands. Afterward, the disseminators of Christianity were wise enough to accommodate themselves more to local conditions. In the Belgium of to-day, where the civilization of Rome had won a firmer footing, they established their bishoprics in lieu of the old Roman provinces and thereby furthered the spread of the Roman leaven, but farther north they did not thus connect themselves with the vague tradition. The only bishopric founded in the northern Low Countries, Utrecht, lay in the territory of a purely Germanic race and could therefore soon become a local and a national centre. It was a long time, truly, before art here attained to independent utterance. In architecture, as in the other arts, the beginnings of a national style are not to be discerned until near the end of the Middle Ages, long after the artistic growth of the southern Low Countries had reached maturity. From the time of the advent of Roman civilization these southern regions had maintained a lead of almost a hundred years, a lead that was still perceptible in the time of the van Eycks and even later, even in the time of Rubens. But if a national art developed more slowly in the north, it stood there upon broader foundations, for nothing had hampered the unfolding of the individuality of the people.

The clearest manifestation of its unlikeness to the art of the southern Low Countries during the first half of the Middle Ages was the adoption and adaptation of elements of German — that is, of Rhenish and Westphalian — origin. One of the earliest Christian churches of which we hear in Holland was founded at Utrecht in the eighth century; and the fact that the initiative came from Cologne is important as a signpost, for during the subsequent Carolingian and Romanesque periods Rhenish architecture exerted a determining influence in the Netherlands. It was from the Rhine that the art of Charlemagne reached them. While they were under this great ruler the political constellations were so favourable that it seemed as though their time for a high development of civilization had arrived. After he united all western Germany and the Netherlands to his empire, the regions between Cologne and the mouths of the Rhine became the heart of his realm. Aix-la-Chapelle, as every one knows, was his favourite place of residence, and at Liege a school was founded that soon grew famous. When one of the important trade-routes of the empire led up along the course of the Rhine, trade seemed to develop in the Netherlands, especially among the Frisians. Then arose the oldest mediaeval building that still exists in Holland, the palace-chapel of Charlemagne on the Valkhof at Nymegen, which, like the little cathedral, often called a chapel, at Aix-la-Chapelle, was attached to a palace with a great banqueting hall. And that Carolingian civilization did not stop at this point is proved by a building in the far north of Holland that was long forgotten, the Church of St. Walburg at Groningen. It was begun in the year 811 and was torn down in 1619, but is preserved in old pictures that have enabled Peters to reconstruct its original plan. Deriving from the cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle, it had the same centralized plan and was of similar importance but, like the chapel at Nymegen, not quite so large.

In spite of its small size this chapel at Nymegen makes an imposing effect, greatly aided by its beautiful site on the last spur of the Rhenish hills, the river Waal running in wide curves at the foot of the slope. Above its elevated central part lies a low dark vault with polygonal sides, built of clumsily squared stones intermingled with bricks some of which are Roman tiles bearing the stamps of the legionaries. In the massive design, the colossal walls, we may trace the spirit of the mighty but still half-barbarous ruler of Europe who, here as at Aix-la-Chapelle, drew upon his memories of the south, and especially of Ravenna, but used them in novel creations of a bold northern character.

For two centuries the buds of this Carolingian civilization unfolded no farther in the Netherlands. The country could not stand up against the repeated attacks of the Northmen who again and again destroyed all signs of renewed vitality. Better times for the Netherlands did not return until, under the Hohenstaufens, architectural activity spread along the valley of the Rhine, producing cathedrals of the greatest beauty. Akin in style to these Rhenish structures were two churches that then arose at Maastricht and Roermond, the most important that have been preserved in Holland from the Romanesque period. Even finer, perhaps, was once the Church of St. Mary at Utrecht. Torn down in the year 1814, it is shown in the drawings of the architectural painters of the seventeenth century, notably in those of Pieter Saenredam and Lambert Doomer which have been published by Hofstede de Groot. Probably it was erected by the founder of the cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer, the greatly gifted Emperor Henry IV, in fulfilment, if tradition speaks truly, of a vow that he would build a church to the Virgin because he had injured the cathedral of Milan in taking the city. The likeness in plan between St. Mary's and the Church of San Ambrogio at Milan may be thought to support this story. In construction St. Mary's, which must have had an importance for the Romanesque architecture of the Netherlands such as the cathedral of Utrecht had for the Gothic, was a vestibuled church designed according to what the Germans call the gebundene System — that most perfect solution of the problems of mediaeval architecture, in which the crossing of nave and transept is taken as the unit of construction and two bays of the aisles correspond to one in the loftier nave.

The churches at Roermond and Maastrict — the finest, as has been said, that remain from their period — are admirable examples of the intrinsic strength and animated grouping of the fully developed Romanesque style. St. Servatius at Maastricht is the more elaborate of the two in design, and in the Gothic period was further enriched by the addition of chapels. The massive structure with its five towers — simple in plan, splendidly separating itself in elevation — forms an harmonious, vigorously animated silhouette. The double crypts, the dwarf arcade around the semicircular apse, and the square towers pierced by rows of windows near the top, are characteristic features of the architecture of the Lower Rhine countries, and by way of Maastricht were transmitted to Belgium and especially to Tournai.

Maastricht still possesses another great Romanesque building, the Church of Our Lady, important for its interior effect and particularly impressive in its great crypt borne by three rows of slender columns. Outside, however, it is not comparable to St. Servatius. Although it dates from the eleventh century an older building, of the end of the tenth century, was unskilfully utilized in its construction, so that the main front now consists of an over-lofty featureless mass of wall flanked by two small staircase turrets.

Besides these buildings in the southern part of Holland there must be noted in the north, in Friesland and Groningen, a little group of Romanesque village churches built on an unusual plan which, as Dehio has pointed out, is also to be found in Anjou and in Westphalia. They have no aisles, a quadrangular choir with a flat east-end, and barrel vaults. The thick walls, sloped on the outside, the small windows, and the plain stumpy towers give them a gloomy fortress-like air. Probably these Angevin arrangements were introduced from Westphalia, for the relations of this region with Anjou are apparent in other fields as well as in architecture and were brought about, perhaps, by the English who ruled over Anjou in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

If during the first half of the Middle Ages the architecture of the Netherlands is still incomplete and cannot yet be separated from the art of adjacent countries, from the time of the upgrowth of the cities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the picture shows more variety, and in the fifteenth century we find architectural enterprise as vigorous in the Netherlands as in any of the chief centres of Late-Gothic art. The true flowering of Dutch mediaeval church architecture, contemporaneous with the beginnings of the art of painting, survives to-day in almost every picture of a Dutch city, for the principal church was usually Gothic, and in most cases there were also fortified towers or town gates of the same period. Numberless are the Gothic churches of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but here, to make plain their general character, only a few of the chief examples can be cited.

The finest of them all is the cathedral at Utrecht. The incomparable choir was built at about the same time as the cathedral of Cologne and, indeed, in conjunction with it; the somewhat later brick tower speaks more of Flemish influence. This cathedral was a beacon of the church for the whole country, and from

CHURCH OF ST. PANCRAS, LEYDEN the time of the van Eycks' Ghent altar-piece it constantly appears, symbolically introduced, in the landscape backgrounds of Early-Dutch pictures. Most of the principal churches of the other large cities of Holland are known from the landscape paintings of the seventeenth century. In the pictures of van Goyen, for example, we usually see the tall tower of the Great Church of the Hague, now replaced, unfortunately, by a clumsy iron spire, or the lofty massive naves of the chief churches of Leyden, St. Peter's and the Hooglandsche Kerk, also called the Church of St. Pancras.

The distant views of Jacob Ruisdael and the city pictures of Gerrit Berckheyden have made familiar the gigantic Church of St. Bavon at Haarlem with its graceful fleche* The towers of both the principal Gothic churches of Delft, the Old Church and the New Church, often rise beyond the courtyards of Pieter de Hooch. And in the backgrounds of numerous paintings by Albert Cuyp we meet the Great Church of Dordrecht, its unfinished square tower crowned by a provisional seventeenth-century termination. Moreover, all who have visited Holland must remember the Old Church at Amsterdam, for its finely proportioned tower is a feature in the first impression one gets on leaving the railroad station, and also the so-called New Church on the Dam, only a little later in date, where

*For want of a better, I use this word to indicate the openwork spire which on continental churches often stands above the intersection of nave and choir. The German term is Dachreiter, ' ' roof -rider", explanatory and picturesque. We maysuppose that there is no good English equivalent (although "lantern" is sometimes used) because a, fleche rarely if ever occurs in England where even the largest mediaeval churches were kept so low that a great tower could be made the central feature of the composition. — Translator.

the bare walls are broken by enormous windows striking even in an exterior view. With these churches the Church of St. James at 'S Hertogenbosch (Bois de Due) and the Church of St. Nicholas at Kampen must be named as two of the largest with five aisles. All of them date in greater part from the fourteenth and the end of the thirteenth century and were finished in the fifteenth.

The character of the Gothic churches of Holland is clearly revealed when we contrast them with Belgian buildings. To be frank, the comparison is not in Holland 's favour. The cathedrals of the southern Low Countries, subjected to French influences, display all the splendours of Late-Gothic art. Rich and brilliant is the decoration of the surfaces, in animated fashion the various parts of building group themselves together, and the pompous bright interiors are filled with a spirit of joyous life. In Holland there are no such intoxicating effects as in the cathedral of Antwerp or in St. Gudule at Brussels. In Holland no one has ever been impelled to speak, as in Belgium, of the Flamboyant style or to use the sonorous word "cathedral," although several of the principal Dutch churches surpass the Flemish in size.

In fact, if we consider the Dutch churches only from the standpoint of architectural history, they are balder and less interesting than the contemporary buildings of any neighbouring country. Too large, and almost clumsy and rustic of aspect, they look like magnified village churches. Their construction shows no complexities, for their stone vaults, dangerous undertakings because of the instability of the soil, were added, not very skilfully, at a later day. In many respects, moreover, these churches often look unfinished. The towers in particular were seldom completed in Gothic days, for the rise of the cities in the fifteenth century was followed by a period of unrest and by the religious cleavage which, at the time of the Reformation, hindered the completion of gigantic religious edifices. And, it may be added, beautiful buildings often fail of their intended effect because of the introduction of the novel arrangements of Protestant congregations. Such is the case with the church at Goes, now divided by a wall through the middle into two parts, and with the transept of the cathedral of Utrecht which has been altered into a Reformed church. Moreover, nature has worked more destructively here than elsewhere. Storms shattered certain towers, like the one at Alkmaar, and the nave of the cathedral of Utrecht; and in other buildings the original wooden ceilings, generally used instead of stone vaults, fell a prey to fire together with parts of the superstructure and of the choir. Often the sandstone ornamentation with which the customary brickwork was at times enlivened has not withstood the weather; and where only sandstone was used, as in the Maastricht region, it has so disintegrated as to demand renovations amid which scarcely anything of the old structure remains.

In short, at a first hasty glance there seems little in the way of praise to be said of these churches which, now that only a small part of them is occupied by the congregation, seem doubly arrogant in their excessive size. Nevertheless it is here that the individuality in style of the art of the Netherlands first expressed itself, earlier than in painting or in sculpture. Here, in the still undeveloped simplicity of a primitive art, we find the characteristics which afterward came to such admirable development in the painting of the great period — an innate strength proper to the whole nation, a puritanical temperament recognizing only realities, and above all a mastery of pictorial effect, always better understood by the Dutch than architectural effect.

These buildings owe their imposing air mainly to the simple cubical shape of their parts, to the exceptional height and breadth of the three aisles, which are not combined in any strictly prescribed way, to the great undecorated wall spaces, and to the gigantic undivided window openings. The body of the church usually seems too large in comparison with the tower which is seldom finished and is treated, so to say, for its own sake or is confused in idea with afleche; too large also in comparison with the surrounding houses which we know to have been much smaller in the old days than either French or German houses, while the churches yielded nothing in size to those of other lands.

In village churches, especially in Zeeland, strong buttresses flanking the walls and a primitive square or sometimes six-sided tower increase the massiveness of effect. Generally there are buttresses also at the corners of the tower, often spreading so widely that they seem to support it on a sloping pedestal. The plain pointed windows with which it is pierced on each side give an idea of the great thickness of the walls, due in the beginning to the unskilfulness of the builder but afterward retained for artistic reasons. On the other hand, in these village churches and just as often in the larger ones the windows of the aisles, being carried very low down as they are in Dutch houses, add an air of comfort to the monumental effect. One advantage of the use of wooden vaults or flat wooden ceilings was that the architect, with no great weight to support, could give his interior unusual breadth and its pillars a wide spacing. And this abundance of space and light, expressing a taste that Late-Gothic architecture everywhere reveals, could here be enhanced by a more open fenestration of the clerestory than a stone vault would have permitted.

The distinctive beauty of these buildings lies, however, not so much in their construction as in their correspondence in spirit with their environment and in their pictorially effective composition. Delightful from a painter 's point of view is above all the grouping of the different parts of the structure. Commonly the large churches lack a dominating and unifying feature, for in no branch of effort was balanced composition the strong side of the Dutch artist. Not only are the aisles and the nave separately roofed but usually each bay of the aisle has its own roof, and the diversified picture created by these peaked and saddle roofs is enhanced by the coverings of the apsidal chapels or of smaller accessory buildings along the sides of the church. The five-aisled churches in particular seem to fall into varied masses of distinct buildings crowded together and, in form and in material, so happily harmonized with the surrounding houses that they have no look of isolation. In a Dutch city the church, in any near view, stands out much less prominently from the street picture than it does in Belgium. And it is precisely in this regard paid to the environment in the designing of a church that the art of the Dutch architect shows to the best advantage.

Even the uninstructed traveller in Holland immediately perceives the skill displayed in combining the church with the silhouette of the city square, or in using it to close a street perspective, or in so building up church and street along the edge of a canal that, with the surrounding trees, they mirror themselves in the water. Nor can he fail to note the delicate feeling shown in harmonizing the form and the colour of the material with the adjacent buildings and, indeed, with nature as a whole, in considering in the choice of the small bricks the play of light on the water and the shimmer of sunshine on the leaves of the elms, and in leading up through the lighter tones of the lithic adornments to the white doors and windows of the houses. These charming street compositions seem to have been arranged by the architect especially to serve as models for the painter. So it was only natural that a distinct class of landscape painters should devote themselves to the rendering of such views, and that others should discover the beauty of the church interiors, equally pictorial in their charm of light and colour.

The chief sources of our pleasure in one of these interiors are the great clear wall spaces, where every play of light is apparent, and the fine simple harmonies of colour — the white of the walls, the beautiful brown of the wooden stalls and ceilings composing with the golden yellow of the brass chandeliers and choir screens, a few reddish spots where the tile pavement is visible, and

CHOIR, CHURCH OF ST. BAVON, HAARLEM perhaps also the warm dark green of the great curtain which in former days shut off the nave from the choir. These tones offered material enough for a rich variety of compositions by such masters in the painting of church interiors as, to name but a few, Saenredam, de Witte, van Vliet, and Houckgeest.