1 The Intertextual Network of Dedicatory Epistles and Prefaces

The dedications and prefaces to the six books of the Schilder-Boeck demonstrate how the treatise as a whole constitutes a sort of inter-text, in which the parts must be read side by side, indeed concertedly, if they are to acquire their full significance. Take the dedicatory epistles that inaugurate each book and together build an edifice of comparison between Ancients and Moderns: the men addressed, all of whom are characterized as Maecenates (generous patrons comparable in their generosity to Gaius Maecenas, famed supporter of the poets Horace and Virgil) and liefhebbers (lovers of art), make up an elite community of affluent, knowledgeable viewers, well versed in the visual arts and, in a number of cases, themselves practitioners of art, who confer on schilderconst a social prestige comparable to that which it enjoyed in ancient Greece and Rome. They testify to the existence of a Dutch social network, a nobility of accomplishment, united by a shared love of painting and collecting, and a respect for its foremost exponents—councilor and mintmaster of the States General (Wijntgis),⁸ notary and secretary to the Fleet of Amsterdam (Jacques Razet),⁹ painter and banker-pawnbroker (Ferreris),¹⁰ beer brewers (Jan Mathijsz. Ban and Cornelis Geritsz. Vlasman, one of whom, Ban, was also a gold- and silversmith),¹¹ schoolmaster, city secretary of Amsterdam, and notary public (Gedeon Fallet),¹² and painter and poet (Cornelis Ketel).¹³ Committed to the cultivation of schilderconst, these men treat love of the higher arts of drawing and painting as a prerogative, and in this respect, they resemble the ancient nobility of blood who likewise privileged these arts above all others. Concomitantly, four of Van Mander’s dedicatees—Razet, Ferreris, Ban, and Vlasman—have amassed superlative painting collections that further bear witness to their devotion to schilderconst and underscore their affinities with the Ancients.

[From the dedication of Book I to Wijntgis:]

For had [the art of Painting] no such noble lovers, she herself and her artful practitioners, without climbing high or being raised in honor, would be reckoned amongst other handiworks and manual laborers, and would perforce remain dishonored and contemned amongst ignorant folk who lack understanding. But good fortune or merciful Occasion commonly ordains in every Century and time that several worthy, upright lovers be attached to our Art and her artful practitioners....Protogenes, Painter of Caunus, had the Egyptian King Demetrius. Pamphilus and Melanthus had Aratus and Tholomeus. Apelles had Alexander, and Zeuxis the Agrigentians. Beyond these ancients, Jan van Eyck had Duke Philip of Charlois; Albrecht Dürer, Charles the Fifth; … Sprangher and Hans von Aachen, the Emperor Rudolph, and we have Melchior, my Maecenas, or better said, Apollo, to whom I altogether dedicate and offer up my slipshod poem, in likeness a mere lambkin.¹⁴

[From the dedication of Book II to Razet:]

My statement is confirmed all the more, in that you, noble Sir, love artful works above money and amass them, having much pleasure therein.¹⁵

In comparison with many ancient and modern counterparts, Dutch and Flemish liefhebbers, being favorably disposed toward schilderconst, one of the most peaceable of arts, will also be favorably inclined to sponsor the Schilder-Boeck, which pays homage not to the military heroes lionized in olden days but instead to men illustrious for their pictorial deeds executed on panel or canvas.

[To Razet:]

And [my “Lives”] shall be more pleasing than were I to offer him in a learned and more artful style all the ancient, semidivine war heroes, with [their] oath-plighted, four-square battle arrays, forays, and conquests.¹⁶

[From the dedication of Book IV to Ban and Vlasman:]

(As I deem) there may well be some or many whom it surprises that I have made such a book, and expended so much effort and care on these matters, which any person perhaps, or certainly, might judge to be too low or trivial: thinking that only men famed for their weaponry and high deeds, were or are worthy of being described by the pen. Yea, that Marius, Silla, Catilina, and other such cruel devourers of men more deserve or ought to be preserved in memory, than our noble, artful, World-adorning spirits of ancient and modern times …. There are others, enough too, who learnedly and carefully promote the description of the years’ times, or the Tragedies of our bloodied Netherlandish Theater, to which [task] I would not be suited.¹⁷

The prefatory poem on the etymology of the terms schilder and schildery (painter and painting), printed just before the dedication to Razet, performs a similar function: with reference to ancient soldiers’ shields (schilden) painted with eponymous devices, the anonymous poet contends that less important than the martial instrumentalities of such armaments were their linguistic affordances; in representing its bearer’s identity, to such an extent that the schild was hung up as a trophy, memorial, or epitaph of his past accomplishments, the shield became metonymic of the memorializing and aggrandizing functions of the pictures painted upon them. Hence, the incorporation of schild into schilder (not shield-bearer but painter or picturer) and schildery (not shield-bearing or shield-making but painting or picturing): schild’s warlike connotations are transmuted into the more peaceful ones associated with schilderconst.¹⁸

A third point of comparison between Ancients and Moderns has to do with their like concern for mastery over the full range of descriptive subjects and pictorial effects comprised by the imitation of nature. This comparative exercise takes us from the dedicatory texts to the prefaces proper. The “Preface on the foundation of the noble, free art of painting” concludes with a list of ancient subjects and effects that incorporates critical categories such as beauty, mimetic precision, invention, cleverness or wit, and grace, technical categories such as facility, fine coloring, good measure or proportion, skill at copying, and the ability to paint large or small things, facultative categories such as painting after the life what the eyes see and painting from memory, subject categories such as human figures, affects, animals, landscape, fruit and flowers, and, as a subcategory of these subjects, the moral quality of profundity. Van Mander then considers how this list has been assimilated and revived by the Italians and the Netherlanders: the widely diverse representational categories explored by the Ancients are reclassified and compressed, resulting in a new roster more closely resembling the specialized pictorial genres practiced by the generation of Dutch painters active just after (and partially trained by) Van Mander. That he designates these various categories, both ancient and modern, verscheydenheden speaks to his sense of his contemporaries, Netherlanders in particular, as heirs to a system of painting that, even while placing great value on “figures and Histories,” yet acknowledges the collateral value to be found in skilled painting of other kinds of things. In making his case, Van Mander once again transposes from the register of war to that of art; although he initially analogizes painters to bold principes who persuade their troops to fight valorously, he ultimately encourages them to “achieve a singular mastery in our Arts, which he will attain without any danger, battle, or shedding of blood, if earnestly, with constant effort, he but avail himself of magnanimous Nature.”¹⁹ The reference to Nature is meant not only to encourage painters to cultivate their natural abilities, their God-given gifts, but also refers to the many things that Nature gives the painter to see and describe. The ideal result would be a painter capable of portraying everything, but since such persons are few and far between, Van Mander counsels the aspiring painter to be pragmatic, to perfect in himself whatever seems capable of perfection:

As Roman Leaders were formerly wont to do, who through artful exhortation could discern from the shaking of their soldiers’ spears how their courage had been awakened and brought to life, so I adjure them to step forth intrepidly and take hold at first of the most special part of the Arts, namely, that they learn how to dispose a Human figure, and finally, that they also embrace all the concomitant parts [of the Arts], or otherwise, if Nature and Spirit are unwilling to permit, some special part, in order to become excellent at it: for it does not happen daily that a single person is empowered to learn, grasp, comprehend everything, or become proficient in all things.

Thus one finds our Art to have proceeded since olden days or Ancient times: that one in one thing, and another in another thing has been an abler and better Master, as one will find in their lives …. One will also find the same varieties (verscheydenheden) amongst contemporary Italians and Netherlanders, here too many to recount: whereby the Young shall be taught to persevere in the Art, to seize that which Nature offers most readily. If not perfection in figures and Histories, so may it be Animals, Kitchens, Fruits, Flowers, Landscapes, Buildings, Perspectives, Cartouches, Grotesques, Night Scenes, Fires, Portraits after the life, Sea Pieces, and Ships, or to paint something else in this wise.²⁰

The term verscheydenheden appears at least twice elsewhere in the Schilder-Boeck: in the “Life of Baccio Bandinelli,” it refers to the “varieties of coloring and marking” (“verscheydenheden van coloreringen en vlecken”) displayed by Baccio in his Leda with Castor and Pollux, painted to rival Michelangelo’s Leda; counterposed to the terms “mixing and tempering” (“vermeninghen en temperinghen”), verscheydenheden implicitly refers to Baccio’s compulsion to show himself as various in his technical abilities, emulous of Michelangelo yet singularly different from him.²¹ In the “Life of Lucas van Leyden,” the term refers to “varieties of facial types and costumes as per the Old Law/Testament” (“verscheydenheden van tronien en cleedingen na den ouden Wet”), to be seen in the master’s prints, no two of which appear alike as regards faces and apparel (“al meest d’een d’ander niet ghelijckende”). This is why Italian masters make a habit of copying Lucas’s prints, states Van Mander, who then deplores their efforts to conceal their indebtedness to Lucas.²² By contrast, related terms such as verscheydenheyt (variety, rooted in concepts of difference, distinction, diversity) and verscheyden (various, distinct, diverse, sundry) are ubiquitous throughout the Schilder-Boeck, which surely indicates that verscheydenheden derives from them, being the plural of one and the noun adjunct of the other. On this account, Van Mander’s conception of the many “parts” of schilderconst—which the aspiring painter must cultivate, inasmuch as he is able, if he is “fully to avail himself of magnanimous Nature”—can be thought to originate from his embrace of variety as a key principle of art. By rooting the parts of painting in a notion of variety so capacious that it seems to denominate everything visible and paintable, Van Mander declares that he places a premium on the painter’s all-encompassing powers of differentiation. Indeed, the beauty of nature, and therefore the beauty of schilderconst, as he affirms in chapter 5 of the Grondt, “Van der Ordinanty ende Inventy der Historien” (On the Ordonnance and Invention of Histories), comes from variety.²³

The Grondt examines all the parts of painting enumerated in the Preface, some passingly, others, such as history, landscape, and animals (as well as affects), to which entire chapters are dedicated, at far greater length. As becomes clear from the mutual relationship of these chapters and their constituent topics, two subject categories—history and landscape—incorporate the greatest variety of describable things; Van Mander appraises their many points of connection and commonalities of theme in chapters 5 and 8, respectively, “On Ordonnance” and “On Landscape.”²⁴ His conviction that the verscheydenheden in toto can potentially be comprised by history and, to the extent that history and landscape are profoundly complementary, also by landscape, perhaps derives from the conception of history he endorses implicitly in the Grondt and explicitly in his posthumous published translation of Ieronimus Benzonius, De historie, van de Nieuwe Weerelt, te weten, de beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (History of the New World, that is, description of the West Indies) (Haarlem: Paschier van Wesbusch, 1610) and his two poems in praise of Haarlem, the first published in 1610, the second earlier, in 1596, known today from an edition of two manuscript transcriptions of these poems, copied from these lost publications.²⁵ Both texts can be characterized loosely as chorographies, an historical genre that chronicles or, better, inventories a region’s noteworthy events by setting them in the larger descriptive context of its topographical features, major edifices, manufactured and commercial goods, networks of trade, and its inhabitants’ appearance, character, customs, and manners of dress. It is under the sign of this type of history, which subsumes narration into a discursive field descriptive in form and function, that the historical genus valorized in the Preface and the historical ordonnance championed in interlinked chapters 5 and 8 of the Grondt can best be understood.

The dedications to Wijntgis, Razet, Ferreris, Ban and Vlasman, Fallet, and Ketel, supplemented by remarks in the prefaces that directly follow, serve to convey a further analogy between Ancients and Moderns: in showing how a shared love of painting unites liefhebbers and schilders, just as it did in ancient times, how such men, then and now, are ruled by “the nature of our Arts, which seek out and love whatever is like them, that is, civility and friendship,”²⁶ and how both groups tend to gravitate appreciatively toward the technical and material aspects of schilderconst (i.e., “Brush-strokes and Panels”),²⁷ Van Mander posits a relation between mind and hand that privileges the latter, construing it as the bodily instrument whereby the mind’s images are given material expression. Van Mander’s conception of the hand’s share in the mental process of fashioning images is essentially Aristotelian:²⁸

And just as Plutarch says that friendship is the noblest [thing] in Nature, so is our Schilder-const glad to be familiar with so noble a virtue, in that Schilder-gheest (the Painter’s spirit), like the Poet’s, cannot endure the very toxic violent shocks [of Envy], but instead is pleased to be calm and still, since thought’s considered / imagined mental images (“d’inbeeldinghen”) through their secret operation must first deliberate and decide, as in the City Hall of a Bourgeois City, what the hands, like compliant servitors (“ghehoorsaem dienaren”), must then execute and do.²⁹

The term ghehoorsaem (compliant, acquiescent, amenable) implies that the hands, more than mere instruments, are willing agents of the mind’s power of imagination, through which the private mental images constitutive of its secret operations are transformed by manual skill into material images that are public and legible. As a matter of fact, Van Mander grants the hand a functional identity at once cognitive and executive everywhere in the Schilder-Boeck; the dedications and prefaces preview this tendency to valorize the hand’s agency. Praising Razet’s large collection of paintings, for example, he calls them “silent voices … painted by various learned, artful hands.”³⁰ In this formulation, art and erudition are as if lodged in the hands, which function as metonyms for the painters who wield them and, implicitly, for the “manners of hand” (handelinghen) representative of those same painters.

If the dedicatory epistles work collectively, as well as in tandem with the prefaces and subsequent lives, to put forward certain arguments about the nature and modi operandi of ancient and modern schilderconst, what sorts of questions do the prefaces conjointly pose? There are three: what is the nature of schilderconst; how does it relate to poëterije (poetry); and when did it originate, relative to other consten (arts)? The Preface to “Lives of the Ancient Illustrious Painters, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman” provides a succinct answer to the first question, which resonates with the fuller account developed in the Schilder-Boeck as a whole. Schilderconst consists in the shadowing forth of a verisimilar mirror image that captures the apparent likeness of some person(s) or thing(s). This processual definition, which ascribes to painting the power of fixing an “appearance of being” (“den schijn van het zijn”) that would otherwise be as fleeting as a shadow, beyond the compass of memory, ultimately derives from Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura II.26, combined with Quintilian’s account of the origins of painting in De institutione oratoria X.ii.7 and Pliny’s in Naturalis historia XXX.15:³¹

Some have subtly contrived [to say] that she arose from Narcissus, who was transformed into a flower, for she is the flower of all the Arts, so that the whole of the Fable of Narcissus can, not inopportunely, be explained in this wise: for what may better rhyme with the fine form of this Youth shadowed forth in the Crystal-clear fountain, than a Figure artfully painted and done after the life by the learned hand of a Painter rich in Art? Even while writing this, I am astonished by how fitting this [contrivance] is, given that I do indeed find our Art to be a shadow of true being, comparable to the appearance of that which exists: for as some men write, this noble, Heaven-sent gift of nature is the daughter of Shadow. My witness is the learned Quintilian, whose opinion is that she originates from the shadows cast by the Sun, wherefore the Ancients are thought to have captured the head’s chief features by outlining these shadows. Pliny, too, in his noted thirty-fifth book, chapter 12, recounts how the daughter of a potter, Deburates, being enamored of a Youth, drew with a coal the profile of his face shadowed by candlelight upon a wall, in order to have him ever before the eyes and in mind; from which [drawing] her father is thought to have made and baked the first face in clay relief. For which reason the art of Drawing (Teycken-const) ought to be celebrated for having been born before Sculpture: and on this account, Painting ought to have been produced by Phoebus or Vulcan, namely, from the shadows cast by the Sun or fire.³²

These anecdotes also introduce one of Van Mander’s most important collateral themes—the relation between teyckenconst and schilderconst—which is addressed in chapters 2, “Van het teyckenen, ofte Teycken-const” (On drawing, or the Art of Delineating), and 12, “Van wel schilderen, oft Coloreren” (On painting well, or Coloring).

All six prefaces take for granted the close affiliation between painting and poetry, but the Preface to the Wtlegghingh draws the most explicit, if tried and true, parallels. The context for Van Mander’s prefatory remarks is set in the dedicatory epistle, addressed to Gedeon Fallet. Here he borrows his chief points from Philostratus the Elder’s introduction to the Imagines and Simonides of Ceos’s comparison of painting to mute poetry, cited by Plutarch in De gloria Atheniensium III.346.³³ He begins by observing that painting, when it “exemplifies and describes the features and deeds of virtuous admirable Men,” joins forces with history and poetry, since they, too, strive after truth and moral instruction.³⁴ He then narrows his focus exclusively to painting and poetry:

For just as the Painter by means of brush-strokes gives past events to be known as if they were present, so does the Poet with beautifully voiced reasons and discriminating words: wherefore they but differ in the materials of representation and portrayal. Thus the writer who runs the course of his narratives in good form is thanked neither less nor more than the Painter who places his work before the eyes, bringing it skillfully to pass with soul-stirring figurations.³⁵

Even the silence of painting is like poetry, in that the ancient Greeks, following Euripides’s dictum, “Silence is the answer of the wise,” favored sayings that used the fewest words to express the richest meanings. Notable is the way Van Mander precisely distinguishes between the material means of representation and then goes on to imply that painting and poetry exercise a reciprocal claim on those means: well-executed narratives convey actions effectively when they partake of a “good form / formation” (i.e., visualize them); well-painted pictures move the beholder when they include beeldinghen (i.e., figurations / rhetorical figures). The goal shared by painters and poets, it would seem, is the effect of enargeia—vivid likeness, visual presence, sensory immediacy.

The Preface proper elaborates upon these parallels by insisting that Poetry is a visual art that operates in and through images. When it artfully praises virtue or condemns vice, it does so by making the two paths visible (“te schouwen”). Poetry achieves its salutary effects by picturing men to themselves in a form at once stirring and aspirational:

Yes, [Poetry] is so entire that I am impelled to say that wise Poetic devices, profound and inspired poems, have an exceptionally potent and beneficial force, in that they gratify the heart by tickling the ear, sweetly picturing to Man a better image of himself, tempering his thought, taming desire and lust, making sense constant, stilling the heart, concentrating the spirt, refining morals, and finally curing the harmful sicknesses of the Soul: so that sound and pure in will, word, and work, armed with innocence, Manful, unmoved and unhindered, he may traverse the thousand-fold perilous, dire thieving woods, and the murderous, dark straying paths of this world, and at long last reach peace of spirit and rest of Soul.³⁶

Scriptural poetry uses a different kind of image to produce a like effect, mixing visual elements incongruously to cue a saying’s deeply symbolic, allegorical sense: as when, in Judges 9:8–15, the trees go to anoint a king; or, in 4 Kings 14:9–10, the thistle asks the cedar to give his daughter in marriage to the thistle’s son; or, in 1 Chronicles 16:32–33, the seas roar and the fields rejoice, praising the Lord. In a similar fashion, the New Testament parables portray the word of God as if he were speaking in images; Van Mander paraphrases and partially elides the parables of the sower and the oversown cockle:

Now one must yet consider what may otherwise be meant and imported. As elsewhere the word of God is portrayed (afghebeeldt) to us with a grain seed for sowing, the unenlightened with a pathway, the inconstant with stony ground, the eagerly desirous with thorns, the fearful of God with good soil, the Word with the Field, the Angels with the Reapers, the Last Judgment with the Harvest, Hell with the Bonfire, Heaven with the barn, good persons with Wheat, bad persons with cockles, as also, [respectively,] with Sheep and Goats.³⁷

That Van Mander thinks of these poetic images as painted by other means, not with pigments but with words whose descriptive potential has been maximized, becomes even more apparent when he segues from Scripture to Ovid. Speaking about Ovid’s Verander-Boeck (Book of Metamorphoses), he states: “There skillfully with keen observation every property [of things] and many-colored contrivances are with very great Art coupled together.”³⁸ He likens the Metamorphoses to a “clear lustrous mirror of instruction placed before the [reader-viewer’s] eyes,” for the purpose of re-forming him, so that he finds himself “in form much improved, transformed, or reshaped.”³⁹

Poetry, then, is to be appreciated as a genus of image-making very closely paired with schilderconst, distinguishable from it only materially, through its reliance on words rather than pigments, brushes, and panels. This brings us to the third topic addressed by the prefaces—the origins of painting, as this pertains to its relation to its sister arts, such as sculpture, and to the liberal arts. Given Van Mander’s conception of poetry as a kind of image-making, it perhaps comes as no surprise to find him arguing in the Preface to Book II that schilderconst must be at least as old as the Trojan War since Homer could not possibly have described the Shield of Achilles in so vivid, lively, and detailed a way, had painting not existed to guide him. Even if the shield was engraved and enameled rather than actually painted, the assumption of painting’s priority over Homer’s poetry would remain irrefragable:

Now, even if one were to say that this work was engraved and baked with enamels, rather than painted, be that as it may, it were not possible to have brought into the work all the things recounted had the art of drawing (Teycken-const) not been in a state of great perfection: and if [drawing] was in great perfection, it were impossible for painting not to have already been brought forth alongside, and not imperfectly, as is well to be deduced …. Now, having taken this into consideration, one would think that Homer could not write so palpably and vividly about the art of Drawing or Painting (“Teycken oft Schilder-const”), had they not been common currency, known beforehand; and indeed, he could not have expatiated so fully about them had they not been richly and highly in practice and use, at the very least in his own time.⁴⁰

Van Mander then extends his timeline back to the time of Lycurgus, 872 years before the birth of Christ, and finally hypothesizes that schilderconst may predate the Flood, since only 200 years after it, Belus, son of Nimrod, caused a figure to be made, which became the first idol. In short, painting must have been a clever invention of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, from whom it spread to the Greeks and the Romans who revered it as a “noble, free Art, not as a guild-regulated craft,” and as a “silent sister of very spirited Poetry.”⁴¹ This extended defense of painting’s venerable age and temporal priority to all other arts and crafts, with the possible exception of poetry, bolsters his opening assertion, in the Preface to the Grondt, that the “genius-begetting, noble art of Painting [is] the natural nursemaid of all virtuous Arts and sciences.” This is why she was held in such high honor by ancient Greek and Roman “Lords and men of the highest learning.” Van Mander then coyly, if modestly, adds: “But whether in or through this association our exceptional art of Painting now bestows through her worthy presence or company a greater honor upon the other Arts than she formerly received from association with them, what I feel about this I shall gladly keep quiet, that I not be chided by reproving eyes, or badly thanked, and in order not to foment many a dispute.”⁴² The Grondt, viewed through the closely woven web of dedicatory epistles and prefaces, can be seen formally to justify schilderconst’s ancient status and privileges, her liberal bona fides, which Van Mander, chapter by chapter, fully situates in the painter’s entwined mind, heart, and hand.

2 The Sources, Title-Page, and Scope of the Grondt

Van Mander’s conviction that schilderconst musters the schilder’s mind, heart, and hand, issuing from their confluent agencies, largely derives from Domenicus Lampsonius’s efforts to codify a canon of Netherlandish masters in the print cycle he assembled in collaboration with the print publisher Hieronymus Cock. Titled Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae Inferioris effigies (Some Effigies of Celebrated Netherlandish Painters), this series of viri illustres consists of portraits of deceased painters, starting with Hubert and Jan van Eyck and ending with Hieronymus Cock, who died before the Effigies was finally issued in 1572.⁴³ Lampsonius supplied the Latin epitaphs that accompany the mortuary images and function as a summary of each painter’s character and achievements. Van Mander, who knew these prints intimately, translated many of the epitaphs, incorporating many of them as perorations to the lives of masters who had died before he penned the Schilder-Boeck.

Lampsonius, as Edward Wouk has recently argued, conceived of the Effigies as a Netherlandish version of the Aeneid: Virgil’s poem recounts the origins of Rome, just as Lampsonius’s concatenated epitaphs tell the story of Netherlandish art, which is seen to arise fully formed, as if already mature, when the Van Eycks promulgate the new medium and technique of oil painting.⁴⁴ At several points in the series, praise is lavished on masters who harmonize the workings of the mind, heart, and hand: for instance, the landscape painter Lucas Gassel of Helmond receives commendation for leading men’s minds to embrace honesty and integrity and, in equal measure, for leading their hearts to love good things. In proof, Lampsonius credits Gassel’s skillful hand with having engendered in him his own “love of graphice (picturing).”⁴⁵ Here as with many other painters in the series, Gassel proudly displays the tools of his art, tightly gripping a palette, brushes, and maulstick. Lampsonius calls upon Pieter Bruegel to “be blessed for your spirit, as you are blessed in your skill.”⁴⁶ The Dutch cognate for the Latin animo is gheest, Van Mander’s term of choice for masters notable for their ready wit and ingenuity of invention. Most remarkable is Jan van Amstel’s epitaph: in a rejoinder to Michelangelo’s disparaging dictum, publicized by Anton Francesco Doni in Il Disegno, that Netherlandish painters lack rational intelligence, having their brain in their hands, not their heads, Lampsonius turns disparagement into praise for Van Amstel’s skilled art of landscape painting.⁴⁷ The aphorism may be true, avows Lampsonius, but the condition it describes is laudable: “It is said not without reason that the Italian has his brain in his head, but the Belgian has his brain in his active hand. Therefore, the hand of Jan favored painting fields well, rather than his head knowing how to paint badly either men or gods.”⁴⁸ Whereas Michelangelo alleges that Netherlandish art is mindless, Lampsonius counters that Van Amstel’s “active hand” is itself mindful, for it knows how to paint fields well and favors landscape over inaptly and ineptly painted history.⁴⁹ Lampsonius’s reference to landscape as docta in the Herri met de Bles epitaph, and his designation of Gassel’s hand as docta, speak to a notion of manual virtuosity that roundly informs Van Mander’s many invocations of the “gheleerde hant” (learned hand) throughout the Schilder-Boeck.⁵⁰ Van Mander uses the phrase to bestow praise and honor on masters such as Hendrick Goltzius whose practiced burin-hand combines inordinate skill with facile grace, assiduity (vlijt) with spirit (gheest).⁵¹ In the dedication of Book II to Razet, cited above, his collection of painted works by “various learned, artful hands” serves to confirm his discriminating love of schilderconst.⁵² The Schilder-Boeck as a whole greatly elaborates upon the apparatus of canon-formation promulgated by Lampsonius and Cock.

But what of the Grondt? Van Mander had several models ready to hand, such as the poems on art published by his former teacher, the poet-painter Lucas de Heere of Ghent, in Den hof en boomgaerd der poësiën, inhoudende menigherley soorten van Poetijckelicke blommen (Garden and Orchard of Poetry, Containing Many Sorts of Poetic Blooms) (Ghent: Ghileyn Manilius, 1565), which in turn inspired the civic administrator Marcus van Vaernewyck, likewise of Ghent, to include extensive notes on art in Den spieghel der Nederlandscher audtheyt, inhoudende de constructie, oft vergaderinghe van Belgis (Mirror of Netherlandish Antiquity, Containing the Construction, or Aggregation of Belgium) (Ghent: Gheeraert van Salenson, 1568).⁵³ In the Preface to Book IV, Het leven der doorluchtighe Nederlandtsche, en Hoogh-duytsche schilders … Alles tot lust, vermaeck, en nut der Schilders, en Schilder-const beminders (Lives of the illustrious Netherlandish and High-German painters … All for the pleasure, delight, and use of Painters and lovers of Painting), Van Mander mentions that he had tried in vain to get hold of De Heere’s lives of esteemed Northern painters, written in verse, left incomplete, and now untraceable, “which not least would otherwise have been a great help to me, in those particulars that required great effort to track down and secure.”⁵⁴ It is easy to imagine how De Heere’s dual project of composing poems on art and versified lives of artists might have functioned as a prototype for the Schilder-Boeck’s more complex combination of a theoretical poem on art and three sets of parallel lives of painters, ancient, Italian, and Northern.

The more systematic format of Van Mander’s Grondt, with its progression from a long opening exhortation that makes reference, both implicit and explicit, to literary works the aspiring painter should know as potential sources of invention, to chapters on the composition (or, as Van Mander puts it, “ordonnance”) of history and landscape, to chapters on the painter’s chief ornaments—varieties of animal, fabric, and well sorted or mixed colors—broadly follows the tripartite schema of classical rhetorical treatises, which generally move from invention (the speaker’s selection of topics), to disposition (orderly presentation of those topics), to eloquence or elocution (ornamentation and amplification of those same topics). However, the emphasis Van Mander places on the process of amplification, on descriptive effects and ornaments, and on what might be termed feats of eloquent coloring suggests that the Grondt could better be compared to treatises on poetics, such as Matthijs de Caslelein’s De const van rhetoriken (Art of Rhetorics) (Ghent: Jan Cauwel, 1555).⁵⁵ De Castelein’s verse treatise invokes the rhetorical canons and figures of thought and speech associated with classical rhetoric and the Aristotelian and Ciceronian functions of docere, delectare, and movere (to instruct, delight, and move), but it attaches these parts and devices to the so-called “arts de second rhétorique” (arts of the second rhetoric), colorful elocution above all. Amongst a plethora of figurative expressions, description is favored as an affective device that engenders vivid, richly detailed images, making them seem as if palpably present.⁵⁶ In all these respects, De Castelein’s poetic treatise on the art of poetry, surely well known to Van Mander, who was himself a gifted poet and rhetorician, might have offered a welcome exemplar, template, or gauge for his poem on schilderconst. After all, the Grondt is a poetic tour de force, replete with well-appointed and skillfully deployed figures—apostrophe, ekphrasis, enargeia, metaphor, metonymy, paradox, paronomasia, personification, prosopopoeia, simile, synecdoche, et al.—marshaled to argue for the high, indeed foundational status of the art of painting amongst the other visual arts, and for its close kinship with the liberal arts.

Equally pivotal for Van Mander was the theoretical preface to Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ piu eccellenti Pittori, Scultori et Architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), 3 vols. (Florence: Giunti, 1568). Titled “Introduzzione … alle tre Arti del Disegno, cioè Architettura, Pittura, et Scoltura,” the preface explains how disegno (drawing, delineation) operates both as a principle of visual invention that launches the allied processes of painting, sculpture, and architecture, and as the practical means whereby such invention is made materially manifest.⁵⁷ The “Introduzzione” initiates the tripartite sequence of lives that chronicles the gradual improvement and, in the final of three ages, the perfection of the “three arts of disegno, namely, Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture,” between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. Van Mander transformed Vasari’s theoretical preface into a comprehensive poem on painting and its parts, but like Vasari, he then sutured his theoretical statement to sequences of lives in which the poem’s critical categories are seen to play out. Vasari’s three ages of Italian art became three distinct cultural histories of art—Ancient, Italian, Netherlandish—on the model of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, as Van Mander explains in the “Life of Apollodorus,” in Schilder-Boeck, Book II: “Just as I, like the excellent Writer Plutarch, planned to compare the illustrious Men, Greek and Italian, one against the other, so should it serve, not unfitly, to set the Athenian Apollodorus opposite Michelangelo.”⁵⁸ In Grondt, chapter 8, “Van der Reflecty, Reverberacy, teghen-glans oft weerschijn” (On Reflection, Reverberation, re-reflected luster, or re-reflection), he gives further information on the genesis of his multipart book. As there were three great schools of ancient painting—Attic, Ionian, and Sicyonian—so Van Mander treats the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Italians (Florentines, Romans, Venetians, and Lombards), and the Northerners (Netherlandish and High German) as representatives of three great schools of art, drawing an explicit parallel between the arts of Sicyon and that of Batavia (the term used by Tacitus in his Germania for the Dutch Rhineland, i.e., the Netherlands):

Furthermore, in that Pictura is now as favorable to Batavia,

As she formerly was to Sicyon,

So has nature come to shake forth gifts from out of her lap

Upon the harbor town of Haarlem.

Into the bosoms of two residents living there;

One of them by rights a Painter, whose

Plato’s Cave, wherein is Art of no common strain,

Is to be found in Amsterdam.⁵⁹

Underlying the division of painting into three historical schools must be Quintilian’s distinction between oratorical genres and styles, in Book XIII, chapter 10 of the Institutio oratoria.⁶⁰ First and foremost, Quintilian distinguishes between the Attic and Latin methods of argumentation and delivery.

This brief selection of key source texts makes all the more apparent the novel format and argument of the Schilder-Boeck. Nothing quite like his treatise had ever been published: a theoretical poem in fourteen chapters (Book I), followed by parallel histories of art (Books II–IV) that exemplify the critical categories introduced in Book I by embedding them in artists’ lives, in turn supplemented by two smaller treatises on allegorical image-making (Books V–VI), both of which, by expounding upon the many mythopoetic figures that punctuate the Grondt and providing the rationale for Van Mander’s method of personification, allow the reader to circle back to his symbolic usage throughout the Grondt. The mutual referentiality of the six books, the intercalation of topics and themes within and across them, justifies the characterization of the Schilder-Boeck as an intertext.

The title-page to the book at large consists of elements drawn from its several books, most of all from the principles set out in the Grondt (Fig. 1).⁶¹ Above is the winged ox of the Guild of Saint Luke, with the guild’s metadevice, three shields emblazoned upon a larger shield, hanging from its neck. If the ox signifies the labor of schilderconst (Wtbeeldinghe, chapter 2, fol. 128r), the seraphic head (identified in Book IV, “Life of Cornelis Ketel,” fol. 276v, as a “Seraphinnen hoofd,” “Seraphim’s head,” or alternatively, a “Lof-geest,” “spirit of praise”) alludes to the divine source of praiseworthy art, namely, to genius or native ability (Grondt, chapter 1, stanzas 1 and 7), which must be combined with diligent labor if the would-be painter wishes to achieve perfection. Flanking the ox, two putti distribute a palm frond and a laurel wreath, the signs of perfection duly honored. At right the personification of schilderconst, maulstick, brushes, and palette in hand, looks intently at the personification across from her, portraying her features after the life (“Life of Cornelis Ketel,” fols. 276v, 278v, and 279v). This many-breasted figure, wearing a crenelated crown, raising a scepter, and leaning against a terrestrial orb, can be identified as both the mother goddess Cybele and the earth goddess Tellus, who jointly embody Nature (Wtbeeldinge, fol. 125v). The Art of Painting thus exemplifies the crucial importance of working after living nature, the “lodestar of picturing, its foundation stone and target” (Grondt, chapter 2, stanza 13).⁶² The child who holds up Painting’s panel or canvas, playing the part of her easel, turns either toward the putto crowning him with laurel or toward Nature: he stands for the “students of Art born of Nature” (Grondt, chapter 11, stanza 1: “Ghy der Natuer oorspronckscher Const Scholieren”), who “attend to the master’s palette and brushes” (Grondt, chapter 1, stanza 48: “Hebt acht op Meesters Pallet en Pinceelen”), whose “labor yield[s] its sweet rewards” (Grondt, chapter 1, stanza 12: “Dan baert arbeydt versoetende profijten”).

Below the topmost figures stand two further personifications: at the right, aligned with Painting and her laureate student, Fame sounds the trumpet of their worthy deeds, while holding stationary the trumpet of misdeeds (Wtlegginghe, fols. 99v–101r); that she looks leftward, as if staring at the titular text, signals that securing the fame of the pictorial arts, the art of painting in particular, and of its practitioners, was the chief aim of the Schilder-Boeck. As Painting gazes at Nature, so Fame may be gazing at the woman to her right, who draws or writes on a tablet, one sheet of paper curling over its top edge. Although she may be Clio, Muse of History, who would then allude to Van Mander’s three sets of parallel “Lives” that chronicle the histories of Ancient, Northern, and Italian painting, she more likely personifies teyckenconst, the “art of Drawing [that] encompasses all things, holding every Art within her measured skeins,” the art of “trac[ing] letters and characters” amongst them (Grondt, chapter 2, stanzas 1and 2).⁶³ Aligned with Cybele-Tellus-Nature, one of her breasts brightly spotlit, she may also portray teyckenconst as the “kind-hearted wet-nurse” who gives rise to all other arts and nourishes them (Grondt, chapter 2, stanza 2).⁶⁴ The essential sisterhood of teyckenconst and schilderconst, explicated in the Grondt, especially chapters 2 and 12, is briefly but potently summarized in the dedication of Book III of the Schilder-Boeck, the Italian “Lives,” to Van Mander’s close friend and patron Bartholomeus Ferreris. He asseverates that much effort must be expended to learn both the one and the other since they are jointly indispensable for the cultivation of European culture:

Worthy gentleman, and good friend, that there are many who in this present, all too ungrateful age claim with a minimum of discernment that commonplace operations are comparable with the very exceptional, heaven-sent gifts of nature, and expressly, that Teycken-const or Schilder-const, perfect at portraying nature, are not only easily learned and facile, but also quite unnecessary, comes from a coarse, perverse judgment. For inasmuch as in our populous Europe, people are accustomed to living civilly, honorably, and rationally, not as barbarians or beasts, so is nearly nothing more consequential and serviceable at mutually sustaining the small with the great, and the great with small, than the aforementioned Teycken-const or Schilder-const.⁶⁵

The reference to things great and small pertains not only to people of variable estate, the high-placed and the lowly, but also, as the dedicatory text goes on to argue, to the relation between the higher and lower arts, i.e., painting, glass-painting, and copperplate engraving on one hand, the skilled handicrafts on the other. I shall have more to say about this presently.

Together, the personifications that grace the title page make reference to the whole of the Schilder-Boeck, placing it under the sign of the tripartite Aristotelian rhetorical scheme of natura/ingenium (natural ability/genius), ars/doctrina (art as theory/instruction), and exercitatio (art as practical skill), respectively bodied forth by Nature, Painting and her student, and the activities of Painting and Drawing, for whom Nature functions in the title print as both the originating source and the object of representation. Codified by Cicero in De oratore II.162–178, and applied as a tractatio (systematic treatment) of the dramatic genres by Horace in Ars poëtica 408–412, this scheme provides the basic philosophical armature upon which Van Mander constructs his arguments about the nature, operations, and instruments whereby schilderconst is produced and perfected.⁶⁶ Far less conventional is his use of parallel construction to define the excellences of three pictorial traditions—the art of painting as practiced by the Ancients, the Italians, and the Netherlanders and High Germans, whose lives and works are compared in Books II–IV, in accordance with the theoretical criteria laid out in Book I. Van Mander adapted his method of argument-by-comparison from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and from the defense of analogical argument in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s De inventione, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, where these authors respectively advocate for the use of paradeigmata (paired paradigms), collationes (collatable exempla), and similitudines (evidentiary similitudes).⁶⁷

Begun in the early 1590s, certainly no later than 1596, and finished in June 1603, as the dedication to Melchior Wijntgis records, Book I, the Grondt, was designed to supply the terminology whereby the practitioners of schilderconst could be described and evaluated in the subsequent three books: in addition to the chapter on teyckenconst, there are chapters on bodily analogie/proportie (analogy, proportion), figural actitude (attitude, disposition), ordinanty/inventy of histories (ordonnance, invention), affecten (affects), reflecty (reflection), landtschap (landscape), beesten/dieren/voghels (cattle, animals, birds), laken/draperinghe (stuffs, drapery), sorteren der verwen (sorting of colors), and wel schilderen/coloreren (painting well, coloring). Chapter 1, a long exordium, exhortative in tone, mainly dealing with the nature and circumstances of the painter’s life and the mores of the workshop, initiates the sequence of fourteen chapters on the component parts of schilderconst.⁶⁸ Chapters 2–6 chiefly deal with the active human figure, the proportional arrangement of bodily members, the expressive coordination of the face and limbs, and the narrative distribution of multiple figures within an ambient or circumferential landscape setting.⁶⁹ Although color occasionally comes up as a topic, the emphasis falls on teyckenconst, how the figure and its circumstances may be delineated. Chapter 5 on history adumbrates chapter 8 on landscape, since Van Mander conceives of both subjects as mutually amplifying ornaments: embedded figural scenes enliven the landscape, and conversely, landscape mobilizes the eyes in ways that activate the figures. The transition from teyckenconst to schilderconst, from drawing in graphic media such as pen, pencil, chalk, pastel, or coal, to painting in oil colors occurs in chapter 7 on the dynamics of reflected light and color and how to represent them.⁷⁰ Chapters 8–10, on landscape, animals, and textiles respectively, focus on the problem of how to paint animate things or entities whose fugitive and lively qualities, encapsulated by the term gheestig (spirited), make them difficult to capture pictorially. This is the context in which Van Mander most fully grapples with the distinction between painting nae[r] t’leven (after the life) and uyt den gheest (from the spirit).⁷¹ Finally, chapters 11–14 examine colors, their material bases and representational uses, the methods of distinguishing amongst them, the modes of brushwork whereby they are applied, and the meanings, both heraldic and emblematic, that they have come to bear.⁷² Chapters 2, 7, and 12 give special thought to the process whereby mimetic images are formed; 2 and 12 to the kinds and degrees of “handling,” the manners of line or brushstroke best suited to confecting such images; 7 to the relation between natural and pictorial artifice; and chapters 7 and 9 to the optical appeal of paintings that exercise a persuasive, even deceptively mimetic effect upon the beholder. These topics and themes are discussed in the more detailed summary, “Précis of the Poem’s Fourteen Chapters,” that serves to round out my introductory remarks, and in the notes that accompany the prose translation of the Grondt.⁷³

As will be evident from this brief chapter-by-chapter summary of the Grondt, Van Mander leavens general principles with an abundant supply of visual particulars that vividly exemplify assorted representational means and ends. In doing so, he made full use of the vast array of firsthand knowledge gleaned during his apprenticeships with the poet-painter Lucas de Heere in Ghent (ca. 1566–1567) and the painter Pieter Vlerick in Kortrijk and Tournai (ca. 1567–1568), his study tour of Italy and long stay in Rome (1573–1577), his visit to Vienna where he and Bartholomeus Sprangher worked together on the triumphal arch marking Rudolf II’s Joyful Entry into the city (1577), and his many years as an occasional, then a professional painter in Flanders (1577–1583) and Haarlem (1583–1603).⁷⁴ Throughout the Schilder-Boeck, Van Mander acknowledges the kinship of teyckenconst and schilderconst with the lesser arts and trades (“Const[en] oft Ambacht[en]”), whose artisanal bona fides these higher arts elevate not only through their close affiliation to the liberal arts, but also through the exceptionally high level of manual and technical skill they demand from their gifted practitioners.⁷⁵ Van Mander clearly expresses this point of view in the dedication of Book III to Bartholomeus Ferreris, cited above. In stating that Drawing and Painting have the power to couple the small with the great, the great with the small, and to nourish them both, he refers also to the ways in which the higher arts confer status on the lower:

Hereby is very profitable coinage distinguished with effigies, coats of arms, and devices. Through this Mother of every ornament, all artful handiworks receive their highest, most perfect beauty, whether they be forged, cast, carved, incised, built, carpentered, masoned, woven, sewn, embroidered, draped, or wrought: accordingly, gold and silver, due to their subtle workmanship, are bought at half again above their estimated worth, and a copperplate is weighed up against a silver one. Indeed, had one a plate made of the poorest material or lead, and ‘twere surely covered over or painted by the admired Apelles, Parrhasius, or Zeuxis, then would it easily be worth its weight in fine coin of gold.⁷⁶

Aligned with this conception of the relation amongst drawing, painting, and the other image-based arts and trades is the disclaimer issued at the close of the Northern “Lives”: although he has focused here on painting, his original intention had been to include glass painters and copperplate engravers (“Glas-schrijvers en Plaet-snijders”), information about whom is instead dispersed throughout Book IV.⁷⁷ And at the start of the “Life of Joris Hoefnaghel,” he states that the visual arts, like a trade, provide insurance against the vicissitudes of fortune, since they can be practiced for money; the willingness of the social elite to let their children train in a “Const oft Ambacht” is a positive trait peculiar to Netherlanders:

I find that a better custom prevails among us Netherlanders than is in use with other peoples—namely, that parents, even when empowered by wealth, often get their children to learn one or other art or trade early in their youth; that can be wonderfully useful, especially in times of war and emigration. For we find that cruel fortune, the bane of this world, has less power over a skill than over riches, and that the art which one has learned in youth is often the last resort in necessity and a refuge of consolation, to avert the shipwreck of oppressive poverty.⁷⁸

Van Mander’s joint investment in the high art of schilderconst and in the lower consten, which benefit from the influence of the painter’s “clever wit” and higher faculties, sensible as they are to the “living images in [his] spirit, mind, and affection,” shines through the synoptic comment about him in Arnoldus Buchelius’s Diarium; having seen his tapestry designs in the Delft workshop of François Spierincx, Buchelius states: “This Spierincx was making much use of the designs and patterns of Karel Vermandre, citizen of Haarlem, excellent painter; whose genius, said [Spierincx], was so versatile that [Vermandre] might prescribe to masters of whatsoever art in what respect [their works] ought to be altered—to painters, sculptors, glass workers, tapestry weavers or embroiderers, architects, goldsmiths, textile makers.”⁷⁹ However, Van Mander also expends considerable energy to demarcate the boundary between schilderconst and the lesser, if contiguous, arts and crafts, the ambachten and handt-wercken. In the “Life of Pieter Vlerick,” for instance, as part of a diatribe against guild organizations that treat painting no differently than “coarse handicrafts and trades such as weaving, furriery, carpentry, smithing, and suchlike,” he laments:

O Pictura, noble and supreme bearer of genius in Nature, mother of all embellishments and wet nurse of all noble virtuous arts, who is not obliged to yield before any of your fellow sisters called the liberal arts, who was valued so highly by the noble Greeks and Romans and whose artful practitioners were so much welcomed and well received everywhere—and so gladly accepted as citizens by gentlemen and authorities. O, far too ungrateful present times, that on the insistence of clumsy bunglers has established in the towns such shameful laws and such envious regulations so that almost everywhere (excepting almost only Rome) a guild is made of the noble art of painting …. In Haarlem, where there have always been many noble spirits in our art, there are tinkers, tinsmiths, and old clothes traders included in the guild.⁸⁰

Each chapter of the Grondt starts with a general definition of the pictorial category to be discussed, followed by a plethora of visual examples that become increasingly specific, thus assisting the reader visually to epitomize the category in question; many of the chapters also incorporate a more or less detailed, circumstantial treatment of materials and techniques, even though the Grondt is a treatise on the theory and practice of schilderconst, not a practical handbook or an illustrative drawing- or picture-book. Van Mander relies throughout on ekphrasis, the rhetorical figure of description, of which he was a consummate master, to adduce the images he wants his readers to fashion in their mind’s eye. To enrich and intensify the process of visualization, and to ensure that his readers remember what they read, he eloquently musters the “colors” of poetry, applying the metrical and rhyme schemes of Italian ottava rima: his stanzas consist of eight lines, each line eleven syllables long, cadenced in “reghels mate”—a regular meter without caesura—and rhymed ab aa bb cc.⁸¹

3 Laying a Comparative Foundation for the Schilder-Boeck

The Grondt, as mentioned above, lays the groundwork for the sequential discussion of Ancient, Italian, and Northern art that follows in the parallel form of three sets of “Lives.” Take the critical category teyckenconst, which is defined in chapter 2, first expansively as the representational source of every image-based art, including the full spectrum of liberal arts, such as grammar, which transmit knowledge by recourse to letter-forms; and then more specifically as the conveyance of thoughts by means “drawing, drawing over, drawing round all that [the sense of] sight may apprehend within the limits of the world.”⁸² By stanza 6, in anticipation of chapters 3–6, Van Mander has narrowed his focus to the human figure; in stanza 9, he states that if the student wishes to draw and shade figures well, he must first find a competent master and closely follow his manner of handling coal, chalk, or pen and ink; and in stanza 10, he shifts emphasis to tonal techniques of washing and hatching on gray- or blue-tinted paper. Stanzas 14–16 affirm that nature is the ultimate source of every graceful “action, attitude, [or] fine foreshortening,” that invention, which Van Mander here equates with ordonnance (the disposition and distribution of human figures), results from drawing after nature and committing these drawings to the storehouse of memory, and that by drawing incessantly, not only from nature but also “from out of one’s self” (“uyt zijn selven doen”), one will eventually become a revered master worthy of being imitated.⁸³ Stanzas 9 and 14–16 thus envision a pedagogical cycle leading from the Meester and his “goede manier” (competent manner) to graceful Natuer, and from nature, memory, and the self in concert, to a masterful manner capable of leading the next generation of students back to Natuer. This sets the stage for his account, in stanza 20, of the manner of line best suited to delineating the flexion of a mobile body, namely, the swelling and tapering stroke that alters gradatim, thick to thin, which he presents as an epitome of grace. Complementarily, Van Mander briefly recounts the methods of rendering the body tonally or in color with a stylus made from chalk or pastel or a stump, and he closes as he opened, by placing painting in a lineage from drawing, and limning schilderconst as teyckenconst’s daughter.⁸⁴ Typical is the transition from a universal statement about the mimetic functions of teyckenconst to more particular discussion of selected objects and methods of representation (chapter 2 places emphasis on the human body) and of the materials and techniques whereby these objects may be portrayed convincingly, in ways that cleave close to nature even when they issue from “out of one’s self.”

Amongst the Greek and Roman painters, Apelles takes pride of place as the supreme master of teyckenconst, and Van Mander’s explanation of how and why this is the case serves to establish the ancient pedigree of the kind of line, moving thick to thin, that he valorizes at the close of chapter 2. In the “Life of Apelles,” the appraisal of teyckenconst turns on Pliny’s famous anecdote about the contest waged between Apelles and Protogenes to determine whose command of “a dexterous fine line/stroke” (“eenen behendigen dunnen treck”) was foremost.⁸⁵ Having called on the painter Protogenes in Rhodes, Apelles learns that he has just stepped out; finding an empty canvas on his easel, he leaves on it, as his calling-card, a finely brushed line in a single color. Returning home, Protogenes immediately recognizes the line as his rival’s, saying that “no one but Apelles could have made with color and brush so fine or subtle a line as this.”⁸⁶ He responds by painting an even finer line in a different color. Returning to the workshop and finding to his shame a line finer than his, Apelles takes a brush dipped in another color and paints a line so inimitably fine that it passes through the prior two. This third line, declares Van Mander, “clove the other two so deftly that no line more precise or subtle could possibly be executed.”⁸⁷ Rendered in paint, executed in lines, these three hatches were appreciated by knowledgeable viewers as joint tokens of teyckenconst and schilderconst: “This panel was left by them unchanged as a memorial, with just these three strokes, to the wonderment of those who saw it, especially those who understood the art of Drawing or the art of Painting.”⁸⁸ Van Mander calls attention to the hybridity of this collaboratively made picture, its liminal status, which freely oscillates between painting and drawing. The overlapping lines, each colored stroke thinner than the prior stroke, function like a fully resolved version of the swelling and tapering line canonized in chapter 2, its constituent elements made visible and distinct. Moreover, the lines have the force of signature strokes: Protogenes immediately recognizes Apelles in and through the line only he could have brushed, and then answers him in kind, with a line unique to his brush; in turn, Apelles responds with a line incontestably his. In this sense, the lines can be seen to advert to the process of drawing and/or painting “uyt zijn selven” (from out of oneself), likewise enunciated in chapter 2. Additionally, the almost symbiotic relation between teyckenconst and schilderconst that the lines disclose can be thought to evince another central theme of chapter 2: the filiation between these two species of pictorial practice. This is to say that the “Life of Apelles” takes up and exemplifies many of the chief features of teyckenconst introduced in the Grondt.

The “Life of Apelles,” even while referring back to chapter 2, also inverts its method of argumentation. Whereas it begins with an assertion about the representational function and force of teyckenconst and concludes by articulating various media and instruments, along with a specific kind of line, the “Life” starts with an anecdote about individuated lines as indices of technical expertise, opening out into a discussion of their mimetic force and function. Soon after telling the story of Apelles and Protogenes, Van Mander hazards a guess about the representational rather than abstract nature of the lines in question:

This is what Pliny says about it. But if I were freely to give voice here to my impressions: it seems to me that these were not simply drawn straight lines or strokes, as many nonpainters think, but rather the outline of a certain arm or leg, or indeed the profile of a face, or something of this sort, the which outline they had drawn very precisely, in some places crossing the other’s line with different colors, dubbed by Pliny “cleaving through”; for there are learned persons who, lacking a good knowledge of our art, write and speak without a grasp of it. And my opinion is confirmed by what Pliny attests: those who understood Schilder-const were greatly astonished and amazed. Wherefrom may well be thought that these lines which the two most exceptional, lofty masters of our art competed against each another to draw were artful outlines rather than simple lines; for many a schoolmaster, calligrapher, or nonpainter could draw by hand a straight line, oftentimes better than the world’s best painter, and for this be not much esteemed by the painters. To such an end, a yardstick or ruler may be used. But they who know about art admire and are moved whenever they see a subtle, artful outline drawn skillfully with exceptional understanding, wherein Teycken-const exists in the highest degree; but they would simply pass a straight line by, unremarked.⁸⁹

As chapter 2 centers on drawing the human body in motion, so Van Mander assimilates Apelles’s and Protogenes’s mobile lines to hatches brushed to circumscribe a figure’s limbs. In this respect, too, the “Life” extends, complicates, but also clarifies the content of chapter 2, showing that the Grondt, attuned as it is to contemporary pictorial practice, yet subscribes to Ancient norms.

Apelles’s counterpart in Book III, the Italian “Lives,” is Michelangelo, who, though he lacks his ancient forebear’s “quality of grace” (gracelijckheyt) or “lovable charm” (charis), is as nonpareil as he in teyckenconst.⁹⁰ Paraphrasing Vasari’s “Life of Michelangelo,” Van Mander summarizes the nature, power, and scope of the master’s teyckenconst in the capsule perorations on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Last Judgment. About the former, he says:

In sum, this whole work has been made in such a way, and is of such a kind, as to be the vessel of light or lamp of our Art, sufficient to illuminate the whole world, which formerly for many hundreds of years was passably blind to the true art of Drawing. No painter need wish to see greater perfection in invention, foreshortening, attitudes, beauty of nudes, and draperies: for here Art in the highest degree is brought to the furthest limit, as well appears from the uttermost beauty of the nude figures, projecting very saliently, living and moving, varied in age, who display oaken wreaths to signify the golden age.⁹¹

His assessment of the Last Judgment makes even clearer what Michelangelo’s teyckenconst entails: a single-minded focus on the human figure actively posed to enact every conceivable attitude.

Then he gave himself over further to serve Paul III, completing the Judgment with much assiduity, in which with a great manner he truly focused on the nudes, that is, on the beauty, perfect proportion, and forms of the human body, in every sort of attitude, herein surpassing everyone else, leaving aside joyful coloring, and a thousand other pleasantries, with which other painters effect pleasing concinnity, and also graceful invention in the ordering of his History.⁹²

In perfecting teyckenconst at the expense of “pleasing concinnity” (“vermackelijcken welstand”), in a way that sets him apart from every other painter, Michelangelo displays his resolute commitment to the principle of working “out of one’s self.” To demonstrate how total was his embrace of this precept, Van Mander recalls his warning to a young painter skilled at borrowing from other painters: the young man should instead “accustom himself to working ‘uyt zijn selven.’ ”⁹³ Michelangelo is like Apelles and very unlike him: it becomes increasingly clear as the Grondt progresses, especially in light of chapters 5 and 7–14, that Michelangelo has excluded from his practice of teyckenconst and schilderconst virtually every descriptive pictorial ornament (byvoechsel)—not least landscape and the sensual depiction of human flesh—whose presence invites and rewards close viewing.

If Michelangelo departs from ancient precedent, Hendrick Goltzius and Bartholomeus Sprangher, his counterparts amongst the contemporary Northern masters, are lauded for their Apelles-like ability to combine teyckenconst with gracelijckheyt.⁹⁴ The many parallels between Ancient and Northern masters, first adduced in the Preface to the Grondt, where a list of Ancient pictorial specialties is followed by an analogous list of Northern specialties, reach their climax in the “Lives” of Sprangher and Goltzius, whom Van Mander portrays as latter-day counterparts to Apelles.⁹⁵ By calling attention to their supreme command of teyckenconst, Van Mander also compares them to Michelangelo, very explicitly in the case of Sprangher, about whose life, consecrated to drawing and painting in the service of Rudolf II, he writes: “his works shall answer to the purpose of children, like those of Michelangelo, and shall offer up his name to eternity in the Temple of Fame.”⁹⁶ However, the quality of grace that permeates Sprangher’s art, placing him in a lineage from Apelles, and setting him side by side with “Raphael who was graceful in all things,” also differentiates him in this regard from Michelangelo whose teyckenconst lacked grace.⁹⁷ The implication is that Sprangher, who resembles Michelangelo and Raphael, thereby surpasses both. In truth, Van Mander attributes Sprangher’s meteoric rise as a court painter to his Apelles-like grace, with which he was gifted by nature from his earliest years:

In point of fact, from the very beginning a certain Apelles-like grace has played through all his works, so that his Venusian Pictura, being now joined by Harmonia, the daughter of Mars and Venus, through the unification of good coloring and sure, dexterous, ingenious drawing, is neither to be faulted with the least little thing, not a sandal’s creak, nor at all to be surpassed. Whereby Sprangher well deserves to have been taken up in so worthy a degree by the Roman Caesar who, being as much a lover of art as the great Alexander, has too [in Sprangher] his Apelles.⁹⁸

This laudation of Sprangher’s inimitably graceful drawing, which has now been enhanced by (or, better, harmonized with) fine coloring is licensed by an epitome of his art, the Banquet of the Gods (Marriage Feast of Cupid and Psyche) executed in pen, ink, and wash and issued as an engraving by Hendrick Goltzius in 1587 (Fig. 3):

Apropos of his drawing, he handles the pen in so exceptionally subtle a way that one knows no one like him, and in this I too follow the judgment of someone known above all others for his pen-handling, the singular Goltzius, who has said to me that he knows of no one to match [Sprangher]. As we have seen from various works here in this land, above all that splendid and wondrously well ordonnanced banquet of the Gods, or wedding feast of Psyche, which the learned hand and artful burin of Goltzius brought into the light in the year 1585 [sic].⁹⁹

Van Mander designed Sprangher’s “Life” to exemplify several aspects of teyckenconst recounted in Grondt, chapter 2: first of all, the twin sources of teyckenconst—natural ability, gifted by nature, and practical application, whereby aptitude is honed; second, expertise gained by drawing with various tools and materials, first coal and chalk, then pen and ink, finally in black and white pigments on blue-tinted paper. Van Mander puts this succinctly in stanzas 3 and 10:

The perfection of the art of Drawing must needs come forth

From a sound understanding, and understanding

Must [in turn] draw strength from practice, having taken root

In a spirit endued by nature, which, being

Ingenious and resourceful, fortifies [understanding] and deftly vivifies it.¹⁰⁰

You may do it all: hatch and wash

As your spirit inclines, with fiery effort,

Hastening to set your hand to copying

With Coal or Chalk, on Paper gray as ash,

Or on pale blue [Paper], heightening

And deepening: …¹⁰¹

A notable feature of the “Life of Sprangher” is the degree to which Van Mander emphasizes that he lacked a master worthy of instructing him: his abilities as a draftsman (and painter) are characterized as sui generis, emerging as they do from nature (i.e., from out of himself), where they lie dormant until practice and contingent circumstance bring them to light. Take the telling anecdote about the origins of Sprangher’s facility with pen and ink, then with pen, ink, wash, and white heightening on blue-tinted paper. Thus far, Sprangher had only drawn in coal or chalk, but compelled by a commission from the Pope, who wished to see modelli for an entire Passion series, he experimented with pen and ink, to brilliant effect: “having never before drawn with anything other than coal or chalk, he executed the whole of it in white and black on blue paper, twelve pieces in all: thus did the Pope bring Sprangher to draw with the pen, as one compelled thereto.”¹⁰² Medium by medium, technique by technique, Sprangher achieves facility in every branch of teyckenconst, rising to every challenge he encounters, by converting natural ability into practical expertise. His seemingly effortless facility is the result of “natural spirit” (“natuerlijcken gheest,” i.e., “spirit endued by nature”) given practical expression (oeffeningh, “practice, exercise”).¹⁰³

In the “Life of Hendrick Goltzius, excellent Painter, Copperplate Engraver, and Glass-Painter from Mulbracht,” Van Mander confirms his friend and colleague’s status as Europe’s foremost draftsman, a paragon of teyckenconst without equal; with reference to glass-painting and its sister arts, painting and copperplate engraving, he states: “for this Art, like painting and copperplate engraving, grows or has its perfection from Teycken-const, in which I know no one better than he, or anyone who has climbed higher or grown taller in stature above the common judgment.”¹⁰⁴ Goltzius, in everything he does as a teyckenaer (draftsman), exemplifies the best practices itemized in Grondt, chapter 2—for example, Van Mander’s precepts about working after the twin paradigms of graceful nature and comely manner:

Therefore, ‘twere good to find an accomplished Master

From the start, in order to accustom oneself to a comely manner.¹⁰⁵

‘Tis wondrous, the grace one sees Nature

Pour forth into life, from every side;

Here everything can be found that we might lack in ourselves ….¹⁰⁶

And this I have to say about [Goltzius], that from his youth onward he not only strove to follow the beauty or various forms of Nature, but also accustomed himself wonderfully to counterfeiting the various manners of hand (handelingen) of the best masters, such as Heemskerck, Frans Floris, Blocklandt, Federico Zuccaro, and finally Sprangher, whose spirited manner he followed very truly; and thereupon, he also engraved after him that splendid work, Sprangher’s heavenly banquet, overflowing with sweet and delectable nectar, conferring on both the draftsman and the engraver a like immortality.¹⁰⁷

The pleasing grace of Sprangher’s manner, the praiseworthy “Apellische gratie” lauded in his “Life,” here finds its appropriate expression in the “masterful force of Goltzius’s burin-hand” (“t’vermoghen der Graef-ijsers”), marked as it is by the swelling and tapering line that Grondt, chapter 2 considers synonymous with grace.

Furthermore, Goltzius is much appreciated throughout his “Life” for his ability to work “uyt zijn selven,” in ways that attest his protean imitative skill and technical invention. Van Mander acclaims his six-part series, the Life of the Virgin of 1593–1594, for its assimilation of Goltzius’s hand to multiple hands in images that appear to have been invented by the masters whose manners Goltzius imitates, but are in fact new images invented by him, in this sense sourced from out of himself: “but omitting many things for the sake of brevity, I shall recount the six pieces he wrought, having just come back from Italy: for thinking upon the manners of hand he had everywhere seen, he with his single hand displayed various hands of his own invention.”¹⁰⁸ Subsequently, he invents a new kind of pictorial image, launching a novel method of teyckenconst, hybrid to such a fault, executed partly in pen, partly in oil-color, on primed canvas the size of a large painting:

Hereafter, Goltzius had the idea of drawing with the pen on prepared canvas, for howsoever large the parchment sheets [on which he had previously drawn], they yet struck him as much too small, in respect of his great resolve and spirit. Therefore, he set about, drawing with the pen on canvas, [its surface] primed and quite large, the nude figure of a woman, with a laughing satyr nearby, very subtly and ingeniously done, and he also heightened it, touching the naked [limbs] in a few places with a bit of color, and then varnished it.¹⁰⁹

This picture, thus described, recalls the painted lines of Apelles and Protogenes, which occupied a liminal place somewhere between painting and drawing; in point of fact, its hybridity is more entangled, for Van Mander, by appending it to his discussion of Goltzius’s drawings on parchment, indicates that it is rendered, like them, in the manner of an engraving, with markedly swelling and tapering strokes of the pen. The work exhibits materials and techniques characteristic of a print, a drawing, and a painting, but is neither printed nor merely drawn, or simply painted. Newly invented by Goltzius, this kind of image is as singular to him as the invention of oil colors and the mirrorlike technique they enabled were particular to Jan van Eyck.¹¹⁰ It is in this specific sense fashioned quintessentially from out of himself. But like oil colors and, for that matter, copperplate engraving, this curious offshoot of teyckenconst also partakes of the status of a novum repertum (thing newly discovered), that community of technical inventions which were thought to distinguish the Moderns from the Ancients. The Ancients were masters of teyckenconst, but not in the way of the Italians, nor again in the way of the Northern masters, and certainly not in the way peculiar to Goltzius, who shares in the Apelles-like grace of Sprangher but also exceeds him on two fronts: his protean manner of imitation and his invention of a composite method of picturing, one part teyckenconst, one part schilderconst. The presentation of the critical category teyckenconst in Grondt, chapter 2, like that of historie in chapter 5, reflexy-const in chapter 7, landtschap in chapter 8, or coloreren in chapter 12, provides the discursive armature whereby these terms are meaningfully applied and inflected in the consecutive sequences of parallel “Lives.”

4 Key Terms and Critical Categories

Although Van Mander’s terminology is fully discussed in my annotations to the Grondt’s fourteen chapters, certain terms and categories require a more discursive treatment beyond the scope of a commentative note. In this section of the “Introduction,” I examine his usage of the terms schilder / schilderen (painter / painting, to paint; picturer / picturing, to picture) and manier (manner, virtually synonymous with handelingh, handling), and of the categories uyt zijn selven doen ([to work] from out of oneself), welstandt (concinnity, decorum, well-being), gheest and uyt den gheest (spirit and [to work] from the spirit), and wel schilderen (painting / to paint well).

5 Ekphrastic Usage in the Schilder-Boeck

The subsequent two sections of this introductory essay explore two further characteristic features of the Grondt: the why-and-wherefore of the many ekphrases (verbal descriptions of pictorial images) on which Van Mander centers his analyses of schilderconst; and his hybridized conception of history and landscape as mutually entangled pictorial types that engage the beholder by operating at the threshold between visual description and visual deception. To begin, let us consider his distinctive take on the relation between ekphrastic text and image or, more precisely, on the poetics of ekphrastic image-making, both in word and image. Van Mander’s ruling impulse throughout the Schilder-Boeck is to treat the artes (liberal arts) and the pictorial arts of painting, glass-engraving / -painting, and copperplate engraving as sister-arts, and to defend the art of picturing as fundamental, indeed as a crucial source that inspires and instrumentalizes every art and science that traffics in images. In this widest sense, the term schilderconst can be defined as the art of image-making, the principles of which underlie both the literary and the visual arts, rhetorica/poësis and pictura; but schilderconst, defined more narrowly, as we have seen, also refers to the art of painting, which is practiced by the mind, eye, and hand in unison, and expressed in and through a wide array of handelinghen (manners of hand).¹⁸⁵ As we shall see, Van Mander moves away from the neo-scholastic, neo-skeptical paradigm of the disputatio artium (dispute of the arts), substituting for it a kind of harmonia artium that embraces all image-based consten (arts) and places them tout court under the sign of schilderconst.¹⁸⁶

By the later sixteenth century, after the publication of Benedetto Varchi’s Due lezzioni and the republication of Vasari’s Vite (1568) under the joint auspices of the Accademia Fiorentina and the newly founded Accademia del Disegno, this ekphrastic practice of comparison across media—both by the artist and by the reader-viewer—had come to be codified as a philosophical exercise. Within humanist circles and academic societies, this procedure, based as it was on examining a topic in utramque partem (from this side and that, from all sides), came to be known as the disputatio atium or, in Italian, the disputa delle arti.¹⁸⁷ The notion that reciprocal contestation is a crucible in which the arts are tested and tempered had a broad spectrum of applications—not only to painting and rhetoric/poetics, but also to painting and sculpture, painting and printmaking, as well as venturing farther afield, to rhetoric/poetics and philosophy, law and medicine, law and theology, medicine and architecture, or, circling back to the visual arts, to governing principles such as graphice/disegno and colorito.¹⁸⁸

Van Mander notably diverges from this mock-combative mode of comparison. The Preface to the Grondt sets the stage for the book’s approach to the consonance of the arts:

The very restorative, inspiriting noble art of Painting, the natural nursemaid of all virtuous Arts and sciences (as Scholars well-versed in letters amply know) was once held in high honor and estate by the greatest Lords and men of the highest learning: indeed, so much esteemed by the ancient wise Greeks that in the time of the artful Painter Pamphilus they placed her in the same degree and on a par with the other liberal Arts. But whether in or through this association our exceptional art of Painting now bestows through her worthy presence or company a greater honor upon the other Arts than she formerly received from association with them, what I feel about this I shall gladly keep quiet, that I not be chided by reproving eyes, or badly thanked, and in order not to foment many a dispute. However, it is not to be gainsaid that she is well worthy of the place from which no one has ever cast her out, and that by rights she may indeed be called liberal.¹⁸⁹

Ekphrases play a major role throughout the Schilder-Boeck: Van Mander relies upon them to evaluate the practice of schilderconst, publicize epitomes of the art, and position it in relation to its sister arts. The term ekphrasis refers to one of the key figures of speech and thought, which was appreciated as a powerful instrument of affect and argumentation; both functions—stirring the emotions and putting forward an argument—were treated as criteria when comparing the respective merits of verbal and visual description as complementary methods of image-making. In the Pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium (formerly attributed to Cicero himself), these two functions—affective and argumentative—are construed as the figure’s most important tasks. The Pseudo-Cicero treats ekphrasis under two heads—demonstratio (ocular demonstration) and descriptio (vivid description)—consistently attaching it to the arousal of strong emotion and the exposition of consequences:

It is Ocular Demonstration when an event is so described in words that the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass vividly before the eyes. This we can effect by including what has preceded, followed, and accompanied the event itself, or by keeping steadily to its consequences or the attendant circumstances …. Through this kind of narrative, Ocular Demonstration is very useful in amplifying a matter and basing on it an appeal to pity, for it sets forth the whole incident and virtually brings it before our eyes.¹⁹⁰

So, too, vivid description elucidates the outcomes, often adverse, of an action, making them clearly visible, for the purpose of stirring indignation, pity, or some other emotion.¹⁹¹ Here the focus falls not only on figural action but also encompasses attendant circumstances (“rebus circumstantibus”), i.e., all that which surrounds or circumscribes the action, adjacencies such as the specifics of place and time. Van Mander utilizes ekphrasis in this expansive sense, for the vivid description of persons, things, or experiences, but also in its corollary and more particular meaning of the eloquent description of a work of visual art.¹⁹²

Although Van Mander often elaborates upon critical categories by referring the reader to works of art he has seen, either at first hand or by way of reproductive prints, he prefers to rely on ekphrasis to make these works vividly present; through ekphrasis he not only indicates what these pictures show and how they show it, i.e., their handelingh (medium and manner of rendering), but also endeavors to communicate their affective impact—the pleasure, pain, joy or fear they instill by virtue of the act of beholding. For Van Mander, the threshold between the originating image and the ekphrastic description of said image is exceptionally porous. Constituted by the picture it ostensibly describes, the ekphrasis yet appears constitutive of the picture it renders, as if the two media—visual and verbal—were somehow fully complementary. On this account, there is no rhetorical effect that the pictorial image cannot produce, just as there is no image worthy of note that cannot be reproduced figuratively, by poetic-rhetorical means. Even though Van Mander, who was keenly aware of the properties specific to various media, never entirely collapses image into word or word into image, his poetics of the image is expansive: even as it encompasses every pictorial effect, it also acknowledges that there is no poetic effect beyond the scope of schilderconst (the art of picturing or, in its more particular sense, of painting). Van Mander’s ekphrastic usage presupposes a dialogic relation between text and image, and from there posits the mutuality of the sister arts, painting and poetry, as entirely consonant with the Horatian doctrine ut pictura poesis.

Van Mander, in considering the relation between other sister arts, such as painting and sculpture in the round, emphatically eschews the paradigm of the disputatio atium, nowhere more explicitly than in the life of the ancient Greek painter Apelles.¹⁹³ Here he asserts that the excellence of painting, like that of sculpture, proceeds in lockstep: the two arts, being complementary, achieve their perfection mutually rather than competitively. This commensal paradigm applies across temporal registers, not only in a particular time and place. The perfected sculptural effects of ancient painting—Apelles’s ability fully to portray three-dimensional figures, for example—can be matched by contemporary painters, just as, conversely, Michelangelo’s superb sculptural works do not so much surpass as match the statuary accomplishments of the Ancients.

Yes, Pliny says about [Apelles] that not only did he outstrip every painter before him, but also every one who came after. So, too, one reads about no one as exceptional as he amongst the Ancients. Then might one think that his works, were they still extant, and were one to place them beside paintings by painters of our modern age, would be nothing special by comparison. But I should quite beg to differ, since one sees free-standing sculptural figures in Rome, in marble and bronze, so excellent that they can still hold their hard heads against the years. Correspondingly, one has never found it to be so, that painting and sculpture in the round give way, the one to the other: instead, whenever one climbs upward, so, too, does the other not fall; on the contrary, they share a like weight in common. Let us now set our modern, free-standing statuary figures next to the best ancient ones: those by Michelangelo himself would be hard pressed to make them yield in art. Now, from what I have read, I should guess that Apelles’s painted figures were rather better than worse than the best of the ancient statues one still sees.¹⁹⁴

This is to say that the excellence of Apelles’s art was likely on a par with that of Michelangelo (and vice versa), judging from ancient sculpture, which can function, on this account, virtually as an indexical trace of ancient painting. When Van Mander adds, by way of a coda, that Apelles considered himself inimitable for having bodied forth Venus (loveliness) and Charis (grace) in his pictures, he then offers a contrafactual anecdote: Apelles who, in his overweening pride, was like many an illustrious poet, had in fact claimed to be superior not in kind but only in degree; he thus recognized, though inadvertently, the appreciable grace and charm of his contemporaries’ paintings. Typical of Van Mander, the moral of this story, pace Apelles, is equalizing: “He wished to say that their works, in the way they were made, had a special, exceptional grace, which his own works had.”¹⁹⁵

The degree to which picturing / painting and poetry are mutually constitutive for Van Mander, in quite a literal sense, becomes evident when one considers his conception of the origins of schilderconst, set out in Book II of the Schilder-Boeck, “Lives of the Ancient illustrious Painters, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman.” The Preface incorporates two sustained ekphrastic showpieces, the first a lengthy paraphrase of Homer’s famous description of the shield fashioned by Hephaestus for Achilles, at the behest of Thetis, the second a somewhat compressed paraphrase of Virgil’s description of the frieze decorating the temple of Juno in Carthage, which showed scenes from the Trojan war (an aemulatio of the Homeric showpiece). Van Mander’s ekphrasis after Homer serves implicitly to place a Homeric stamp of approval on the various subjects and effects of art designated, defined, and demarcated in the Grondt’s chapters on history, landscape, animals, drapery, reflection, etc. In the Preface to the Grondt, Van Mander, as noted above, dubs these subjects and effects the verscheydenheden (varieties), urging would-be schilders to take command of all of them, but allowing that in practice some will be better at one thing, some at another.¹⁹⁶ It is worth quoting the ekphrasis in extenso, since it enables him to claim that Homer’s diction, his power of verbal image-making, like Virgil’s, arises from prior experience of pictures that subsume every kind and degree of image the poet could possibly devise.

So it is indisputable, in view of what the same Homer writes in his Eighteenth Book, that the art of painting was sufficiently well known during the time of the Trojans, for he says that Vulcan had made for Thetis in the shield of Achilles a thousandfold devices / ornaments of Invention, namely, the Heavens, Earth and Sea, the circuit of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the various Celestial signs, the Bear, Pleiades, Hyades, and suchlike; then, too, he had fashioned two Cities, with weddings in one of them, and thereby Brides guided by [the light of] burning torches, and people dancing in public, and Matrons looking on, seated at their thresholds, showing admiration in their eyes. Elsewhere People had gathered to hear [lawyers] pleading opposite sides of a death penalty case before the Bench, in which goings-on (‘twere too long to retail here), [Homer] says, were such marvelous affects and actions, that in portraying such things the world’s best Painter would have his hands full. In the other City, he speaks of many episodes of War, the city besieged, and many [city-folk] taking council, making a raid, setting a trap, while Wives and Children, accompanied by old men, defended the city. The ones setting the trap had Mars and Minerva as their Leaders; they lay [in wait] by a river, where they expected to seize the cattle that came there to drink: there came two Herdsmen playing on their Reeden Pipes, giving joyful pleasure to their bleating Flocks, oblivious to the snare set by their enemies who sprang upon them, swords raised, and took hold of the fat Oxen and white Sheep, killing the Peasant Herdsmen. The besiegers, gathered in Counsel, left their meeting and came hither on horseback, where a great battle was fought, and at play amongst them, Tumult, Discord, and Death: here to be seen were great streams of blood, a varied array of actions and apparel. And still did Vulcan (so [Homer] says) fashion a sandy field, thrice ploughed, with earth uncommonly soft and rich, on which many farmers steered their plough-yoked oxen back and forth: to the field’s end there came a Man who refreshed their labour with a cannister of Wine. One saw, too, where they ploughed, how the fresh-furrowed earth was browner than [the earth] turned earlier; this was work[manship] (says he) wholly worth the viewing. Elsewhere [Vulcan] fashioned a fertile field full of yellow-eared corn being mown by Harvesters, the heaps and bundles lying thickly piled amidst the peasants: there some bound the sheaves, and youths laid them up in heaps. Therein the Lord of the field, his hand holding a Scepter or staff, doth seem to revel. In another place, beneath acorned oaks, were others who, having been given the task of preparing a meal, had slaughtered the fattest ox and were making it ready: the Women of the household were bringing the workmen their noontime meal and bread, overstrewn with fine grain. And yet did Vulcan fashion in his Godly work a Vineyard filled full with vines, the black of which was made from blue; he encircled the Vineyard with a ditch, and for entry, there was but a single path, upon which the vignerons came and went. There one saw Maidens and Youths bearing the happy vintage in little baskets woven from twigs. Amongst them was a young man sweetly playing a peasant’s ditty on a harp, and there were others, too, who kept time, clapping their hands joyfully, and dancing to it. Further along, he had fashioned a herd of fat oxen, their foreheads horned, which came lowing, from out their stalls, into a meadow by a fast-flowing river, its banks reedy; four herders brought up the rear, guarding [the herd], and with them nine dogs, fleet of foot. Two Lions had taken from the edge of the bellowing herd a steer that with louder voice brayed for help, and though the herders gave chase and cheered on their hounds, [the dogs], for fear of being bitten, dared not snap at the lions (which went on eating the steer’s innards, and refused to let go); instead, they merely barked, running to and fro. Furthermore, this lame Artifex had fashioned a dale full of white Sheep, also stalls, huts, and other things of this sort. And as Daedalus had formerly done in Crete, in the same manner did [Homer] paint round the beautiful Ariadne a gathering of fresh-faced Youths and fine-haired Maidens, well worth a hundred Oxen, who hand in hand danced a round or a circlet, the youths’ garments finely woven, the weave lustrous as if smeared with oil, the Maidens in long-pleated robes, bearing parti-colored floral wreaths upon their brows.¹⁹⁷ Wearing golden daggers at their sides, the Youths, with winged, well-practiced feet, scampered still and anon, like a potter who every now and then lightly turns his wheel. Sometimes paired, straightway they leapt outward, dancing round the others, and sometimes joined together with them: a great concourse of people stood fast, full amused to see who jumped the finest; amongst them were two others who, to the sound of their fine, consummate song, did somersaults. Now may well be surmised from this Shield that painting was properly known in Trojan times: for what Painter is there who should be able to devise all this or bring it to pass in our time? If one were to say that a work such as this was not painted but graven or enameled, whatever it may be, ‘twere impossible to have brought all the things just related into the work if the art of Drawing had not reached a great state of perfection: if its perfection was great, then is it not likely that the art of Painting, already engendered, did exist, as can well be assumed. On the other hand, one reads in the first Book of the Aeneid that Trojan Aeneas, coming upon a Temple built in honor of Juno in Carthage, saw there a painting of the siege of Troy, wherein he observed Priam, Achilles, and many others, portrayed after the life, or rather, done in such a way as to be recognizable to him. Amongst various battles and retreats he saw how Troilus unluckily strode forth against Achilles; elsewhere how this same Achilles, having dragged Hector’s dead body round the walls of Troy, ransomed it for a parcel of gold; and many other particulars, done so well and so artfully that they did much move the heart of Aeneas, causing a great flow of tears to moisten his cheeks. Now may one avow: “Taken as a whole, this is Poetic devising and no History whereby to offer certain proof, being in nowise more sufficient than the previous tale.” This I allow, according to the worthiness of Virgil’s poetry. Yet, even though he did devise, such exceptional Poets, attentive to all things, would have considered as well whether in Trojan times, when Troy fell, painting had already been discovered—else might they be censured for thoughtlessness: the same is to be said about Homer. Having weighed this matter, I think that Homer could have written neither so forcefully nor definitively about the arts of Drawing and of Painting, had they not been known publicly in his time or earlier, and nor could he have [written] so widely about them had they not been highly in fashion and in use, at the very least in his lifetime.¹⁹⁸

Remarkable is the way Van Mander appears almost to elide the functions of painting with words and painting with pigments, as in the sudden interpolation of the phrase “the black of which was made from blue” (“welcke swart waren van blaeuwicheyt”) to describe the blue-black soil, as “limned” by Homer, but also to describe Vulcan’s use of blue to render the rich blackness of fertile soil. Equally noteworthy is the clause “as Daedalus had formerly done in Crete,” which can be read as a reference to that which Vulcan has portrayed—a round dance performed in Ariadne’s honor—and how he has portrayed it, namely, with a painterly skill as great as that of the painter Daedalus: hence the marginal gloss stating that Daedalus was an excellent painter who predated Homer.¹⁹⁹ In this same clause, the shield is suddenly construed as a painted image, the implication being that Homer’s ekphrasis describes a metal object fashioned so like a painting that it can be designated as such. The conclusion Van Mander draws ascribes to Homer’s ekphrasis an efficacy that wholly derives from painting, even while paradoxically exceeding it, to such an extent that no modern painting imaginable can be thought capable of reproducing Homer’s effects: “For what Painter is there who should be able to devise all this or bring it to pass in our time?” But far from invoking the conventional divide between text and image, Van Mander elides these paired terms: in asking who could “devise all this,” he leaves open the status of “this,” the object of imitation; does he mean Homer’s painterly ekphrasis, or is he referring to the kind of painting upon which Homer’s ekphrastic display is premised, and without which it could not exist? “This” would seem to denote the nexus of ekphrastic text and image: Van Mander inquires whether modern painters are competent to concretize an ekphrasis-like painting, a painterly ekphrasis, like the one traceable from the Shield of Achilles.²⁰⁰ (And in fact, his answer, as his account of Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece at the start of Book IV makes clear, is a resounding yes, given that this epitome of schilderconst is replete with the full range of verscheydenheden.)²⁰¹ Van Mander’s version of Homer’s Shield of Achilles makes the synergy of text and image, or more precisely, of painterly text and ekphrastic painting, evident in another respect: if the copia of Homer’s ekphrasis, its amplitude and extraordinary richness of detail, are ascribed to the poet’s attentive relation to Teycken- and Schilder-const, so, conversely, Homer’s ekphrastic power proves indexical to the presence of the linked arts of drawing and painting, both at the time he wrote the Iliad and before then: “Nor could he have [written] so widely about them had they not been highly in fashion and in use, at the very least in his lifetime.” Underlying everything is Teycken-const, the art of drawing, which, on Van Mander’s view, sponsors the relation between the medium of ekphrasis and the visual media—graving, enamel, painting—that function jointly as ekphrastic subject and source.

Moreover, if picturing and poeticizing are appreciated as mutually contingent, this reciprocal relation is echoed by the implied connection between the ekphrastic trope—the schild (shield)—and the process of schild-eren (picturing, painting) figured by that trope.²⁰² The etymology of schilderen, its supposed derivation from schild, speaks to the way in which the shield-trope, though empowered by what Van Mander imagines as the anterior viewing of pictorial images, tacitly testifies to the actual origins of schilderconst in shield-painting. The preliminary poem that initiates Book II, “Etymology, or exposition, wherein the word Painter, or Painting, has its source,” written in the form of a dialogue between Karel van Mander and his brother Adam, makes this case:

See, Adam, worthy brother, I surmise that this word

Schilder (painter), or Schildry (painting), comes forth from Schilden (shields):

For the brave noble heroes in the battle for Troy

Did cause their shields to be embellished with fine figural work,

Likewise the Romans, did indeed hang here and there

Their forefathers’ shields, in public places,

In the town hall, their own halls, or the temples of their gods,

In order to memorialize their ancestors’ pious deeds:

For they themselves stood there aplenty, done after the life.

This Schilde schildren (painting of shields), see, has never ceased to be,

Whereby it followed, came ever more to pass,

To say schildery, and to call us Schilders.²⁰³

Read in light of this poem, Van Mander’s paraphrase of Achilles’s shield describes the ur-shield whence painting originates (or the meta-shield whereby the origins of painting are discerned), while also providing the evidentiary basis for Van Mander’s assertion that painting underwrites the pictorial effects of Homer’s ekphrastic tour de force. The Shield of Achilles stands for the origins of painting, without which there could be no ekphrastic shield, but the ekphrasis also licenses or notionally engenders, like a fountainhead, the varieties of schilderconst to be discussed in Books II–IV of the Schilder-Boeck (the Ancient, Italian, and Northern “Lives”), and especially the vescheydenheden analogously practiced by the Ancients and brought to a second perfection by the Dutch, Flemish, and German masters: “Animals, Kitchens, Fruits, Flowers, Landscapes, Buildings, Perspectives, Cartouches, Grotesques, Night Scenes, Fires, Portraits after the life, Seascapes, and Ships, etc.” Painting and ekphrasis prove conjunctly enabling, the one capacitating the other.

The reciprocally vivifying effects of pictura and poësis must operate in tandem, in the form of a painterly poetry or a poetic painting. Van Mander was of course aware that in practical terms, the poet cannot paint a picture, nor the painter write a poem, with the possible exception of poet-painters such as the Poetelijcken Schilder Cornelis Ketel, whom he characterizes as sui generis.²⁰⁴ Indeed, in chapter 1 of the Grondt, Van Mander offers the following advice to aspiring young painters; they should strive to flee Rhetorica, the sweet-featured art of poetry, which is otiose and distracts from the “jealously demanding arts of Picturing” (“der Schilder-consten jalousie”):²⁰⁵

Howsoever merry and diverting [she may be];

Yet I myself have never entirely abandoned her,

Although I fear she has freely diverted me

From the Painter’s path.

She is a beautiful flower: were she to bear fruit,

Or bring wheaten flour into the Kitchen,

Then might one rejoice to practice her.²⁰⁶

The poetic impulse must be curbed if, exercised apart from painting, it threatens to impede the would-be painter’s training or the master’s ability to earn a living. But key to Van Mander’s cautionary remarks is the alternative possibility he imagines of poetry bearing fruit for the painter whose poetic practice of schilderconst—not of painting and poetry as parallel tracks, but of the two together as the “painter’s path”—secures both prosperity and joy.

In truth, the Schilder-Boeck demonstrates some of the forms that the harmonization of painting and poetry might take. For example, the “Life of Hans Bol, Painter of Mechelen” features an extended ekphrasis of Bol’s Daedalus and Icarus, painted in watercolor on canvas, which Van Mander had seen in the collection of his cousin Jan (Fig. 4).²⁰⁷ Taking his cue from Homer’s and Virgil’s many references to workmanship, he insistently foregrounds the picture’s “precision and able handling” (“suyverheyt, en een goede handelinghe”), its “firm and sure manner” (“vaste en ghewisse manier”), the “setting out and working up” of its constituent parts (“aen te legghen, en op te maken”). Here and elsewhere in the “Lives,” ekphrasis does more than describe a pictorial subject and the experience of beholding it: Van Mander also conveys how Bol manipulates his media, moving from handelinghe to schildery, pictorial means to pictorial image, and more than this, he indicates how the making of the image, its made qualities, become legible in and through the act of beholding. And as Ovid, in Book VIII of the Metamorphoses, draws a parallel between the reader of the poem and the audience within it, so Van Mander asks us to consider how our astonished viewing of Bol’s brilliantly rendered picture, in particular its figures and landscape, is analogous to the wonder shown by the shepherd and ploughman who, from within the image, observe the father’s soaring flight and the son’s sudden fall. More than simply avowing Bol’s ability to translate from poetic text to image, Van Mander makes known, by means of ekphrasis, how such a pictorial image comes to be made in close proximity to the poem that inspired it.

I have seen in the possession of my cousin Mr. Jan van der Mander, now Pensionary of Ghent, a large watercolor on canvas, the history or fable of Daedalus and Icarus, in which they fly through the open sky, having escaped their prison. There in the water lay a steep rock, overtopped by a castle, done in a way not to be bettered, so subtle and precise was the rock, moss-covered, washed over, so confident the handling of its many little colors; likewise the castle, its fabric ancient, strange, as if grown from [living] rock: it was all wondrously conceived / contrived (versierigh). Very well handled, too, was the distant landscape, and the water wherein the rock was mirrored, in whose brown shadows one saw the feathers from Icarus’s wings, fallen through the melting of the wax and floating on the water, very naturally. There as well, some beautiful foregrounds, and additional landscape: round about, in front, sat a shepherd with his flock, and a bit farther on, a peasant at his plough, looking up, astonished at this flight, as specified by the text.²⁰⁸

Typical is Van Mander’s use of bewassen (washed over) to refer jointly to the waves lapping at the cliffsides and the washes of watercolor applied to canvas, and his use of the term versierigh (conceived / contrived) to describe both the rock and its painterly handling. By the same token, these many references to handelingh remind the reader, repeatedly, that the ekphrasis responds to a pictorial image and to the traces of pictorial execution legible in its surface. Conversely, the ekphrastic account conjures up this image or, rather, the process that (re)produces it, after the fact, so to speak. The temporal relation between picture and ekphrastic picture is complex, moving from the anterior picture to its rhetorical double, or from the rhetorical picture to the pictorial image, now become posterior to the text. This temporal chiasmus reminds us once again that Van Mander, in his distinctive use of ekphrases, construes text and image as mutually constitutive.

Based in small on the lengthy ekphrastic paraphrases after Homer and Virgil that populate the Preface to Book II, this method of description largely differs from that utilized in Book III, the Italian “Lives,” where Van Mander assimilates Vasari’s more conventional rhetorical technique. Vasari emulates the ekphrastic paradigm codified by Leon Battista Alberti in De pictura, in his description of Apelles’s lost Calumny of Apelles.²⁰⁹ Like Alberti’s, Vasari’s ekphrases focus on composition, figural attitudes, gestures, decorum, and transmission of the affetti, rather than on the relation between making and viewing, rendering and representation.²¹⁰ Even when Vasari, diverging from the norm, attempts to describe Venetian colore and attends to contingencies of setting and circumstance, his emphasis falls on embodied action and affect. Take Vasari’s ekphrasis of Palma Vecchio’s Transportation of the Body of St. Mark to Venice (formerly displayed in the Scuola Grande di San Marco), an abbreviated paraphrase of which Van Mander incorporated into his “Life of Jacopo Palma il Giovane”: the winds are treated like personified Winds, the waves like malign antagonists, and the picture as a whole judders no less violently than the men on shipboard (Fig. 5).

There was also an elder Jacopo Palma of Venice, who painted in oil a splendid rare work in the chamber where the Scuola di San Marco gathers, a picture wherein the dead body of Saint Mark is brought by ship to Venice. On one side is subtly portrayed a terrifying storm at sea; on the other, very well done, with the utmost care, ships and barques are assaulted by fell winds: likewise, a group of figures in the sky, the varied forms of evil spirits that blow like Winds round the ship, hindering it and its oars rowed strenuously against the raging waves. Here one sees the diligence and dexterity of the sailors, the violence of the winds, the motion of the nude figures, and the lightning falling from the sky, the water broken by the oars, and the force of the rowers bending the poles, something not to be improved or brought closer to nature: for it appears, in the beholding, that the whole picture shakes and shudders, as if everything painted therein were alive, taking place naturally.²¹¹

In this passage, references to mimetic subtlety and precision combine with affirmations of verisimilitude, yet terms such as “diligence and dexterity” apply not to the process of painting per se, but to the figures enacting the istoria. Throughout Book III of the Schilder-Boeck, Van Mander operates in a Vasarian mode, adopting his Italian forebear’s ekphrastic usage, with its clear emphasis on narrative action and affect. By contrast, the ekphrases in Books II and IV, the Ancient and Northern “Lives,” pay far more attention to the pictorial subjects and elements discussed in Book I, the Grondt, which includes chapters on landscape, animals, drapery, the optics of reflection, and wel verwen (coloring in the sense of Venetian and Lombard colorito). Above all, Van Mander attempts to relay “spirited” (geestigh) displays of descriptive skill, paying homage to painters’ ability to capture fugitive effects, especially the movement of hair, drapery, foliage, and sky.²¹² The term geestigh signifies liveliness, spiritedness of both the mind and the hand: with reference to acumen and lively wit, Cornelis Kiliaan, in Etymologicum Theutonicae linguae, translates g[h]eestigh into Latin as ingeniosus (ingenious) and argutus (lively, keen-witted); with reference to manual dexterity, as scitus and solers (skillful, adroit).²¹³ Geestigh has as its corollary meanings bellus and venustas (fine, graceful, beautiful). Bol’s mossy rock, washed by waves, washed by watercolors, is one such epitome of geestigh handling, ingenious in contrivance, subtle and precise in manufacture; so, too, his clifftop castle is curious, strange, and wondrously conceived / contrived, so lively, so (in)spirited that it appears to have grown from stone. Steeped in handelingh, the ekphrasis articulates indeed operates at the threshold where verbal description and descriptive painting meet, where the boundary between verbal and pictorial image-making blurs.

6 Landtschap and byvoechsel: Van Mander on Landcape and History, Simulation and Dissimulation

Every Dutch art theoretician of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries responded in some fashion to Van Mander’s Grondt and his three sets of “Lives.”²¹⁴ But if the Schilder-Boeck was determinative for the treatises on art published in its wake, the reverse is also true— namely, that these same treatises cast light on their originating source, offering readings of the Grondt that likewise illuminate his magnum opus for us. Take the painter-art theoretician Samuel van Hoogstraten, whose conspicuous use of metapictorial devices in his paintings, and discussion of experimental conceits in his treatise, the Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the academy of the art of painting: that is, the visible world) (1678), testify to his astute reading of Van Mander, who was himself a gifted painter whose art and theory fully coincide.²¹⁵ As Celeste Brusati has shown, Van Hoogstraten marshaled these devices to display his command of reflexive processes of visual thought that were both the constitutive cause and the deliberative effect of schilderkonst, the art of painting, processes he also attempted to explicate in the Inleyding. Key to what one might call his artisanal hermeneutics are two devices in particular: first, the threshold frame that marks a painting’s dual capacity “to simulate and dissimulate at the same time,” i.e., to describe the visible world with the utmost exactitude and concurrently to deceive the beholder into confusing the image of some thing for that thing itself.²¹⁶ Van Hoogstraten’s feigned paintings—the Feigned Letter Rack Painting of ca. 1670 in Karlsruhe, for instance—pictures that pretend to be actual pictures when in fact they are trompes l’oeil of such pictures—brilliantly elide this categorical distinction (Fig. 6). Second, there are the doorkijkjes (framed through-views), such as The Threshold View of a Passageway of ca. 1655–1660, in the Louvre, that articulate a telescoping optical corridor or, better, a multifocal ocular trajectory which viewers are invited to traverse as they look inquisitively first at one thing, then another, pausing to speculate upon the meaning of the relics of domestic life encountered along the way (Fig. 7).²¹⁷ Paintings such as these, by extending the “eye’s reach like a lens or other optical device,” produce an effect of temporal dilation that immerses viewers in the experience of beholding and simultaneously, by exercising their perceptual and cognitive skills, make them intensely aware of the painter whose pictorial skill has engaged and animated their eyes, mind, and heart.²¹⁸

In the Inleyding, Van Hoogstraten utilized many of the critical categories codified by Van Mander—welstandt, ordinantie, historie, landtschap, reflexy-const, to name but a few—ingeniously adapting them to suit his purposes.²¹⁹ The Grondt provided Van Hoogstraten with the theoretical armature whereon he based his own distinctive account of the artifice of painting. Conversely, as it turns out, Van Mander was no less fascinated with the relation between simulation and dissimulation, and his discussion of pictorial desiderata such as the insien or doorsien—respectively, the view into or through environs leading, often tortuously, to an event or events positioned at some distance from the foreground—would prove fundamental to Van Hoogstraten’s conception of what makes a picture alluring and persuasive, which is to say eye-catching.²²⁰ The Grondt considers the topic of pictorial deception in chapter 5 on history, chapter 8 on landscape, and chapter 9 on animals, and it is on the first of this triad, “Van der Ordinanty ende Inventy der historien” (On the Ordonnance and Invention of Histories), that I want to dwell in the penultimate section of this introductory essay.

Chapter 5 stipulates that a well-ordered picture must be richly ornate, both copious and varied in its descriptive parts, not least its landscape setting. Midway through the chapter, Van Mander digresses at length on the topic of history-in-landscape, devoting sixteen out of eighty-eight stanzas, by far the largest tranche, to this historical genre or type.²²¹ By means of byvoechselen (adjuncts, additions, appurtenances) such as landscape and its constituent elements—features like roads, rivers, woods, hills, and dales, and the supplementary figures and animals populating them—the historical invention becomes enticing, even seductive.²²² Held spellbound, the eyes are drawn further and further into the image along various routes leading eventually to the embedded figural scenes, the proper histories, which Van Mander, borrowing the Latin term for “goal” or “target,” denominates the scopus.²²³ Whether historical or mythological, these storied episodes, by dint of the vreemdelijck (curious) device of having been implanted within their ambient circumstances, are made initially onkenlijck (unrecognizable), so that they must be sought out, discerned gradually, discovered like landmarks encountered en route on a protracted and circuitous journey.²²⁴ It is precisely by deferring this encounter, argues Van Mander, that the painter seizes hold of the viewer’s errant gaze, steering it indirectly yet ineluctably toward the scopus or scopi. The term byvoechsel, on this account, means something like an enriching ornament that functions descriptively and optically to amplify the historical subject: Van Mander thinks of byvoechselen as the chief means whereby verscheydenheyt (variety) is conferred on the historical ordonnance. In chapter 8, “Van het landtschap” (On Landscape), he explains how and why the process of amplification that embeds the scopus amongst various attendant appurtenances is crucial to producing a persuasive effect upon the beholder. Simply put, such a picture invites the eyes into an immersive, seemingly self-sufficient terrene, what Van Mander calls a “little world,” and literary scholars such as Harry Berger, Jr. have dubbed a “second or green world.”²²⁵ The enveloping circumstances mediate access to the scopus they do not so much frame as anticipate and at the same time forestall, operating like its extended threshold. Stanza 41 makes this case as follows:

It were good to know your little stories in advance,

Whether from Prose, or Poetry, as you please,

All the better to arrange your Landscape with respect to them,

But above all forget not

To place small Figures beside large Trees,

And, having constructed your little World, place some figures here ploughing,

Others there harvesting, over there loading wagons,

Yet others fishing, sailing, bird-catching, and hunting.²²⁶

The sixteen-stanza exemplum at the heart of chapter 5 takes the form of a very elaborate ekphrasis hailing from Jacopo Sannazzaro’s Arcadia of 1504. Van Mander appropriates it to demonstrate how an insien or doorsien is fashioned by means of byvoechselen leading, via a richly deflective, multifocal route, toward a reflexive scopus—“reflexive” in that it thematizes the pictorial work of dissimulation. The scopus, in other words, focuses on the theme of deception. Strictly speaking, the events comprised by this exemplum are poetic fictions rather than histories per se, but Van Mander uses Sannazzaro to model a mode of ordonnance that applies equally to historical and poetic subjects (and this holds true, too, for the ordinantie of his own paintings, drawings, and prints). We the readers of Van Mander’s Sannazzaro-derived text visualize the poet’s ekphrastic beholder, namely, the putative beholder who is seen to see the painting the ekphrasis conjures up, as if we were directly party to that beholder’s experience of beholding. Not only do our eyes elide into his, but the beholder himself, and we with him appear to vanish into the poetic fiction that presents itself to his / our eyes as if it were no mere painted image but the very persons, creatures, and things themselves, and the small world they inhabit, that stand revealed before us.

To give a better sense of Van Mander’s method of achieving the ekphrastic effect of enargeia (in Latin, illuminatio, i.e., vivid, evidentiary presence, on which I will have more to say in due course), let me track the visual itinerary he maps or, perhaps more exactly, plots in stanzas 45–60. Hendrick Goltzius explored the paradigm of history-in-landscape in a series of large finished landscape drawings executed in the 1590s, around the time the Schilder-Boeck was written, so, his Landscape with Venus and Adonis of 1596 (or 1598) is illustrated here to model the type of landscape—vreemdelijck, onkenlijck, verscheyden, scopic, and rich with byvoechselen—that I shall be discussing (Fig. 8).²²⁷ Van Mander begins by setting the ekphrastic conceit: the narrator Sannazzaro or, rather, his Dutch alter ego, along with several fellow shepherds, is visiting the shrine of the Arcadian tutelary goddess Pales, where, upon crossing the threshold, he sees hanging above them an intricate landscape painting. In it one descries hills and woods overgrown with trees (“heuvels en bosschen, met boomen verwildert”), cows grazing here and there on green grasslands (“weyden in de groene beemden veel kudden verspreyt”), herders milking cows, shearing sheep, and singing to the accompaniment of bagpipes (“eenigh op sackpijpen sachmen daer spelen, ander schenen, wilden oock in hun singhen t’ghluydt nae bootsen”).²²⁸ Amidst this pastoral setting, somewhere between woodland and meadow (“bosschen … daer sachmen weyden”),²²⁹ one catches sight of group of nymphs; half hidden behind a large chestnut tree, they dangle an oaken wreath in front of a goat, amusedly staring as it tries to gnaw at the leaves, oblivious to the blades of green grass growing at its feet.²³⁰ And while they peer at the goat peering at the wreath, unbeknownst to them a troop of goat-legged satyrs spies upon the nymphs from behind a mastic tree.

The nymphs take flight, swimming to the opposite shore of a nearby river, its banks overtopped by surging stormwater; and panting from their strenuous effort, having reached safety, they look back to mock their would-be captors (“zijnd’ over t’water ten anderen boorde, blasend’ … hen vervolghers met den werck’ ende woorde, bespottelijck verweten”).²³¹ A bend in the same river, and yet another tree—this time a wild olive—leads to the next mythological episode: shaded by this tree, Apollo ostensibly watches over the flocks of Admetus; however, a pair of bulls, their horns locked in greeting, has distracted him, and looking intently at them, he fails to notice Mercury stealing away with the heifers entrusted to Apollo’s care (“niet siend’ hoe Mercurius den subtijlen, … hem zijn koeyen heeft ontstolen terwijlen”).²³² By the river stands a large rock in the shape of a man pointing, the vestige of the old shepherd Battus who was turned to stone for attempting to deceive Mercury, betray his trust, and expose him as a thief (“in een steen verandert, op sulcker ghijsen, als schijnende metten vingher te wijsen”).²³³

As trees and a river led from the episode of nymphs and satyrs to that of Apollo, Mercury, and Battus, so large stones like landmarks lead from that episode to the next. Disguised as a herder, Mercury sits on a boulder and plays a rustic flute, craftily trying to lull Argus to sleep before killing him. His ulterior motive is to free Jupiter’s paramour Io, who has been turned into a snowy white heifer:

And he seemed, filled full with cunning,

To consider how best he might

Deceive the many-eyed Argus.²³⁴

On the other side of the boulder a true shepherd, asleep amidst his flocks, lies beneath a high oak tree, his dog sniffing the shoulder bag he uses as a pillow (“aen d’ander sijde was in slaep ghelegheen, een herder midden zijner geyten onder eenen seer hooghen eycken-boom”).²³⁵ The presence of the moon (either Diana or Selene), gazing raptly down at him, identifies this shepherd as Endymion, whose love Jupiter eternalized through the gift of perpetual sleep (“blijd’ ooghe de mane aensiende desen, vermoeddement Endymion te wesen”).²³⁶

Close by, beside an elm, yet another shepherd, this one as false in love as Mercury in intention, uses his sickle to carve the name Enone on the tree’s trunk. This is Paris, who abandoned Enone, his first love, when Venus, keen to win his favor, promised him Helen of Troy. Van Mander cleverly alludes to his broken vows when he says that Paris failed fully to inscribe Enone’s name, having been diverted from his task by the sudden arrival of Mercury with Venus, Juno, and Minerva in tow.²³⁷ The judgment of Paris then ensues: Van Mander construes the judgment scene as the picture’s true scopus, its chief episode and thematic center of gravity: “This now, that is, the judgment of Paris, is the scopus of the history.”²³⁸ But, as he soon makes patently clear, the true moral of the story has little to do with Paris proper, and instead redounds to the Grondt’s, indeed the Schilder-Boeck’s, larger theme of pictorial excellence as expressed in and through technical skill, above all the schilder’s ability to deceive the viewer’s eyes:

But what was very ingenious, pleasing, and apposite,

Worthy to be considered and seen,

Was the great attention with which

This judicious painter of fine sharp wit,

Had made Juno and Minerva to stand,

Each in her person exceptionally beautiful,

Each so utterly perfect that he himself could not

Have presumed to do better.²³⁹

Now, since he did not know how to make Venus

More beautiful than the other two, as becomes her,

He portrayed these two from the front,

But taking subtle advantage of the situation,

He, a wise artist (“wijs Artiste”), painted Venus subtly, with her back turned,

By this trick of artifice (list) licensing pleasure,

Giving one to think that were she to turn herself,

She would bring the others’ beauty to distraction.²⁴⁰

Landscape supplies the instrument whereby Van Mander arrives at his conclusion, his scopus: by stages the eyes travel from bosky hills and grasslands to a meadow beside which grow chestnuts and mastics, then across a turbulent river, before reaching an olive growing near a bend of said river, near to which there stand a stone in the form of a man and a second larger stone, and growing beside them a tall oak, and close by an elm, at the base of which the scopus of this sequence is enacted. Each of the places is the locus for an act of viewing: the nymphs’ of a goat, the satyrs’ of the nymphs, the nymphs’ of the satyrs, Apollo’s of the two steers, Battus’s of thieving Mercury, Mercury’s in disguise of Argus, the Moon’s of Endymion, and Paris’s of Mercury and the three goddesses, this last leading to an account of the Arcadians’ and, through them, of the reader-viewer’s act of beholding the fictive picture Van Mander / Sannazzaro is describing. Finally, enshrined within the concatenated sequence of places and of acts of viewing—in seventeenth-century parlance, a catena or ketene—there is the catena of themes bodied forth by the byvoechselen embedded within these prior loci: the satyrs’ attempted deception of the nymphs, Mercury’s deception of Apollo, Battus’s abortive deception of Mercury, Mercury’s guileful deception of Argus, Paris’s betrayal-deception of Enone, Venus’s ruthless deception of naïve Paris (which leads finally to his death during the siege of Troy), and at last, the painter’s deception of the beholder, who is tricked into thinking that the painter has portrayed Venus in all her beauty and seductive charm when, in fact, this feat of pictorial legerdemain was beyond his skill.²⁴¹ Within this series of deceptions, Endymion, guileless and ingenuous, serves as a contrapposto (antithesis) that enhances by contrast the theme of deceit and beguilement. The nature of pictorial skill, then, its deceptive form and effect, is Van Mander’s pervasive scopic theme. His presentation of the scopus is couched in the pictorial language of the byvoechsel—the historical addendum or supplement inserted as an ornament within an encompassing landscape that itself does duty as a circumambient byvoechsel. The Judgment of Paris and all it implies about how an historical subject is best ordered and beheld become discernible as a function of the landscape, through the integration of its component parts, which facilitates the spatial and thematic process of enchainment and concatenation we have just tracked. Within this layered, compilatory system, landscape operates as the discursive field wherein a hermeneutic of deception is adduced as the pictorial basis for a theory of historical ordonnance. If ekphrasis allows Van Mander to evoke the enargeian force of a history picture thus ordonnanced, the way in which enargeia here devolves into an argument about deceptive means and ends drives home the point that no rhetorical figure, verbal or visual, can indefinitely maintain a fiction of presence that does not finally admit to its status as an artifice.

Van Mander’s ekphrastic source, as previously mentioned, was Sannazzaro’s Arcadia, specifically the third prose chapter, which follows the “Eclogue of Montano and Uranio” and precedes the “Eclogue of Galicio.” Embedded within this literary picture of verdant woods and hills dotted with “a thousand kinds of flowers,” there stretches a concatenated chain of mythological episodes, one scene of deception leading to the next, the entire sequence climaxing with the Judgment of Paris. This final epitome dovetails with the preceding episodes in that Venus, by offering Helen of Troy as a bribe, tricks Paris into declaring her more beautiful than Juno or Minerva; furthermore, Paris, as Sannazzaro implies, will ultimately deceive his current lover Oenone, ditching her for Helen: “Next to him was Paris who with his blade had begun to carve Oenone in the bark of an elm, and because of his judging among the naked Goddesses, who were standing before him, he had not as yet been able to finish it completely.”²⁴² The theme of false judgment then allows Sannazzaro to circle round, yet again, to his deceptive theme, by way of a cleverly metadiscursive trope. As Paris judged Venus, so the viewer, if he properly appreciates the painter’s skill, will judge the beauty of his picture to be nonpareil: “But what was no less ingenious to the judgment than pleasurable to the eye was the circumspection of the prudent painter who, having made Juno and Minerva of such exceeding beauty that it would have been impossible to surpass them, and mistrusting his ability to make Venus as beautiful as necessity required, had painted her with her back turned, thus with his shrewdness excusing his insufficiency.”²⁴³ Sannazzaro would have expected his reader to know that the painter has resorted to a cunning device famously promulgated by the ancient Greek painter Timanthes, in whose Sacrifice of Iphigenia her father Agamemnon was shown veiled to evoke the intensity of paternal grief; precisely by not showing the father’s face, Timanthes tricked the beholder into thinking Agamemnon’s sorrow had been portrayed consummately.²⁴⁴ The viewer’s judgment, in other words, like Paris’s, is deceived by a clever artifice. Van Mander’s fascination with this protracted passage from Arcadia undoubtedly resulted from its subject—the power of beauty, and beautiful painting, to deceive the eyes and with them the heart and mind of the receptive beholder.

Why, one might ask, did Van Mander devote so much time and energy to crafting his version of Sannazzaro’s ekphrastic demonstration piece? The answer is fourfold: first, by generating an ekphrastic account that absorbs the reader into the process of slotting or, better, nesting mutually linked episodes into place within a continuous landscape, he epitomizes what he clearly saw as the history piece’s optimal mode of address—it should produce an ad vivum or nae[r] t’leven effect that fully draws the viewer into a seemingly firsthand encounter with the pictorial subject. The process of entering into and dwelling within the fiction the painting strives to impart—he calls this self-sufficient fiction a “constructed little world” in chapter 8, stanza 41, as cited supra—is the gist of what he tries to convey here. His ekphrasis, like Sannazzaro’s, though in a more concertedly instructional way, mainly turns on the second of two definitions of painting ad vivum current in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The first defines ad vivum / nae[r] t’leven as “after the life,” in the sense of an image made as a function of direct observation, whereby the visual record of the object of sight is seen as authoritative precisely because of the evidentiary method of recording. The descriptive richness of Van Mander’s ekphrasis might be said to accord with this sense of an image as closely simulative of nature observed. The second defines ad vivum / nae[r] t’leven as “to the life,” in the sense of producing an effect of vivid presence, as if one were propinquitous to the represented person or thing. This second sense, in that it produces an effect of real presence, is more dissimulative than simulative. As Sachiko Kusukawa has recently argued, the great naturalist Conrad Gessner attempts to describe this effect when he compares a nature cast to the sort of painting with which the ancient painter Parrhasius triumphed over Zeuxis: whereas Zeuxis’s still life of grapes had fooled a flock of birds, Parrhasius’s trompe l’oeil of a curtained painting fooled Zeuxis into trying to draw the fictive curtain. Such a painting, as Kusukawa puts it, “create[s] in the viewer’s eyes and mind a lively enough image of an object such that it would trigger a reaction akin to a viewer perceiving the object itself.”²⁴⁵ Van Mander’s Sannazzaro-like ekphrasis attempts to give an account of the engaging effect—at once enargeian and assimilatory—that an history picture can exercise on the beholder when it is painted in a landscape mode.

Second, Van Mander uses the ekphrastic technique of descriptive dilation to reveal how the well-ordered history can induce the viewer to grapple with an enigmatic theme when that theme is fully woven into the fabric of the picture’s multifarious parts, in the manner of a well-constructed landscape whose component elements are assembled integrally. His statement midway through stanza 45, “In such a manner that their significance could hardly be guessed,” drives home this point.²⁴⁶ The lengthy ekphrasis compels the reader to track continuously from one linked episode to another, and thereby to consider how and why the journey into and through the image remains coherent in extenso, over its considerable expanse and extended duration. How and why do its constituent parts come across as hypotaxic rather than paratactic, integrative rather than aggregative, with the climactic scene—the Judgment of Paris—supplying the thematic hinge that insistently and retrospectively joins everything together in respect to the theme of deception? The landscape, its natural features serving as signposts, provides the connective tissue that binds the history’s figural nodes.

Third, by tracking through the many byvoechselen comprised by the history-cum-landscape, Van Mander insists on the importance of copiousness and variety—not only of figures but also of setting and circumstances—in seizing and holding the viewer’s attention.

Fourth, he illustrates and greatly amplifies the structural device, described in chapter 5, stanza 12, of an insien or doorsien that leads the eyes to key figures positioned in the middle ground or beyond. Van Mander’s term for the motion of the eyes thus drawn into the image is ploeghen (to plough),²⁴⁷ and he makes clear that this is one of the main devices whereby an history painter can produce welstandt (i.e., exercise an opportune effect upon the beholder).²⁴⁸ The “Life of Hans Vredeman de Vries, Painter of Leeuwarden”, which inaugurates part two of Schilder-Boeck, Book IV, on living Northern masters, largely centers on that master’s ability to paint Perspectijven (perspective views) containing one or more doorsienen. Van Mander herewith implies that this optical motif is one of the hallmarks of modern Netherlandish art. Typical is his reference to a Perspectijf by Hans’s son Pauwels, featuring “a [painted] gallery looking toward a courtyard with fountain” (“doorsiende Gallerije in eenen Hof met een Fonteyne”): the picture is so captivating that it impels the work’s prime viewer, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, “to transit through it, as if taking no account of himself,” that is, to forget that the perspective view down which he peers is in fact a mere artifice.²⁴⁹ Only after encountering the painting itself, as a material object, does Rudolf come to his senses, seeing the view for what it is, a perspectival fiction. And yet Van Mander’s use of the term dickwils (often, repeatedly) stresses that the illusive effect recurs every time the emperor beholds the picture.²⁵⁰ So, too, Van Mander’s ekphrasis is so long-drawn-out that one becomes oblivious to its rhetorical status, construing it not as the verbal account of a painting but, impossibly, as a direct encounter with the fictive world the ekphrasis brings compellingly into focus; or, put somewhat differently, the ekphrasis describes the story of the viewer’s encounter with mythical events that are made so vividly present to the mind’s eye that they appear actually to have been seen. This is the sort of well-favored ordonnance, the “opportune effect” (welstandt) Van Mander here and in chapter 8, “On Landscape,” invites the aspiring schilder to master.²⁵¹ In this and many other respects, he paved the way—I’m tempted to say, “opened up the passageway”—that Samuel van Hoogstraten boldly assayed in the Inleyding.

The kind of discernibly artificial yet persuasively illusive optical phenomenon Van Mander evokes, explicates, and endorses in chapters 5 and 8 of the Grondt entails mastery of a variety of descriptive effects closely associated with painting uyt den gheest (from the spirit), as he argues in the remarkable ekphrastic sequence that closes chapter 9, “On Cattle, Animals, and Birds.” Uyt den gheest, as we have seen, is the phrase coined by Van Mander to characterize a mode of pictorial invention based on prior visual experience, especially on images imprinted on memory through the action of drawing nae[r] t’leven (after the life, after nature).²⁵² Like chapters 8 and 10, “On Fabrics or Drapery,” chapter 9 centers on one of the four pictorial subjects altogether associated with gheest, in “On Landscape,” stanza 37: “For leaves, hair, the sky, and drapery, / That is all spirit, and the spirit teaches how to fashion them.”²⁵³ The twelve epigrammatic ekphrases on Myron’s trompe l’oeil cow, an epitome of the geestigh (spirited) depiction of a furry (i.e, hairy) animal, that conclude chapter 9 can thus be seen to comment on the nature of an image produced uyt den gheest and on its attendant effects, just as the extended ekphrasis on Sannazzaro’s fictive lintel painting, a thematic linchpin of chapter 5, espouses the adjacency of history and landscape, exemplifies the structural value of an insien or doorsien, and licenses the incorporation of byvoechselen. Whereas the mythological landscape was comprised by a single protracted ekphrasis, a sequence of twelve synoptic epigrams, linked in tandem, conjures Myron’s heifer many times over. The bovine ekphrases differ from their Sannazzaran counterpart in another respect: they attempt to simulate the experience of viewing a trompe l’oeil effigy, restaging the viewer’s encounter with the bronze cow, as if it were an actual cow actually present, and yet also a work of art, restored to sight and touch, rather than irrecoverably lost to time, and transposed from ancient Greece to the here and now. The cumulative impact of these consecutive ekphrases insists on the statue’s semblance of life and lifelike presence, its convincing effect on all who saw / see it: this is to say that the statue, which stands proxy in stanzas 42–46 for a picture painted uyt den gheest, shares two key features of the landscape mode distilled in chapters 5 and 8—conjointly simulative (after the life) and dissimulative (to the life), it draws the viewer in, in the manner of an ad vivum / nae[r] t’leven image. Taken as a whole, these five stanzas cleverly give voice to Van Mander’s conviction that such a picture, though it originates from gheest, will produce an evidential effect virtually indistinguishable from the one produced by a picture executed nae[r] t’leven. Stanza 37 of chapter 8 implies the same thing: in learning to paint “leaves, hair, sky, and drapery” by means of pen, ink, and wash on colored paper, one begins by working after the life or, alternatively, after various manners of hand(ling), but inevitably discovers that merely copying nature or art cannot finally lead to the persuasive depiction of these often fugitive, pluriform, multiplicitous forms. As discussed above, they differ in this regard from the human body, the lineaments of which can be mastered by any draftsman who draws assiduously after a well-proportioned, muscular model.²⁵⁴ Instead, spirited things are best portrayed by relying upon the resources of gheest.

The connotative meaning of gheest, as applied by Van Mander in this context, can best be understood by reference to the Thesaurus Theutonicae linguae, where g[h]eest is defined both as esprit subtil (subtle spirit) and ingenium acre (sharp, ready wit), g[h]eesticheyt signifies vivacity, liveliness, and dexterity, and a g[h]eestich person is someone skillful, adroit, diligent, experienced, and judicious in art (Latin cognates: industrius, affaber, and scitus).²⁵⁵ This constellation of terms suggests that the phrase uyt den gheest, when it attaches to images descriptive of leaves, hair, sky, or drapery, connotes the clever ingenuity with which the painter has managed to capture their lively appearance; visual wit of this sort issues from sure, subtle handling, from a hand as adroit as it is practiced, capable of producing an ad vivum effect even while freed from the strictures of laboring nae[r] t’leven. The type of image Van Mander has in mind cleaves close to nature but also reveals the painter’s ready wit: originating in industry and experience, it yet appears subtly quick and skillful. The twelve ekphrases on Myron’s heifer play upon this curious amalgam of mutually disparate criteria—industry and ingenuity, diligence and skill, wit and judgment—by calling attention to the sculptor’s ability to operate at the threshold between nature and artifice. They were partially adapted from the set excerpted and translated from the Greek Anthology by Pierre Ronsard in his “Traduction de quelques épigrammes grecs, sur la Jenisse d’aerain de Myron, excellentement bien gravé.”²⁵⁶ On one hand, the ekphrases declare that Myron has sculpted (or, to use Ronsard’s more pictorial term, “engraved”) the image of a cow so true to nature, so convincing that it deceives men and beasts. On the other hand, they repeatedly round upon this claim, emphasizing that the cow is nothing more than an image, a consummate trompe l’oeil, an illusion by turns admirable and fit to be punctured.

The artifice of the ekphrases themselves, the “full complement of twelve” (to quote Van Mander) that convert the single image of a cow into a seeming herd of twelve, speaks to his dual conceit that this cow / these cows are creatures of nature and works of art. Several ekphrases convert the conceit into a paradox.²⁵⁷ Ekphrasis 2, “No image of a cow am I,” has the heifer speak as if Myron were ventriloquizing her: she at first asseverates that she is no mere image but then announces, almost in the same breath, that she is stilled rather than alive, more sculpture than cow, her feet having been anchored to a stone base by the vengeful sculptor.²⁵⁸ Ekphrasis 3, “What’s worthy of note,” turns on an enthymematic absurdity: if this is “no concocted image,” then Myron must be a cowherd, the cow apt for the plough.²⁵⁹ Ekphrasis 6, “Even though Myron did cast me,” opens with the cow’s admission that she is indeed fashioned from bronze and closes by asking us to imagine how she might have bellowed like a bull, her sex somehow changed, had Myron given her a tongue, which of course he did not.²⁶⁰ Ekphrasis 7, “A wasp, seeing this cow,” recounts the deception of a wasp that stung the cow’s hide and discovered it to be hard as bronze.²⁶¹ Ekphrasis 9, “Why, Calf, do you creep,” chides a calf for sidling up to a cow whose udder, made by art rather than nature, is empty of milk.²⁶² Ekphrasis 10, “Why, Myron, do you hold me fast,” reverts, like ekphrasis 1, to the trope of the stony base that hinders the bronze cow from ploughing the farmer’s fallow fields.²⁶³ Ekphrasis 11, “Unless a person were to touch,” puts the look and feel of the cow in opposition: whereas the cow appears real to the eyes, her hard bronze body becomes apparent to the hands of whoever touches it.²⁶⁴ Ekphrasis 12, “Myron does not quickly dislodge,” reminds the viewer that the cow, while she stands anchored to her plinth, remains materially dead as any statue, whatever its appearance to the contrary; only were it possible for Myron to set her freely grazing amidst other cows (namely, the other cows populating this epigrammatic herd) could she be seen as truly alive rather than a sculptural illusion of life.²⁶⁵

In his study of ekphrastic epigram in the Palatine Anthology, focusing on the thirty-six epigrams on Myron’s cow, Michael Squire argues that the “medial lability” of the bronze heifer—its recurrent quality of shuttling between the natural and the sculptural—functions in analogy to the metadiscursive character of these epigrammatic ekphrases: they purport vividly to recapture the experience of viewing Myron’s “living” cow but in fact call that experience into question by attesting to their own irrefutably literary ontology.²⁶⁶ The epigrams claim to derive from inscriptions in bronze (hence, the frequent use of first-person voice), but their transposition into a more purely literary form, a sequential anthology of correspondent epigrams, belies their monumental origins, exposing the epigram’s generic conceits. “The mimetic power of the images frames (and is framed by) reflection about the comparative mimetic resources of words,” so that the τέχνη (technē) of the sculptor comes to stand for the τέχνη of the poet; Myron’s ability to bring a bronze cow fully to life is echoed by the poet’s ability to make a silent image speak the words incised somewhere upon or beside it.²⁶⁷ But just as the “promise and failure of Myron’s naturalistic cow” controverts the illusion of life, exposing it as a trompe l’oeil effect, so the epigram’s ekphrastic power is shown to be a purely rhetorical ploy.²⁶⁸ Squire’s analogy is easily reversible: the promise and failure of the ekphrastic epigram reveal the medial artifice of Myron’s heifer and its illusory hold on life. The contradictory wit of the twelve epigrams, their assertions of life held in suspense by their apparent artifice, serve to reveal how the simulative and dissimulative functions of Myron’s sculpture jointly manifest, tussling for the upper hand.

The quality of suspension just mentioned, based as it is on an apposition of nature and art that gives saliency to both factors, applies equally to the range of uyt den gheest images under discussion. Appreciated in this way, the epigrams redound to the peculiar status of animals painted uyt den gheest (and by extension, also to landscape and drapery). Their ad vivum / nae[r] t’leven appearance can be seen as analogous to the unmediated effect of nature evinced by the epigrams and ascribed by them to Myron’s moo-cow, but it can also be recognized as a veracious fiction reducible to a trompe l’oeil effect, again like the sculpted cow and the epigrams evocative of it. This is because such images of animals, more particularly of their distinctive furry coats, are, if handled rightly, pure expressions of gheest. They look natural but emanate from a confluence of wit, ingenuity, skill, industry, experience, and subtlety, which is to say, from a ready spirit and a practiced, spirited hand. Stanza 47 and its marginal gloss drive home this point about the look of animals sourced from gheest: even when painting “monsters and dragons” (“monsters en draken”), the painter must not seem to stray from nature, but be that as it may, these animals must also be “subtly rendered” (“aerdich ghehandelt”), identifiably creatures of art.²⁶⁹ They walk the line between leven and gheest: “There’s nothing better than to paint all things after the life, and above all, to render everything subtly.”²⁷⁰ Throughout chapter 8, as previously noted, Van Mander emphasizes that artifice can be a natural phenomenon: in discussing uyt den gheest, however, he does something different; refusing to elide or harmonize the terms “nature” and “art,” leven and gheest, he places them side by side and demonstrates how they can be seen to work concurrently, in discrete conjunction, and to produce a mimetic effect at once utterly persuasive and ingeniously contrived. Playing at the threshold between simulation of dissimulation, Van Mander brilliantly paves the way for his beneficiary Van Hoogstraten.²⁷¹

7 Précis: The Poem’s Fourteen Chapters

Chapter 1, titled “Exhortatie, oft Vermaninghe” (Exhortation, or Admonition), is one of the longest of the Grondt’s fourteen chapters.²⁷² Van Mander speaks in the voice of a practiced painter, well versed in the ways of the painter’s workshop, attuned to the social mores of “Const-liefdigh … beminders” (art-loving enthusiasts, v. 24), pragmatic about the need to earn a living, and yet steeped in ancient and modern poetry, unhesitating in his assumption that his readers will be as familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphoses as with Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Practitioners of Pictura (the arts of picturing, especially painting) are gifted by Nature with native ability, which inclines them irresistibly to fashion innumerable mental images, “inbeeldinghen ontallijck” (numberless interior images, v. 10). These images “leven,” they live in “gheest, sin en gheneghen” (thought, spirit, and affection, v. 10), which is to say that they are rational, animated, and emotive, issuing respectively from the faculties of mind, heart, and will. But for Van Mander, native ability is a prerequisite that leads nowhere if it is not assiduously honed by years of training: as he puts it, schilderconst is not “elcken te ghebiede” (biddable to all, v. 3), not even to those whom Nature inclines from a young age to take up “alle Const … ghereetschappen” (tools of every Art). Nature will have prompted them, as children, to draw, but if they fail to cultivate that prompting, and neglect to exercise the stylus and the brush, then their childhood promise and youthful ambition will come to naught. Prospective painters must flee idleness and, above all, the idle pursuit of “Bacchi cruyck en Cupidinis schichten” (Bacchus’s jug and Cupid’s darts, v. 13), i.e., drink and carnal desire, and their side effects, insobriety and irascibility.

Throughout chapter 1, the complementary relation between “Const en Ambacht” (Art and Trade, v. 5) is taken for granted. An inclination toward the visual arts or trades is a gift of Nature, for which the recipient must be thankful, and manual proficiency undergirds the practice of both the painter and the artisan. Schilderconst, like any “Ambacht,” is to be appreciated as a source of “nootdruft” (livelihood, v. 58), and for this reason, even though Van Mander expects aspiring painters to know their poets and be familiar with a myriad of mythological references—Minerva, the “vernufte maeght” (sage maiden), for example, or “Caballini water” (the Horse’s stream, i.e., Hippocrene, brought forth by Pegasus as a source of poetic inspiration, v. 56)—he warns them to steer clear of Rhetorica (the poetic art of persuasion, v. 47), “merry and diverting” though she be. He himself, as he admits, has indulged his love of poetry, and so, he speaks from experience when he declares that Rhetorica stocks no larder and, in this sense, diverts the painter from the task at hand. If that task involves mastering the tools of art, it also requires the painter to become engagingly sociable, ingratiating to lovers of art, obliging to his master, candid and helpful to his fellow apprentices and journeymen. These are matters of judgment, as Van Mander makes clear in stanzas 49–54: the young painter must “geeren buyghen onder t’ghemeyn oordeel” (gladly bow to common judgment, i.e., workshop consensus and public opinion, v. 49), must refrain from judging his master publicly, even if he spots faults in the master’s work, must be plainspoken and unbiased when exercising judgment of his peers’ efforts, but always with “beleeftheyt” (courtesy, v. 51), and last but not least, must be judicious and temperate with regard to himself, neither fulsomely praising nor reviling his own works. “Courtesy,” avows Van Mander, “vermach vele” (is equal to any task, v. 29). As painters by their art captivate viewers’ eyes and hearts, so must their refinement of behavior inspire “goede jonse, ghenade en vrientschap” (good favor, grace, and amity, v. 27) in all their dealings, within the workshop and beyond, principally with “beminders” (lovers of art, v. 24).

The principle and practice of art upon which Van Mander dwells the most, whereby the aspiring schilder can best improve himself, is appropriative imitation: he must “wel spelen Rapiamus personage” (play well the part of the personage Rapiamus, v. 46). The name Rapiamus, which derives from the Latin verb rapere (to seize, carry off, claim possession of), here personifies the action of laying claim to a model by imitating it. (The moniker, couched in the form of the present subjunctive, literally means “Let us seize.”) In stanza 46, the reference applies implicitly both to nature and to art, not only to the human body’s constituent parts—“arms, legs, torsos, hands, feet, and [other members]”—but also to works of art that epitomize them. Van Mander returns to the theme of rapere in stanza 75, where he urges his young readers not to return from their study tour of Italy until they have assimilated from Rome a “teyckenen zedich” (a fine / refined manner of drawing) and from Venice “t’wel schilderen” (the good [manner] of painting). And in stanza 84, Van Mander compares the composition or, better, ordonnance of the Schilder-Boeck to that of a picture fashioned after the manner of Rapiamus: the book has been drawn from numerous sources, as if its author had “suckled at various breasts” and gone “fish[ing] in other ponds.” But the treatise is no mere aggregate copied from disparate models: he has “exercised [his] invention,” thereby ensuring that the book, ascribable to him and thoroughly concocted, coheres as a whole, on the model of the proverb quoted in stanza 46: “Wel ghecoockte rapen is goe pottage” (Well cooked turnips make for a good potage).

Finally, having mixed procedural advice on how to imitate, with moral advice on virtues to be nurtured and, concomitantly, vices to be spurned, and having also admixed a bit of technical instruction, as in stanza 48, where he cautions against “over-tempering the smalts or ashes,” Van Mander brings chapter 1 to a close by offering practical advice about the journey to Italy, alternately praising Rome as “hooft der Picturae Scholen” (capital of the Schools of Pictura, v. 66) and disparaging its many moral dangers. He also gently mocks the Romans for failing to see that Netherlanders, though certainly proficient at landscape and grotesques, are capable figure painters in the same degree.

Chapter 2, “Van het teyckenen, oft Teycken-const” (On drawing, and the Art of Delineating), describes Teycken-const as the “Vader van t’schilderen” (Father of picturing / painting, v. 1), and then, taking up one of the themes of chapter 1, adds that many other arts, amongst them goldsmith’s work and architecture, trace their lineage from teyckenconst. Drawing thus mediates between the pictorial arts and their high artisanal sister-arts, consociating them. Having personified teyckenconst as male in stanza 1, Van Mander unexpectedly changes tack, identifying her as female in stanza 2 where she receives the title “Voedster aller Consten” (Wet nurse of all the Arts). Writing, too, since it entails tracing letters and characters, can likewise be appreciated as a species of drawing, and teyckenconst, in this particular sense, can be said to nourish all text-based literary arts as well. What’s more, as the source of Grammatica’s (Grammar’s) syntactical rules, her generative influence expands to embrace all seven “Vry Consten” (Liberal Arts, v. 1–2). Teyckenconst not only engenders the full range of arts, from artisanal to liberal, s/he also capacitates cognition. Van Mander states in stanza 3 that native ability, when fortified by the practice of drawing, begets and vivifies one’s understanding of that after which one draws. He further implies that drawing cultivates good judgment which, joined with understanding, facilitates the production of whatsoever mental images it pleases the hand to draw. Drawing, to the extent that it issues from such images, infuses them with the draftsman’s intention: in stanza 4, Van Mander calls such drawings, made after these images, “an expression, a striking elucidation of intention, a witness to it.” His chief point of reference, as he makes clears in stanzas 4–5, is “t’Menschen beeldt heerlijckst gheschepen” (the Human form, most precious of all created things, v. 4).

Stanza 6 initiates a discussion of Actitude (pose, attitude of the human figure) that will later constitute the chief topic of chapters 3, “Analogie, Proportie” (Analogy, Proportion), and 4, “Van der Actitude” (On Attitude). The bodily epitome Van Mander visualizes is a turning figure whose hip swings forward from a standing leg that bears the body’s whole weight. A printed model-book—an “A.b. boeck” (A.b.[c.] book, v. 6)—would be a welcome resource upon which young schilders would surely draw, were such a collection available. Why is it, laments Van Mander, that apothecaries, chirurgs, and practitioners of the liberal arts enjoy ready access to such how-to manuals, whereas young painters, who like new beakers await to be filled, have nothing comparable? The next best thing, therefore, is to find a “goet Meester” (accomplished Master, v. 9), from whom a “goede manier” (comely manner, v. 9) and the “seker vaste gronden” (sure, firm foundations) of one’s art can be learned; typically, Van Mander is specific about materials and techniques: first, a soft, forgiving medium like coal, later chalks and quills can be used to familiarize oneself with light and shadow, highlights, and the rudiments of “stellen, handelen, omtrecken, ronden” (disposition / attitude, handling / manner, contour, projection, v. 9). By placing these particulars in apposition to “comely manner,” he implies that they are the constituent features of “manier” to be learned from a capable master draftsman. He further specifies that strokes should be barely discernible except in those places where the shadows fall most densely. Remarks such as these would seem to indicate that he had the hatched strokes of a master draftsman-printmaker like Goltzius foremost in mind. The later reference, in stanza 20, to linear flexion, to hatches tapering and swelling from thin to thick, as a way of modeling muscular bodies, and as a good alternative to stumping with granular media such as chalk, makes this allusion to Goltzius even more apparent.

Van Mander urges his young readers to experiment with colored grounds and tonal transitions, all the better to concatenate between zones of bright light and zones of deep shadow. Returning to the theme of a printed A.b.c. book, he instructs the aspiring draftsman to utilize coal or chalk and to stump his strokes when drawing after prints, and also to differentiate the tints by tonal value. He may be referring to the use of colored chalks or, alternatively, to the effect of color that can result from relatively monochrome media, if they are deftly handled. To learn a fine manner of modeling tones, he recommends that the chiaroscuro prints of Parmigianino be consulted; studying their “daghen wel in het legghen” (well-placed highlights, v. 12), assimilating them so thoroughly that they become veritable offshoots grafted onto one’s person, is tantamount to working after sculpture in the round. And by these means, one will prepare oneself to go to the draftsman’s ultimate source, progressing from the helpful contrivances of art to the “gracious … unaffected sweetness” of nature, “that is, to life … the Lodestar whereby to steer our ship.” For Van Mander, the principal benefit of working after nature, “tot het leven” (to the life, v. 13) or “na[er] t’leven” (after the life, v. 13), is that it makes reference to living things whose life is perceptible “both in stillness and in motion.” These are living creatures, first of all “volcomen naeckten van Mans, en Vrouwen” (a fully nude Man or Woman, v. 14), secondly “Kinder-naeckten en alle Dieren” (children in the nude, and every kind of Beast, v. 14).

If from Nature one learns everything not supplied by native ability, as Van Mander avers in stanza 15—“actions, attitudes, foreshortenings, shapes in profile and overlapping shapes”—one must jointly train oneself to fashion forms “uyt zijn selven” (from out of oneself), “om inventie te hebben” (in order to possess invention). He underscores this point in stanza 16, stating that “inventy van jonghs moet oock med’ opwassen” (from an early age, invention must develop in concert [with Nature]). Invention generates “ordineren” (ordering, ordonnance, composition, v. 16) by looking not to “others’ storehouses” but to one’s own. By “cassen” (storehouses), Van Mander clearly means “memory,” which he personifies as “Memoria … de Muses Moeder” (Memoria … Mother to the Muses). Invention thus involves tapping or harnessing images stored in one’s mind, wherein the visual memories of things experienced at first hand are retained. Van Mander is setting the stage for his subsequent discussion of two key complementary categories of mimetic picture-making—nae[r] t’leven and uyt den gheest (after the life and from the mind / spirit)—which are variously applied throughout part two of Schilder-Boeck, Book IV, comprising the lives of Netherlandish and German painters still active when Van Mander was writing his treatise. Uyt den gheest, as he explains in chapter 8, “Van het Landtschap” (On Landscape), chapter 9, “Van Beesten, Dieren, en Voghels” (On Cattle, Animals, and Birds), and chapter 10, “Van Laken oft Draperinghe” (On Fabrics or Drapery), is the procedure that sources mnemonic images for the purpose of gathering them into a pictorial ordonnance, a well-ordered composition. That these images issue from the mental faculty of gheest (spirit) animates them, imparting the lively quality of spiritedness. This quality is fully compatible, of course, with the impression of life conferred by working after or to the life. Indeed, stanza 17 suddenly changes course, returning to the matched topics of stocking the “schatcamer der wetenheyt” (treasure chamber of knowledge) and “conterfeytende … u voorbeeldt” (portraying your model), topics broached in stanza 15. This is say that the topic of stanza 16 (and the closing line of stanza 15, on working from out of oneself)—invention and its mnemonic referents—is clearly seen by Van Mander to be inextricable from the topics of stanzas 15 and 17—portrayal of the living model as mnemonic inscription, as the plenishment of memory. His term for this sort of portraying is “conterfeyten” (to copy, imitate closely).

Van Mander concludes by returning to the trope of “Teycken-const van Schilderen Vader” (Drawing, the Father of Painting, v. 21), adducing the technique of drawing with colored crayons as incontrovertible proof that “no two things could resemble each other more” than Drawing and Painting. Nor is teyckenconst miserly in the benefits it bestows: on the contrary, every age and estate finds drawing useful, whether for learning to speak authoritatively about the visual arts or for describing places and their circumstances as need requires.

Chapter 3, “Analogie, Proportie, oft maet der Lidtmaten eens Menschen Beeldts” (Analogy, Proportion, or measurement of the Parts of a Human Body), expands upon the topic broached in chapter 2, stanza 14—the nude model as one of the building blocks of the draftsman’s art. Stanza 1 provides a succinct, elegant definition of proportion: it is “ghelijckmaticheyt puere” (a pure system of correspondent relation) that brings the constituent parts of figures, but also of buildings, into mutual conformation. Underlying the analogy between bodily and architectural structure is the biblical analogy, adduced in stanza 2, between the Temple and the Lord’s body, taken from John 2:19–22. In its application to the visual arts, the analogy operates through numerical ratios, the particulars of which Van Mander itemizes in stanzas 3–8, moving from the smallest to the largest intervals between body parts: for instance, one-eighth from crown to chin of a man’s head, one-sixth from brow to breastbone, one-fourth from crown of the head to the sternum. The parts themselves can likewise be enumerated: the interval between the hairline of the brow and the bridge of the nose, between the eyes, is one-third the length of the face, and the distance from heel to toe is one-sixth the length of the body. As the body and its members subscribe to arithmetical ratios and proportional measurements, so the body’s motions are notionally circumscribed within geometrical forms, such as the superimposed circle and square that define the limits of an extended male body, measuring from the navel as center to the tips of the fingers and toes. These geometries and proportional relations can be sensed or cognized by the attentive schilder, irrespective of measurement, as Van Mander states explicitly in stanza 8: “And as this perfect circular form is detectable in him, so one also finds present in him the likeness of a true square.”

Having cited Vitruvius, Pliny, and Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion in stanza 9, Van Mander changes tack in stanza 10, warning his readers that master painters and sculptors who cleave meticulously to numerical measurements will prove virtually inimitable to the students who aspire to follow them. Let these students, he advises, content themselves with the shorthand measurements of Vitruvius who, using the head as a module, simply defines the male body as eight heads high, or two faces wide, the female body as equally tall but wider at the hips (at two heads wide). After digressing on the topic of female flesh, its softness, delicacy, and dimpled hollows and creases, all of which the draftsman (and implicitly, the painter) must capture, Van Mander concludes with a caveat: the canons he has just detailed, whether complex, as in the case of Dürer, or simple, must be modified according to the “verscheyden proportien wedervaren … in’t leven” (various proportions encountered in life, v. 15), which will usually be found somewhat to diverge from strict numerical norms. Variation is a trait of nature, and the schilder, in describing persons squat or slim, must take this fact of life into account.

Chapter 3 concludes with a reference to the topic of chapter 4, “Van der Actitude, welstandt, ende weldoen eens Beelts” (On the Attitude, decorum, and decorous motion of a Human Figure): Van Mander announces his intention of examining the decorum of human actions by discoursing on how properly “to position a figure, set it to work, activate it.” Accordingly, the first four stanzas of chapter 4 explain why he considers a discourse on figural welstandt (decorum, good bearing or demeanor, well-ordered bodily attitude) indispensable. Beauty is a virtue, and artful Nature is beauty’s repository, and so too do Nature’s circumstances supply the “oorspronck en middle” (source and method, v. 1) whereby the pinnacle of beauteous perfection may be fashioned. Yet even in nature there are flaws, “omstandicheden faelgieren” (attendant circumstances that fall short), which thereby diminish beauty. In drawing after nature, the draftsman may find that his figures, even when their caroming contours produce a fine effect of projection, may prove lacking in other respects, their motions insufficiently stirring, their poses imbalanced, their parts indecorous in one way or another. But these defects of nature (and of drawing after the life) can be put right by looking again to Nature, this time for precepts, “ghewisse regulen en vaste Wetten” (certain rules and firm laws, v. 4), that can assist the draftsman to circumvent these flaws. The rest of chapter 4, stanzas 5–29 principally, furnish this corrective, disclosing Nature’s rules, her touchstones.

Van Mander begins with standing figures, first at rest, then in motion, and eventually introduces the attitude he adjudged the most beautiful: the serpentine figure, coiled and turning in space, its rotating limbs subsumed into a network of antitheses—rotation and counterrotation, convexity and concavity, projection and recession, advance and retreat. In stanzas 5 and 6, he describes an upright figure, its axis vertical, with limbs outstretched, and then compares the relation between a person’s head and body to that between a capital and a column. Stanza 7 instructs the draftsman to accustom himself to seeing this axis of orientation in his mind’s eye, as a notional plumb line, so that it need not actually be drawn. Stanzas 8 and 9 initiate the process of visualizing how properly to vary such a figure, first bilaterally: the body parts must be syncopated so that the head and torso do not bend uniformly, inclining to the same side; then spatially: the legs must be coordinated so that they rise and fall in tandem, with one foot in front, the other foot behind. The serpentine figure comes clearly into view in stanzas 10–12, where Van Mander recommends that persons, whether laboring or standing still, walking or running, be portrayed as if swaying. Irrespective of age, the arms and legs must always be seen to alternate, both before and behind, from side to side, and crosswise, with the face turned toward whichever arm extends outward, and the head turned away from whithersoever the torso swivels. The masters he cites as great paragons of this figural epitome of welstandt are Raphael, Michelangelo, and Giambologna.

Typically, he then spends several stanzas justifying variations from the norm: for example, whereas a turning pose embodies grace or, more precisely, focuses attention on grace as an effect of art, as an artifice that heightens the quality of grace in nature, conspicuous turning will detract from the modesty proper to sacred figures, hindering rather than enhancing devotion. It shall also be acceptable, as need arises, to diverge from the graceful norm, in the manner of Orpheus who played rough-sounding modes on his otherwise sweet-sounding harp, whenever his poetic subjects demanded them. This discussion of poetic modes—the graceful and fine juxtaposed to the ungraceful and rough—in their application to teyckenconst anticipates Van Mander’s defense of two painterly handelinghen (manners, modes), the one smooth, fine, and meticulously rendered, the other roughly brushed, the former best seen in close proximity, the other at a distance, in chapter 12, stanza 27. Another exception to the rule is any functional attitude illustrative of labor: when staves are thrust or ropes are pulled, the arms and/or legs will operate in unison, stretching outward together; under these circumstances, graceful alternation would prove inimical to persuasive narration.

Having defined various improprieties that contravene figural welstandt, in stanzas 18–22—excess foreshortening of the female face, for example, or an arm that pivots outward or upward from a shoulder dropped where the hip projects—Van Mander then cautions the would-be draftsman not to display extreme torsion in the human figure. Verging on contortion, such spectacles of artifice call to mind those “Camerspeelders” (Play-actors) who take to the stage and “springhen en beutelen” (tumble and somersault, v. 23), mistakenly “construing unnatural things of this sort as an art.” As they mar rather than beautify a play, so draftsmen who entangle their figures in corkscrew turns mar rather than embellish a picture. They should instead “houden matelijcke ganghen” (keep to the middle path, v. 25), “turning and bending” in an enhanced but not exaggerated version of nature. This holds just as true of figures whose motions illustrate functional tasks: they, too, can sometimes be shown turning but should never appear to move “buyten Natuer en gracy” (in excess of Nature and grace, v. 28); if they swivel, let it be “slightly, or nearly not at all.”

With reference to Pliny’s descriptions of ancient sculpture, to courtesy books such as Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, and poetic effictiones (enriched verbal descriptions of bodily appearance) such as Ariosto’s portrayal of the temptress Alcina, Van Mander concludes by touching upon topics that anticipate the subjects of chapter 6, “Wtbeeldinghe der Affecten” (Portrayal of the Affects), and chapter 12, “Van wel schilderen, oft Coloreren” (On painting well, or Coloring)—namely, the depiction of emotional states, such as Demon of Athens’s famous statue of two soldiers, one still exerting himself, the other exhausted, or the rendition of varieties of animate complexion, especially as pertains to maidens and matrons. These differentiated affects and effects must closely correspond to distinctions in enacted attitude, in accordance with “Persoons crachten en ghemoeden” (a Person’s strengths and temperament), so that a soldier appears noticeably different from a philosopher. And with that, the discussion of figural decorum, good bearing, and well-ordered attitudes closes, the scene having now been set for the disquisition on history painting in the subsequent chapter.

Chapter 5, “Van der Ordinanty ende Inventy der Historien” (On Ordonnance and the Invention of Histories), the longest in the Grondt, is one of two chapters focusing on the topic of pictorial composition—the ordinantie (ordonnance) of a picture, as a whole and in its parts—the other being chapter 8, “Van het Landtschap” (On Landscape). Throughout this chapter, as elsewhere in the Grondt, Van Mander includes both fact and fiction, events from history and mythology, under the sign of Historie. Two definitions of ordinantie coalesce in stanza 1, the first ontological, the second functional: if the virtue of every creature and thing consists in its God-given “gheregheltheyt” (arrangement), this structural principle, inherently expressed as the quality of ordonnance, is also actively expressed through the rational works of persons and the resourceful works of mute beasts (such as bees and ants), both categories of work being the result of “ordeningh” (ordering, orderly behavior). Stanza 2 states further that ordonnance can be appreciated, too, as a purposeful effect of the painter’s powers of Inventy (Invention), which must be exercised with “gheest, als verstandts doorgronden, aendacht, universael experiency” (as much with spirit as with depth of understanding, attention, [and] universal experience). The “Regulen en Wetten” (Rules and Regulations, v. 3) of composition that Van Mander now intends to set forth must issue first and foremost from the historical subjects the painter has chosen to portray: they must represent these subjects appositely, by means of “bootsen oft Beelden daer toe bequame” (models and Figures expedient to the task at hand, v. 4), which are to be mobilized according to the seven Motus (Motions) executable by the human body. In enacting these motions, as stanzas 6–7 specify, the figures should appear to move freely, neither uniformly nor constrainedly, in a manner dictated by the stories they narrate.

Starting with stanza 8, Van Mander elaborates upon the means whereby a graceful ordonnance can be achieved. The painter must attend not only to his “materie” (substantive material, i.e., subject) but also to its attendant circumstances, and then sketch everything as the imagination dictates. Letting the spirit of invention flow, he may follow the Italians in drawing a full-scale cartoon based on his sketches, always taking care, however, to avoid a “maniere die swaer is, en niet wel stellijck” (manner heavy, and poorly disposed, v. 10) or “al te ghestenteert, moeyelijck oft quellijck” (too labored, awkward and ponderous). Drawing after the life, one may also add the colors of nature to one’s cartoon, thereby giving it “welstandighe crachten” (an attractive force or, alternatively, a forceful concinnity). Above all, as Van Mander advises in stanzas 11–13, the painter who strives for harmonious ordonnance should insert framing figures at the sides of the pictorial field, leaving the middle-ground empty so as to stage smaller, more distant figures there. The provision of an optical corridor down which the eyes may advance toward background figures and distant landscapes, is the surest method of achieving a pleasing ordonnance, for painted histories lacking landscape backgrounds will appear awkward rather than graceful (vv. 11–12). Stanzas 14–18 go on to say, by way of qualification, that one may imitate the Italians—Tintoretto or Michelangelo, for example—in clustering figures into groups, on the model of battle scenes wherein they attack or retreat, even while taking care not to emulate Michelangelo, whose Last Judgment, though uncommonly varied in the forms and actions of its nude figures, includes no view into the distance. Van Mander hesitates to criticize Michelangelo but nevertheless implies that his great fresco, deprived of any landscape, lacks concinnity.

Stanzas 19–26 focus on the theme of variety: as musical harmony results from mixing a variety of sounds, so must the painter mix “veel verscheyden Beelden” (many varied Figures, v. 19), on the principle that “door verschedenheyt is Natuere schoone” (Nature is beautiful through variety, v. 20). The picture should therefore be as varied as a field full of flowers, or a banqueting table loaded with food and drink. With respect to history painting, the figures should be varied according to the seven axes of motion (defined in stanzas 4 and 5), as well as by “natuere, wesen, en gheneghen” (nature, condition, and temperament, v. 21). Van Mander especially favors a method of composition detailed in stanza 23: this involves setting the picture’s Scopus (nucleus, i.e., key figures) amidst a circle of onlookers who variously address or entreat the person at their center. In stanzas 25–26, fully equating copious variety with grace, he urges painters to incorporate animals of every sort, persons of either sex and every age, landscape, architecture, and other adornments, since “every kind of subtle fantasy issuing from Copiousness … makes for a fine alluring Harmony.”

Stanzas 27–42 distinguish between two historical modes, richly varied or austerely simple, which Van Mander compares to two modes of oratory, respectively based on a maximum or minimum of speech, and to two kinds of drama, comedy and tragedy, respectively enacted with many or few figures. Whereas stanzas 27–30 praise those great masters who favor the simpler and grander of the two modes, associated with masterful, deliberate, and considered speech, stanzas 31–37 instead enlarge upon the allure of the copious mode, which requires to be paired with delightful, frivolous, comedic subjects, such as mythological fables. Just as these subjects offer innumerable pleasures and enticements, so the mode best matched to them overflows with enticing variety, as in a picture of Zephyr and Flora kissing by the light of dawn, amidst a floriferous field brimful with every species of bloom—the anemone, crocus, bindweed, narcissus, and purple hyacinth. Stanza 32, as rich in lyric reference as the picture Van Mander asks us to envision, itself overflows with allusions to the Ovidian origin stories of these flowers.

Stanza 33 describes the experience of viewing such a captivating picture: like bees flitting amongst these flowers, the viewer’s eyes, enthralled by pictorial variety, will fly from sight to sight, gladly grazing in Pictura’s garden. Stanza 34 wittily analogizes the simple historical mode to one of Varro’s famously short guest lists, whereas the copious history will be as rich and sumptuous as the repasts he lavished upon the privileged few. Such a picture will display its particulars in the way a peddler’s stall advertises his wares, setting them out on shelves above, below, and at the sides of the buyer’s field of vision. Not only should it thus entice viewers to ogle its contents, it can also double their desirous gaze, by ranging depicted onlookers “op heuvels, boomen, oft op trappen steenich” (on hills, trees, or stone steps, v. 34; cf. stanza 23 supra), as if they were living counterparts of the peddler’s goods. Stanza 36 compares these witnesses to “Comic Actors on the stage,” the objects of whose gaze, often positioned above them (as in a thoon or tableau vivant), are made sufficiently conspicuous both to them and to the picture’s beholder. Continuing the theme of doubling, Van Mander advises the painter to exemplify in his picture the affective response he wishes to solicit from the beholder, by showing a figure who reacts with evident emotion to some turn of events, news of which is being conveyed to him. Surprisingly, just before, in stanza 37, Van Mander analogizes Historie itself, as a genre of schilderconst, to the copious mode he has been characterizing, as if the mode were subsuming the genre: painted history must comprise every category of art encompassed by schilderconst, such attitudes, affects, and varieties of reflected light, respectively the topics of chapters 4, 6, and 7 of the Grondt.

Stanzas 38–45 digress on the topic of how to maintain historical clarity, both formal and thematic, in light of the desideratum of copious variety. The sense of the history must ever be plain to see, its meaning discernible, even when the painter, following Horace, exercises a “power equal to that of the Poets,” depicting his subject as he wishes, playing upon the viewer’s curiosity, devising an ordonnance so replete with corollary elements that the true historical subject is cleverly and alluringly, though only momentarily, withheld. Once compelled to search out the scopus, the viewer will look here, there, and everywhere, traveling deep into the picture along its divagating optical pathways, looking for the true sense that is the pictorial raison d’être. This historical mode contrasts, states Van Mander in stanza 44, with that practiced by early Netherlandish masters when painting “devoot’ History” (devout History), which foregrounds the principal figures, never diminishing their prominence. He then exemplifies the optical and thematic complexities of the copious mode by means of a lengthy ekphrasis adapted from Jacopo Sannazzaro’s Arcadia, in stanzas 46–60, on which see section 6, supra, of this “Introduction,” “Landtschap and byvoechsel: Karel van Mander on Landcape and History, Simulation and Dissimulation.” The closing stanzas of this ekphrastic tour de force, along with stanzas 61–64, constitute a sustained analogy between painting and theater: histories richly embellished in the manner of Sannazzaro’s astonishing word-picture, so vivid it is more a painting than a poem, are as delightful to spectators as comedies interspersed with clownish interludes. Therefore, reasons Van Mander, “machmen eensaem History vermeeren” (one may amplify simple History) in this wise, indulging one’s inclination toward the richer of the two modes.

Chapter 5 closes, in stanzas 65–88, with helpful advice regarding various ornaments useful for augmenting and embellishing an historical subject: for instance, the painter may insert “gheestelijcke Beelden” (allegorical Figures, i.e., personifications, v. 65), such as Faith, Hope, and Charity in a Sacrifice of Isaac, or proleptic figures, such as Jeremiah, Isaac, and other prophets who foresaw the mystery of the Incarnation, as in Federico Zuccaro’s Annunciation (formerly in Santa Maria Annunziata, Rome, v. 67), or again, mythological figures, such as Apollo and Daphne, who stand for the Sun and the Moon in Rosso Fiorentino’s eschatological image of the Virgin in the Sun (v. 67). Amongst the ancient painters, Nealces was much admired for incorporating such an ornament, a crocodile signifying the Nile, in his great picture of the naval battle between the Persians and Egyptians, fought on that river. This brings Van Mander in mind of the statue of Father Nile he saw and studied in Rome, the attributes of which and their natural, geographical, and ethnological significance he expounds at length in stanzas 72–83. Accounts of other personifications worthy to grace history in an enriched mode follow: Father Tiber, for example, and beside him the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, or the Rivers Eurotas and Numicius. He adds, in stanza 86, that just as rivers may be personified, so, too, may cities and lands: the volatile temperament of the Athenians may be transferred to the figural embodiment of Athens, the martial valor of the Romans to the figure of Rome. Van Mander concludes, in stanza 88, by promising to expand upon the subject of ordonnance once again in another place, perhaps an allusion to his treatment of Landtschap (and its relation to Historie) in chapter 8.

Chapter 6, “Wtbeeldinghe der Affectien, passien, begeerlijckheden, en lijdens der Menschen” (Portrayal of the Affects, passions, desires, and sorrows of Persons), returns to the topic broached in stanza 37 of chapter 5, where “dramatizing fear, wonder, and sorrow” and “revealing by [figures’] gestures the purport of their speech” are seen as a sine qua non of history painting. Stanza 1 explain how and why these affects become visible and representable: motions of the heart and sense impel the bodily limbs to move as external indices of these internal motions, making their “ghestalten, ghedaenten, oft wercken” (forms, qualities, or actions) discernible. Stanzas 2–7 focus on the unitary affects or passions—“liefde, begeerlijckheyt, vreucht, smert en tooren, commer en droefheyt” (love, desire, joy, sorrow and choler, distress and melancholy, v. 2)—which persons are by nature prone to express through their actions; these are singular rather than plural or layered, one passion not admixed with another. Known by the Greeks a ethoi, as Van Mander explains in stanza 3, these passions were first portrayed by the ancient painter Aristides, whose wounded woman and sickly man were epitomes of the affective art. Such Affecten are expressed first and foremost “met de leden van den aenghesichte” (with the features of the face, v. 4), ten in number: to communicate them legibly is a task as praiseworthy as it is difficult to achieve. Nature is the chief descriptive source of affective bodily motions, but Histrionica (the dramatic arts) offer a ready, complementary source of imitable affects, as Van Mander points out in stanzas 5–6. Amongst these, the first in order of importance is “Liefde” (Love), the enacted attributes of which are smiling faces, enfolded limbs, and intertwined bodies.

In stanza 8, Van Mander complicates the painter’s brief: his higher task is to portray complex, compound emotions, such as love mixed with shame, chagrin, and/or disquiet, as exemplified by the story of Antiochus who harbored and was tormented by a secret love for his stepmother Stratonice, recounted in great detail in stanzas 8–19. For Antiochus, the imagined pleasure of love consummated mingles with the sorrow and despair of unrealizable desire. In stanzas 12–13, Van Mander develops a witty analogy between the doctor who astutely reads Antiochus’s symptoms as mixed emotions attendant on forbidden love, and the painter who sets about the task of portraying the lovelorn lover. Stanza 19 brings this extended tale to a close by observing that just as the motion of the hand indicates the source of bodily pain, so the motion of the eyes transits to the object of loving desire. Here bodily motions prove symptomatic of the underlying causes of the affects they express.

Van Mander supplies further examples of mixed emotion in stanzas 20–44: there is Homer’s account of Paris, whose eyes, like covert gestures, imploringly revealed his love of Helen, or Mantegna’s nymph-satyress gazing with maternal fondness at her satyr-child; both Paris and the satyress express a compound of love so sweetly intense that it shades into aching pain (vv. 20–22). Even more layered were the mixed affects that the ancient painter Euphranor gave to Paris who, as judge of the three goddesses, lover of Helen, and slayer of Achilles, combined the character traits of judicious wit, fetching desire, and spirited valor (v. 24). As his wit likely lodged in his eyes, so was concupiscence evident in his laughing mouth, manly strength in his forceful attitude (v. 25). Citing Pliny and Albert the Great in stanza 26, Van Mander identifies the eyes as the primary seats of desire, both as source and attribute. The eyes, he goes on to say in stanza 27, are multifarious in their expressive range, which modulates between joy and sorrow, compassion and bitter grief.

Moving to other facial features while keeping to the theme of mixed emotion, Van Mander asserts in stanza 28 that the depiction of sorrow’s conversion into merriment, of heaviness into lightness of spirit, may be effected by means of the motions of the brow, which can be likened to the lambent air when storm clouds are swept away by the sun. This is one of many examples of Van Mander’s tendency to read the human body as if it were a landscape, and conversely, to read landscape as if it were a human body. But the brow, though by nature disposed to reveal what the heart feels, may yet be used by cunning persons to cloak their true intentions: the term for such wily men who deck “base rancor” with a “glad brow” is “dobbel voorhoofdich” (double-browed, v. 31). Similarly, the eyebrows are complex affective indicators: on this score, in stanzas 33–34, Van Mander adduces the ancient statesman Phocion, whose forbidding brows belied his good nature (or alternatively, whose mastery over himself curbed his irascible temperament), to refute the simpleminded assumption of the physiognomists that there is a direct correlation between the motions of the brow (and eyebrows) and human nature. The relation between affect and the stirrings of the face is far more complex, as stanza 34 warns.

The philosophical distinction between joy and sorrow is of no interest to Van Mander, as he avows in stanza 35; rather, his task as schilder is to communicate the “changes and movements of the limbs, whereby one may easily recognize what our Figures are feeling or doing.” He affirms in stanzas 36 that it is indeed possible to distinguish between laughing and crying faces, although painters who fail to consult nature will tend to confuse the expression of sorrow with that of joy. Let them heed the example of the ancient sculptor Praxiteles, who portrayed a sorrowful matron beside a lighthearted woman, the one clearly weeping, the other just as clearly laughing. Stanza 39, circling back to the notion that ethoi are like colors (v. 3) and to the discussion of Antiochus’s rosy-red face as a symptom of chagrin (v. 8), emphasizes that the complexion, in concert with the eyes, brow, and eyebrows, is a telling conveyer of affect. Through skillful manipulation of color, the ancient painter Demon manages to display the compound affective character of the Athenians, disclosing their volatility, prone as they were “to be inconstant, wrathful, angry, merciful, gentle, fearful, stalwart, humble, [or] majestic” (v. 39). More than this, Demon strove to combine these affects in a single figure, whereas his fellow painter Timanthes distributed various kinds and degrees of grief amongst the Greeks shown bearing witness to the sacrifice of Iphigenia—most signally, her father Agamemnon, the intensity of whose paternal grief was subtly implied (and intensified) through the device of veiling his face. Sometimes, as stanza 44 avers, a mere wrinkle is all it takes to indicate that one affect, such as pity or sorrowful compassion, is changing into another, such as fear.

Turning from the face to the head and the body’s other limbs, Van Mander now offers, in stanzas 45–54, a detailed account of how various affects may actively be transmitted. In stanza 49, he differentiates between the expressive personification and the exemplification of affect, citing as an epitome of the latter Aristides’s Sick Person, once displayed in the Roman Temple of Fever. Equally important is the ability to depict death as the complete absence of affect: the famed Meleager Sarcophagus in Rome is much praised, he states, because immobilized by death, the hero has been shorn of all affect.

Evinced formerly by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the ability to depict emotion is not now an endowment of contemporary masters only, for as Van Mander acknowledges in stanza 53, he once saw on the Capitoline in Rome a picture of the Horatii and the Curatii, about a hundred years old, in which the shifting emotions of the Romans and the Sabines were shown as effectively, though in an antiquated style, as in any contemporary painting. Consequently, the skilled depiction of affect is not to be appreciated as contingent on the times. Another example, taken from the recent past, is Pieter Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents, in which the herald charged with promulgating Herod’s cruel edict reveals how a “modicum of compassion,” fleeting but detectable, underlies the mortifying obduracy he applies to the task at hand (v. 54). Therefore, says Van Mander in stanza 55, the aspiring painter must master the full spectrum of simple and complex affects, the proper depiction of which will “t’ghewin den werckman croonen met eeren” (crown the workman’s profit with honor), thereby elevating the virtue of his art.

In stanzas 56–58, Van Mander returns squarely to the theme of mixed emotions, enhancing it by reference to the use of mixed materials: he cites the example of the ancient sculptor Aristonidas, who mixed (rusted) iron with bronze to portray the blushing remorse felt by Athamas, king of Thebes, who had thrown his own son from the city’s battlements in a fit of rage. Surely, adjures Van Mander in stanza 58, painters should try to achieve in paint what Aristonidas achieved in metal. This reference to color leads him to insist, in stanzas 59–69, that painters should strive, “by fashioning and refashioning the figures with your colors,” to reveal the heart’s affects, as did Michelangelo when, following Dante, he likened Charon’s irises to burning coals circled round by fields of white, and painted his cheeks fiery red with choleric heat (v. 60). Conversely, Ovid’s personification of Envy should be not rubicund but “deathly pale” (v. 61). Correspondingly, in stanza 62, Van Mander praises Lucas van Leyden’s engraving David Playing the Harp before Saul for its painterly suggestion of color: Saul, implies Van Mander, can be seen as either red with rage or pale as “dootverw’ ” (ground color), “afflicted interiorly by fear.” Just as admirable are Giotto’s “fearful, appalled, astonished” apostles, rendered in mosaic on the façade of Old Saint Peter’s (v. 63). And foremost amongst the ancient epitomes of mixed emotions was Aristides’s painting of a vanquished city, featuring a mother, mortally wounded, whose love for her infant child mingled with anxious care lest he suck her bloodied breast milk (v. 67). Here the intermingled milk and blood stand implicitly for the difficulty of the painter’s charge of laminating diverse affects. For his fellow painters’ benefit, Van Mander imagines the precise particulars of the mother’s facial features and paling complexion.

Stanzas 70–73 function as a peroration that incorporates a rejoinder to Vasari’s claim that Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is an inimitable canon of affects unequalled before or since, each affect aligned with a precipitating sin. Quite to the contrary, protests Van Mander, the Ancients had already in their time depicted every affective kind and degree, as Pliny attests. Read in relation to the Preface of the Grondt, which presents the Netherlandish masters as heirs to the Ancients in their varieties of pictorial expertise, this closing counterargument explicitly calls upon them to exercise themselves, too, in portraying every type of affect, from the most simple to the most complex, on the model of masters such as Aristides, Parrhasius, and Timanthes.

Chapter 7, “Van de Reflecty, Reverberaty, teghen-glans oft weerschijn” (On Reflection, Reverberation, re-reflected luster, or re-reflection), discourses on light—more specifically, on reflected light—as a fundamental source of pictorial imitation. The representational properties of painting in oil colors, as becomes evident by the chapter’s close, are closely aligned with, indeed set in motion by the action of light illuminating and interacting with the surfaces it strikes. Stanza 1 thus begins with the sun, whose incandescent light, reflected back by other heavenly bodies, such as the stars and planets, outshines any other type of light. Reverberant effects of reflected and re-reflected light provide a model for the kinds and degrees of reflection to be discussed later on. Stanza 2 invokes the dawn, when night, the absence of light, recedes, and one sees the first rays of sunlight reflected and re-reflected amongst banks of cloud. Not only is such a light an affective prompt to joy, it also produces the multitudinous colors of the morning sky and, by implication, of the world at large. At dawn, states stanza 3, the rising sun’s golden light bestows colors on the azure sky, tinting it with rose-reds and flowerlike purples. In referring to these colors as “roode Roosen” and “purpuren Blommen” (red Roses and purple Blossoms), Van Mander insists on the figurative affordances of light and on its substantive representational effects: it is as if light were productive of roses and blossoms, or at the very least of their vivid images. This stanza closes by remarking that painting’s capacity to describe light and color, thereby to gratify heart and sense, exceeds the descriptive potential of poetry. In stanzas 5 and 6, Van Mander further elaborates upon light’s tendency to alter or enhance colors: not only at sunrise but also at sunset, Aurora, the personification of the dawn, reddens that which she illuminates—“Towers, Houses, Trees, Mountains, and Clifftops”; and, by a “holder reflecty” (bright reflex of light), red things become more ruddy, “vierich en gloeyende” (fiery and glowing, v. 6).

Van Mander now describes, in stanza 7, the luminous effects of the rising sun, personified by Apollo, as it casts an intensely bright bank of light upon the sea. He then shifts position, so to speak, in stanza 8, focusing less on the light source than on the “limpidly lustrous crystalline” surface of the sea or any reflective body of water that, when clearly lit, mirrors the sky above it. Reflected light is seen to trigger or, better, enkindle this mimetic process of representation.

Stanzas 9–24 describe other luminous phenomena caused by light reflection, the double rainbow, above all, whose second bow, unlike the primary arc that signifies the covenant struck by God with Noah, instead simply exemplifies the action of re-reflection in its purest form (v. 11). Likewise, the “diversche Sonnen” (multiple Suns) sometimes seen at sunrise or sunset are nothing more than re-reflected images of the sun. In stanzas 14–16, with respect to the great waterfall at Terni, Van Mander considers the circumstances under which prismatic rainbows become visible in the falling water’s mists. And in stanzas 17–18, he puts forward the hypothesis that the rainbow’s colors are elicited from the elemental interaction of air and fire operative in rain clouds. After calling to mind, in stanzas 19 and 20, the sumptuous, lapidary colors of the rainbow described by the prophets Ezechiel and Jesus Sirach, and comparing them to the erubescent colors of the high priest Simon’s robes, Van Mander perpends, in stanzas 21–23, the sequence of colors comprised by the rainbow, one hue passing imperceptibly into another—purple to flesh-tint, whitish carmine to orange, then red, red to yellow and bright blue, and azure back to purple. In stanza 23, he provides technical advice, pointing out that the rainbow’s spectrum of tints reveals which colors are best matched to which. Painters, he continues in stanza 24, should lay out their palettes accordingly, also placing white close to hand so that lighter shades of each rainbow color can easily be mixed.

Stanzas 25–33 retail various effects of Reverberacy (Reverberation), Van Mander’s term for the process whereby light cast by some bright source—“moonlight, firelight, lightning, candlelight, [or] the flame of a forge”—illumines its surroundings, tinting objects (v. 25). Thus does moonlight with its glow “bestow a pale glow, wherever she reaches,” and lightning’s “bluish fire” causes darkness to take flight (v. 26). Alert to such phenomena, says Van Mander in stanza 27, the ancient painter Antiphilus painted a boy blowing upon a flame, his face flickering with reverberant light, and Echion, in an epitome of Reflexy Const (the Art of Reflection), portrayed a bride lit by the fiery glow of a matron’s torch. For Van Mander, reflected light carries an affective charge, as his account of Alcina lit by torchlight, her sweet enchantments thereby made all the sweeter in Ruggiero’s eyes (paraphrased from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) demonstrates; this processional scene functions as an epitome of reflected light’s power to anticipate joy and magnify pleasure. But reflected light can also instill terror, as the description of a disastrous conflagration in stanza 31, of Vulcan’s fearsome forge in stanza 32, and of hellfire’s horrific glow in stanza 33, make patently apparent. Stanzas 34–35 supply further particulars for the depiction of fire: Van Mander counsels the painter that to intensify the phosphorescence of firelight, he ought to silhouette a fully shadowed figure against the flames—say, one of Vulcan’s Cyclopes. Stanza 36 qualifies this advice by reminding the painter that anyone standing behind the “fiery sparks must bear the livery of re-reflected light,” so that they are seen to be lit by reflections and coruscating re-reflections.

Stanzas 37–38 initiate a roll call of masters of Reflexy Const: by reference to Raphael’s Liberation of Saint Peter, Van Mander urges painters to observe closely how reflected light interacts with adjacent shadows. In stanzas 39–41, he lavishes praise on Jacopo Bassano for his depiction of “flames, torches, [and] fiery hanging lamps” as well as of kitchen implements—pots and pans of copper, tin, or iron—that reflect light variously. Van Mander thus calls upon painters to pay heed to how light not only colors surfaces but is also colored by them. In stanza 41, he also makes mention of Jacopo’s invention of another method of depicting reflected light, on slate panels highlighted in goldpoint; this leads him to bestow a like praise on the “Netherlandish-Italian painter” Gilles Cognet, whose nocturnes ingeniously incorporate “raised bits of gilt husk” to represent torchlight, as in a nighttime scene, set in Amsterdam, of a lottery drawing, or his scenes of hell or Troy ablaze. Stanzas 45–49, apropos of Cornelis Corneliszoon’s painting of Plato’s Cave and Hendrick Goltzius’s Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres, drawn in pen and ink on parchment, professes that Reflexy Const, formerly identified with the painters of ancient Sicyon, now finds its greatest practitioners in Haarlem (see chapter 7, infra, Figs. 3 & 4).

Stanzas 50–55 revisit the theme of how colored lights interact, first broached in stanzas 39–41. The flesh-tints of figures shown in full daylight, lying or sitting amidst greenery, will be tinted green (v. 50), just as “wool, silk, or linen” will cast their colors upon “faces and naked bodies” (v. 51); similarly, “gold or silver vessels, vases, … and glasses in which wine has been poured” will “stain [white linen] tablecloths with reflected lights” (v. 52). Van Mander adduces the paintings of Pieter Aertsen, based as they are on “Natuere, der Schilders Meestresse” (Nature, the Painters’ Mistress), in which he displays his mastery of Reflexy Const, showing how the colors of various objects mutually reverberate and re-reflect. Reflexy Const is what allows him to deceive the viewer’s eyes, confers seeming substance on the objects he portrays, and brings them convincingly to life, animating them through the lively motion of colored light. In consequence, Reflexy Const and the art of pictorial illusion go hand in hand, the former enabling the latter. When all is said and done, as stanzas 57–61 avow, painters, if they wish to master the art of reflection, must look to the occurrences of mirroring in Nature, whose still, watery places are often seen perfectly to reflect whatever lies at the water’s edge (v. 59). As the poet Ariosto, in his description of the hidden glade where Angelica, fleeing Rinaldo, sought shelter and lighted upon a mirroring stream, imitated Nature (vv. 58–59), so painters who enter Pictura’s labyrinth must let the skein of Nature guide them as they strive to master Reflexy Const, imitating all that Nature contains (v. 61).

Chapter 8, “Van het Landtschap” (On Landscape), develops the topic raised in stanzas 11–13 of chapter 5, where Van Mander apprises painters that graceful ordonnance entails the provision of distant landscapes captivating to the viewer’s eyes. As landscape invites the beholder to enter the image, allowing him to wander into the fictive setting and journey optically, so chapter 8 opens, in stanzas 1–7, by calling upon the young, aspiring schilder to rise at dawn, exit the city gates, and go walking in the countryside, alert to its many visual pleasures. Van Mander sets the scene in floriferous high summer; what the painter there sees recapitulates the sequence of sights just described in the opening stanzas of chapter 7: clouds tinted purple by dawn’s rosy light (v. 4), various color mixtures melding into the molten gold of the rising sun (v. 5), the sky becoming azure blue as the earth’s verdant greens intensify (v. 6). It is as if landscape were the pictorial subject that best combines the criteria of History and of Reflexy Const. The repeated commands (“Observe,” “See”) that initiate stanzas 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, emphasize that landscape involves close viewing of nature’s sundry fugitive effects, first by the painter, then by the landscape painting’s attentive, enthralled viewers.

Stanzas 8–11 focus on the optics of viewing a distant landscape or landscape painting: as viewers’ eyes penetrate the landscape, tracking along the orthogonal axes of furrows and fields, they will find faraway mountains merging into ambient clouds, the clifftops virtually indistinguishable from the mists that enshroud them (v. 8). All things will recede toward the horizon, diminishing by degrees as they approach a notional vanishing point (v. 9). “Giving thought to the density of the blue-bodied Air,” one will depict sunlight filtered through cloud, dimming one’s backgrounds most moderately, not excessively (v. 10). Moreover, zones of sky, seen mirrored in bodies of water, will appear to blend “from above to below” (v. 11).

In stanzas 12–15, Van Mander expanding his inventory of landscape types, describes how inclement weather should be portrayed. He begins with an admonitory digression: if Apelles managed to depict thunder and lightning with the few colors at his disposal, should not today’s painters, equipped with a superabundance of colors, aspire to imitate the many “vreemde dinghen” (rare or curious things) Nature puts on show: “black thunder clouds, ill-favored and spectral … lightning bolts,” and other fearsome phenomena, “snow, hail, squalls, glazed frost, hoarfrost, and suffocating, oppressive mists”? Conversely, urges Van Mander in stanzas 15–18, painters should apply themselves, too, to the depiction of fair weather, when the radiant sun, as if wreathed round with red lakes and a purplish tint, dispels all-obscuring mists (v. 17).

How to enhance the pictorial illusion of depth by seamlessly weaving foreground into middle-ground, middle-ground into background, furnishes the topic of stanzas 19–23. The picture’s zones must appear undulant, their constituent parts no less imbricated than the waves of the sea (v. 20). And to facilitate the eyes’ motion from foreground to background, painters, even while imitating Pieter Bruegel, who tended to anchor his foregrounds with a conspicuous tree, should yet choose to leave their foregrounds somewhat open, and will avail themselves of half-tints, rather than placing hard darks next to sweet lights (v. 21). These precepts lead Van Mander to conclude, in stanza 23, that if verscheydenheyt (variety), “both of color and form,” is what makes for the beauty of landscape, one must nevertheless take care to preserve the “welstants ghenietens” (pleasurable consonance) of the picture’s many parts, their mutual concinnity. Stanzas 24–26 contrast the landscape type favored by Italian masters such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Girolamo Muziano, who organize their “solidly construct[ed]” pictures around a single view into the distance, with the multiple views of the landscape type perfected by Bruegel, who variedly mobilizes the eyes, leading them up the sides of high mountains, then down into dizzying valleys, as they make their headlong way toward the distant horizon, coiling past rushing streams (vv. 24–25). Bruegel is lauded, too, for his coloristic decorum—the skill with which he reserves browns for barren hillsides, greens for shady meadows and dales.

Stanzas 27–35 layer the description of springtime landscapes onto an account of seasonally appropriate oil colors—emerald and sapphire greens for grassy swards and burgeoning meadows, blonde yellow for fields of unripe corn and oats, celestial blue for flax flowering amidst waves of wheat, buckwheat, and clover. For Van Mander, landscape, more than any other pictorial subject, becomes a pretext for discussing pigments and paint handling. The proper appreciation of landscape painting involves a like appreciation of the painter’s materials and brushwork, as stanzas 32–33 make plain with their instructions to brush “blue-tinted woodlands” “with white” “on grounds of ash,” and to stipple small trees onto steep cliffs the color of “light ash.” In painting peasants’ huts and hamlets, one must cleave close to the colors of Nature, eschewing the artificial appearance of saturated reds, such as vermilion or red lead.

The reference to stippled trees climbing up mountainsides leads, in stanzas 34–35, to a discussion of how alpine peaks should be painted, their sides deeply cut by sinuous, serpentine waterways. Stanzas 36–39 then turn to the depiction of trees, the true test of a paint’s “manier” (manner, v. 36) and “handelingh aenghename” (pleasant handling, v. 37). Arboreal foliage, more than any constituent part of the landscape, requires an “aerdigh’ en fraeye manier” (subtle and fine manner) and a “goeden slach” (good stroke); therein lies the “cracht” (force) of the landscape (v. 36). In stanza 37, Van Mander lays stress on the fact that the painting of leaves, like the painting of hair, sky, and drapery, is a matter of gheest, not “leersaem Const” (teachable art). The spirited depiction of such things issues from native ability, from the painter’s lively spirit, and also from his memories of things seen in Nature (in Van Mander’s facultative psychology, gheest being operatively associated with the mnemonic faculty). Stanza 38 reminds painters that each species of leaf requires its distinctive color.

Recalling Van Mander’s canon of beautiful bodily motion in stanzas 10–12 of chapter 3, stanzas 39–40 advise the painter to make his trees rise from thick to thin, turning as they rise. This is another example of the way Van Mander entangles his accounts of figural and landscape painting. Stanzas 41–47, with specific reference to the ancient painter Ludius, famed for his landscapes interspersed with humorous anecdotal scenes, enjoins the painter to populate his landscape with “storyken[s]” (little stories) taken from poetry or prose. If he wishes to convert his landscape into a “cleyn Weerelt” (little World), a convincingly self-sufficient place, a self-contained fictional entity, he will punctuate it throughout with these diverting anecdotes. The type of landscape Van Mander here recommends strongly recalls the elaborate ekphrastic landscape punctuated by Ovidian scenes, with which he exemplifies the richly varied mode of historical ordonnance in stanzas 45–60 of chapter 5. This additional analogy between Historie and Landtchap gives yet more evidence of the mutually contingent conceptions of History and Landscape at play in the Grondt.

Chapter 9, “Van Beesten, Dieren, en Voghels” (On Cattle, Animals, and Birds), amplifying upon the theme of verscheydenheyt (variety), “both of color and form,” highlighted in stanza 23 of chapter 5, commences by adjuring the reader not to play the part of Dionisius Anthropographus, an ancient painter “who could fashion to his liking nothing but Human figures” (v. 1). Quite to the contrary, painters should instead strive to be “fraey … in alle dinghen” (skillful at everything), not least in portraying the animals described in this chapter (v. 2). Chapter 9, in its emphasis on the proper portrayal of hair or fur, like chapter 10, “Van Laken oft Draperinghe” (On Fabrics or Drapery), continues the discussion of gheestigh subject matter, begun in stanza 37 of chapter 8: “For leaves, hair, the sky, and drapery, this is all spirit, and the spirit teaches how to fashion them.” Van Mander starts with the noblest of beasts—the horse—the species most closely attuned to human beings in quality, temperament, and intention, by turns fearless and forceful, yet tractable (v. 4), capable of grief and compunction (v. 5), conformable to its master’s will, even unto death (v. 6). The horse, as it turns out, has an affective range nearly as great as the human figure.

In stanzas 8–12, Van Mander provides some basic technical advice on how best to depict a well-proportioned steed, even while stating that he dislikes hard and fast precepts and measurements, the rigorous application of which will usually result in a “swaer manier” (plodding manner, v. 9). Stanza 10, which specifies that well-formed hooves must be “lustrous jet black,” and stanza 12, which instructs painters “to give [a horse’s] hair its proper color,” anticipate the topic of stanzas 13–16 on equine coloring. Although Van Mander insists that the painter is always free to paint whatsoever colors he wishes—“piebald,” for instance, or “white and yellow”—he styles brown-red and blue-gray the most beautiful colors. Stanza 14 implicitly invokes Reflexy Const, calling upon painters to master the “luster and shine of hide … as revealed in Sunshine,” and to pay attention to the “flickering hair of the flanks.” Stanzas 15–16 encourage the painter closely to mark the vagaries of Nature, her propensity to counterfeit various materials on horses’ hides: some Neapolitan or Campagnan horses appear “coated in honey” (v. 15), some apple-grays give the impression of “scales” (v. 16), some flecked whites comes across as being spotted “with little flies” (v. 16). Stanza 17 reminds the reader that color and Actitude (Attitude) go hand in hand: Van Mander emphasizes that equine attitudes require as much mastery as human ones, if horses are to be shown moving in a “sweet, well-tempered way.”

Stanzas 18–23 rehearse multiple anecdotes about the depiction of a specific fugitive effect, the froth seen to issue from an active horse’s mouth: Protogenes, Nealcas, and other ancient painters often relied on luck, chance, or mere accident, says Van Mander, when portraying such things that (like leaves, hair, sky, and drapery) fall beyond the scope of set rules or practical diligence (v. 20). The moral of these linked anecdotes, distilled in stanzas 22–23, is that painters, in their efforts to imitate Nature, must not paint “met vlijt” ([too] diligently) or produce images that look “figuerlijck gheschildert” (painted in an artificially contrived fashion). Furthermore, in their persistent attempts to represent such apparencies, they must seize upon any ways and means that prove expedient, any modus operandi that yields a good result: “And howsoever such things be done, whether with the thumbs, or with a sponge, or in some other way out of the ordinary, if the result looks good, I hold it in esteem” (v. 23). Recalling the Plinian anecdote about Apelles, who left it to live horses, by their firsthand reaction, to judge whether his painted horses were true to life (vv. 24–25), Van Mander adduces several works of ancient art—the Capitoline Marcus Aurelius on Horseback, the bronze horses on the façade of Saint Mark’s, Venice, the Horsemen of Monte Cavallo—to demonstrate how expert and anatomically precise the Ancients were at portraying horses (vv. 26–27).

From stanza 28 onward, the topic shifts mainly to “bulls, oxen, and cows,” which, as Van Mander observes in stanza 29, “share a similar form” but must be differentiated according to color, temperament, and various features peculiar to the breed, such as horns (vv. 30–31), furry locks (v. 32), and shaggy coats (v. 33). With reference to the beauty of livestock, says Van Mander in stanza 34, one must look above all to Nature, “practic[ing] after this living thing and that.” In painting cattle and other beasts after the life, Jacopo Bassano is as worthy to be prized amongst the moderns (v. 36) as were Pausias and Nicias amongst the Ancients (vv. 37–38). After bestowing fulsome praise on the Farnese Bull, sculpted by Apollonius and Tauriscus of Rhodes and displayed in present-day Rome (vv. 40–41), Van Mander concludes, in stanzas 42–46, with twelve epigrams on Myron’s famously lifelike bronze heifer (paraphrased from Pierre Ronsard’s French translation of epigrams from the Greek Anthology), on the manner and meaning of which, precisely poised between truth to Nature and the display of artifice, a compound Van Mander very much endorses (see section 2, supra, of this “Introduction,” “The Sources, Title-Page, and Scope of the Grondt”). The final stanza (v. 47) takes up the epigrammatic theme of Nature and artifice in concert, advising the painter that even when he devises “Monsters en Draken” (Monsters and Dragons), he can “do nothing better than direct [himself] to Nature.” There he will find some animal on which to model his chimaeric creatures in how they “lie, lope, step, and amble,” taking care “to paint all things after the life” and, simultaneously, to paint “everything subtly,” that is, to reconcile Nature and artifice.

Chapter 10, “Van Laken oft Draperinghe” (On Fabrics and Drapery), concerns the representation of clothing—specifically, the texture, sheen, color, and drape of various types of fabric, as they interact with the human body at rest and in motion, their patterns of folds changing accordingly. Fabrics and drapery are the fourth of the gheestigh subject matters listed by Van Mander in chapter 8, and respectively treated there and in chapters 7, 9, and 10, where he discusses kinetic skies, leaves, hair and fur, and now textiles. Although the beauty of the nude transcends “every variety of linen, worm-spun silk, and garment of Tyrian purple,” declares Van Mander in stanzas 2–3, modesty and the exigencies of Northern climes compel us to clothe ourselves as befits our station—purple for kings, white for maidens, black for widows, roughly woven grays for herdsmen and mariners (v. 3). Therefore, one of the painter’s foremost tasks is accurately to render the varieties of woven cloth—woolens, twills, serges, silks, and other stuffs—either “hanging flat or lying creased” (v. 5). As prime examples, Van Mander cites Albrecht Dürer’s creased draperies and Jan Gossart’s finely-spun cloths (v. 6), but best to be imitated is Lucas van Leyden, whose fabrics resulted from ceaseless study after the life. What all three masters evince is the gheestigh nature of stuffs that, in the manner they are joined, girt, and bound, appear to be “matter[s] of ‘gheestigh soecken’ (spirited conjecture) [and] ‘versierich vinden’ (clever invention),” more so even than foliage or hair (v. 8).

Stanzas 9–11 argue that the seven motions characteristic of the human figure, in chapter 3, and of landscape and the way it is viewed, in chapter 8, are applicable, too, to drapery as it “stretches and dangles,” is folded “out and in,” “slip[s] out of sight,” or “recedes” (vv. 9–10) in accompaniment to the projection and recession of “shoulders, thighs, knees, belly, calves, or buttocks” (v. 11). As the disposition of trees is compared to the Actitude of bodies in chapter 5, so here, in stanza 12, networks of folds are analogized to the branches growing from a tree. With these criteria in mind, Van Mander heaps further praise on Dürer and Lucas in stanzas 13–16, singling out Dürer’s late Marian prints, in which brightly lit fields of flat fabric alternate with multifaceted shadows (v. 14), and Lucas’s Dance of the Magdalene, Triumph of Mordecai, and Temptation of Christ, which feature fine, flowing trains and dense networks of minute folds. In stanza 14, he insists that credit be given where credit is due: both masters, he protests, have been profitable objects of imitation to their Italian counterparts who, by slightly altering their sources, cunningly hide their accrued debt of borrowings. His misgivings, however, do not extend to the Venetians: in stanza 18, he lauds them for their skillful painting of “sijden en weerschijnsels verscheyden” (silks and various lustrous stuffs). In stanza 19, with the Venetian painters in mind, he previews the subject of chapter 11, “Van het Sorteren, en by een schicken der Verwen” (On Sorting and combining Colors), while also recalling the subject of chapter 7: he lists adjacencies of pigment that can be used to represent reflections—lakes with light blues, smalts with lake whites, light massicot with green, ash white with yellow-lake, purple with red or blue. Stanza 22, likewise anticipatory, gives an example of the kind of technical advice he will offer more abundantly in chapter 12: he counsels the painter to give his velvets and satins a “gloedich doorschijnen” (glowing transparency) by means of color combination, modulation, and, most importantly, masterful glazing. Stanza 23 follows up by noting how and why the reflective properties of silken velvets must be painted differently from those of satins.

Stanzas 24–26 then rate various Italian masters known for their painted stuffs, amongst whom Titian, whose widely circulated woodcuts attest his fine handling of fabrics, is principally eulogized. By contrast, asserts Van Mander in stanzas 27–29, the Ancients displayed slight skill at draping fabrics, as their statues, “with linens hanging wet, like cords,” reveal (v. 27). Schematic, repetitive, and leaden, their stuffs neither respond to the figure’s motion nor flutter with the breeze (v. 29). In stanzas 30–31, as an antidote to such deficiency, Van Mander reminds his readers that draperies, animated by Gheest, should proceed directly from the painter’s lively Idee—that is, “imaginaty, oft ghedacht” (imagination, or memory)—so as to move “in a subtle, true way” (v. 30) and to stream gracefully, as befits the veils of nymphs and the skirts of bacchantes (v. 31).

Color and coloring are introduced as topics of concern in chapter 5, associated with the depiction of affect in chapter 6, identified with gheestigh paint handling in chapter 8, and rise further into prominence in chapters 9 and 10, as we have just seen. Chapter 11, “Van het Sorteren, en by een schicken der Verwen” (On Sorting and combining Colors), takes up the subject raised in stanza 19 of chapter 10—how to apportion colors in such a way as to enhance their respective properties, by setting them side by side. Van Mander hastens to clarify, in stanza 1, that his chosen topic here is adjacencies, not mixtures of pigments. He directs painters, in stanzas 2 and 3, to call to mind, as an epitome of sorting, the ancient painter Pausias’s famed picture, known as the Stephanoplocos, in which he portrayed his beloved Glycera plaiting wreaths and gathering posies whose floral colors, “ten-thousandfold,” she was seen to combine in “constich voeghen” (artful congress). Like Pausias, the painter would do well to follow Nature, in whose springtime dales, as in the vale of Tempe, the vivid colors of florets “in their thousands” are easily discernible, none eliding into the verdant greens of the surrounding fields (v. 4). In art as in Nature, adds Van Mander in stanza 5, even the color green should stand out from green—trees from plants, plants from meadows, whether by day or by night.

Throughout chapter 11, the description of natural phenomena supplies a touchstone for the proper sorting of colors: for example, as the sky’s bright blue is said to enhance the sun’s golden radiance, so yellow and blue can be conjugated, and also red and green, red and blue, purple and yellow, and green and white, “no less than Vineyards accord with fields of Wheat” (v. 7). In stanza 8, Van Mander enjoins painters to cast their eyes on Nature’s colorful creations, such as seashells and birds, especially the parrot, in which she “sows [colors] by sorting them.” Nature further teaches that purple and green, like blue and purple and green and blue, are gracefully matched, and that all combine well with flesh-tints, unlike red, which sits better beside yellow, just as yellow abides well by green. In sorting colors, affirms Van Mander in stanzas 10–11, Bruegel was expert beyond measure, as his use of gray stuffs “shaded as if without shadows” demonstrates, from out of which a red or azure blue would occasionally blossom forth, in the manner of poets who season their stories and arguments with pregnant sayings. After citing another master of grays, Raphael da Reggio (v. 12), Van Mander speeds to his conclusion, mentioning as an aside that well sorted colors enhance the appearance of both flesh and fabric and heighten the effect of projection in “landscapes and buildings” (v. 13). He admits to marshaling his energies for the chapters to follow that will bring his magnum opus to a close.

Whereas chapter 11 centered on the juxtaposition of consonant colors, chapter 12, “Van wel schilderen, oft Coloreren” (On painting well, or Coloring), focuses on brushstrokes and mixing colors, especially the production of flesh-tints which Van Mander identifies as the most complex of color mixtures. Stanzas 1–3 define the relation between “teyckenen” and “schilderen” (drawing and painting), likening painting to the “Gheest oft de Siele” (Spirit or the Soul) that enlivens drawing’s “doode streken” (dead strokes), bringing them to life with the brush’s colored strokes. Or again, drawing is like the clay effigy moulded by Prometheus and adorned by Minerva, painting like the heavenly flame with which the titan brought that dead image to life. Van Mander conflates this effigy with Pandora, thereby implying that painting has the power to encompass (i.e., to represent) the “plenitude of every good thing” (v. 2). In a further analogy, he conceives of drawing and painting as paired, and compares their union to the marriage of poetry and music, whereby the affianced sounds of both are enhanced and vivified (v. 3).

Stanzas 4–8 describe two methods of combining drawing and painting to produce a picture. Some masters, “sure of hand, quick-witted, well-apprised,” will prefer to improvise directly, drawing on their panels the lineaments of whatever “Ide’ ” (Idea, i.e., mental image based in imagination and memory) they have pre-painted in their mind’s eye (vv. 4–6). Copious in invention, they will then quickly apply the colored underpainting, in the process revising what they have drawn (v. 5). In stanza 6, Van Mander warns that their bold, resolute method of “verwe handelen” (color handling), which moves briskly from intention to execution, will be appropriate only to those “Painter-Augustuses” whose command over their art is imperial, nonpareil. The second method, detailed in stanzas 7–8, results from “much effortful consideration”: sketches and preliminary drawings precede the application of the finished drawing in black lead over a “thinly tempered” priming. The underdrawing must be meticulously detailed and precise, “without the smallest stroke out of place,” and the oil colors should then be applied with the utmost care over this drawn template (v. 8).

Stanzas 9–15 digress at length on the Italian method of painting in fresco with the help of “well-studied” cartoons; Van Mander reports that Michelangelo considered this technique “manly” and, conversely, deprecated painting in oils as “Women’s labor or toil” (v. 11). He rejoins, in stanzas 12–13, that pace Michelangelo, fresco painting is little practiced in the Netherlands, where “hard weather” is so inimical to “stone-based plaster.” Having said this, he emphasizes that in principle he approves of the cartoon as a method of careful preparation serviceable to any technique of painting: howsoever one paints, the cartoon must be composed boldly, at the scale of the final picture, worked up tonally, and brushed in a “painterly way on the ground color” (vv. 14–15). Indeed, as Van Mander avouches in stanzas 16–18, early Netherlandish masters used cartoons as prototypes for their precisely painted panels, tracing them onto the polished white ground and then, on this basis, executing a finished underdrawing in black chalk or black lead (v. 16). Using diluted lamp-black, they then added details and subtle shading before covering the underdrawing with a “thin layer of priming … the color of flesh,” diligently bringing the picture to a semifinished state; finally, they added a thin layer of color, with an “application deft, lustrous, and pure” (vv. 17–18). He adds, in stanza 19, that Dürer, Bruegel, and Lucas were all masters of this technique, at which “first amongst the first” was Jan van Eyck.

By contrast, he complains in stanza 20, painters now work paint as if they were sculpting it, rather than laying their colors “cleanly, finely, and sportively” (i.e., with a sure but free hand). In stanza 21, Van Mander makes patently clear his preference for netticheyt (precision) in handling of the brush, so long as the brushwork, for all its precision, never fails to display “aerdt, gheest, en cloeckheyt” (subtlety, spirit, and ingenuity), appearing fully resolved and thus retaining its welstandt (concinnity) “from afar as well as close by.” Pictures made in this way will captivate the viewer’s eyes, causing them “to cleave fast with constant desire.” In stanzas 22–25, he adduces Titian as a paragon of netticheyt, on the example of his youthful works, executed precisely so as to please from any vantage point, near or far. His inimitable later works, however, though toilsomely brushed, appear from close up to consist of mere “patches and rough strokes,” showing their netticheyt only from a distance (v. 23). Here netticheyt is a paradoxical effect that results from brushwork as judiciously applied as its looks slapdash. Quoting Vasari, in stanza 25, Van Mander designates these late works by Titian paradigms of “labor … concealed by Great Art” (i.e., of the art that conceals art).

The discussion of Titian’s two manners, along with the earlier account of the two methods of combining drawing and painting, leads to the conclusion, stated in stanza 26, that Northern painters today have two manners at their disposal, as evinced by Titian’s early and late handelinghe (paint handling), diligently precise on one hand, rough yet judicious on the other. Van Mander, who clearly prefers the former of the two, urges aspiring painters from the start “to acquaint [themselves] with a fastidious manner and a precise beginning.” In stanzas 27–29, however, he issues a pair of caveats: if they wish their figures to “project in the round,” painters must eschew sharp highlights, instead relying on re-reflection and deft use of the ground color to effect smooth transitions from shadow to light; and equally important, they must carefully choose pigments and color mixtures conducive to producing “incarnadine flesh-tints” true to the body’s lustrous complexion, its vermilion bloom and glow (vv. 28–29). So crucial is mastery of “carnatie” (flesh-tint) that Van Mander devotes eight stanzas to it (30–37): “carnatie” must be varied according to age, sex, and station (v. 30); to achieve variation of this sort, vermilion must be layered over selected colors, such as yellow ocher for the depiction of sunbaked flesh (v. 31); highlights must take the form of flesh-tints, and pure lead white never utilized for this purpose (vv. 32–33). By way of example, Van Mander cites a Nativity by Titian, once described to him by Goltzius, in which a single flesh-tinted highlight shone forth from a shepherd’s brow, while all the adjacent colors “sped away into a haze of shadows” (v. 34).

In stanzas 35–35, Van Mander, admitting that the Italians are better at procuring the effect of living flesh than the Netherlanders, charges his fellow painters to redouble their efforts to paint flesh neither drily nor piscinely; they must first of all realize that any flesh-tint consists of “soo veelderley verwen” (a great variety of colors), and that in painting the human face, no less than in painting a “pleasing Landscape,” “green, blue, yellow, indeed every color” comes into play (v. 36). In deploying these many colors, the painter should hold fast to the apothegm that “everything must gently merge,” as Nature, who “always model[s] for the best,” clearly shows to any good painter who, working “after the life,” allows her to quicken him (v. 37). Therefore, adjures Van Mander, let bad habits and false opinions be dropped by all painters who have been misled; better for them to be untrue to whatever has falsely guided them, to improve themselves than to behave like obstinate, “contumacious sectarian[s]” (i.e., stubborn adherents of false doctrines).

Stanzas 38–40 enforce Van Mander’s cautionary remarks, appending a further admonition: painters should abstain from admixing lampblack with any other pigments, most of all with flesh-tints, since it will actively decay, spoiling every other color. So, too, he warns in stanzas 41–42, massicot, minium, and Spanish green should be banished from any flesh-tint, and, for the application of the purest pigments, brushes must be kept exactingly clean (v. 42). He closes, in stanza 43, with some highly technical advice regarding the use of pigments, such as smalts, prone to discoloration due to their unstable reaction to oil media.

Chapter 13, “On the origin, nature, force, and effect of Colors,” reflects upon the ontologies of colors, starting with their source in God, whom Van Mander presents as their first principle and efficient cause. He opens by proclaiming that all things have their proper colors, given them by their divine Creator, who like an “artful Sculptor and Painter” is the originator of every form and being (v. 1). As colors first came into being when God separated light from darkness, so now, even when obscured by shadows and indiscernible to human sense, they continue to exist as a distinctive quality of things (vv. 2–3). All accidental properties, asserts Van Mander in stanza 4, derive from the four elements, colors being no exception (v. 4).

Van Mander propounds a formal definition of color in stanza 5: color is the “furthermost clarity of any body from within which it is materialized” as the “substance of Light.” Bright daylight thus heightens the eyes’ innate ability to discriminate amongst the colors of things. In stanza 6, he affirms that no thing, howsoever strange or unusual its form, can exist without color. In stanza 7, he distinguishes between natural and artificial colors, those made by Nature and those made by human manufacture. And in stanza 8, he qualifies the definition just put forward in stanza 5, specifying with respect to the function of colors that they are the “natural quickening of [the surfaces] of all things” in human eyes; whether “monochrome, mixed, or polychrome,” these colored things “awaken the eye’s hungry gaze,” causing the beholder ravenously to crave that which he sees, as if it were food.

Colors not only supply the means whereby all things can be differentiated, they also exercise an affective force on persons, emboldening or startling them, oppressing or exhilarating (v. 9), even causing mothers to give birth to children colored like the things that once affrighted them (vv. 10–11). Stanzas 13–16 describe further affordances of color, which can seduce or beguile, refresh, please, or delight. So attractive are the colors of a woman’s body, avows Van Mander in stanza 17, that Scipio and Alexander came to be much admired less for their martial deeds than for controlling their rampant desire when faced by ladies of fine coloring. In stanza 18, he reminds the reader that black and white are colors, too: here he credits the affects triggered by texts written in black on a field of white, as much to their contents as to the colors of pen, ink, and paper. Paraphrasing Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World, in stanzas 19–22, he recounts how the natives of Peru, though they knew nothing about European writing, had their own impressive system of chronicling affairs of state by means of knotted cords, variously colored. As this and other examples show, various peoples respond to colors differently: black thus conduces to joy amongst the Javanese, white to sorrow, as Van Mander reports in stanza 23. In closing, he acknowledges the fine colors of “unalloyed God,” “unblemished glass,” and “rare gemstones” such as “Sardonyx and Jasper, Chrysolite, Hyacinth, Topaz, Amethyst, Emerald, [and] Chrysoprase,” which transport the heart and mind heavenward, allowing persons to glimpse the beauty of the new Jerusalem even in this life (vv. 25–26).

Chapter 14, “Bediedinghen der Verwen, watter mede beteyckent can worden” (On the Interpretation of Colors, and what they can signify), the last in the sequence of four on color and coloring, purports to examine the representative and signifying functions of colors, amongst which the color yellow is first in rank, not only because it is used to portray the radiant sun, chief source of the light that makes all colored things visible, but also because yellow, in that it represents the golden glow of sunlight, can also collaterally be seen to represent gold itself, the chiefest, most precious, and most desirable of metals (vv. 1–2). Although the “intemperate desire” for gold has spawned much evil, this does not necessarily redound to gold’s discredit, reasons Van Mander in stanza 3; the metal, in and of itself, is not iniquitous. Stanzas 4 and 5 dwell on the etymology of the term “gold”: derivative from Aurora (saffronlike and glowing) or Aura (luster), it can also connote the human inclination readily “to behold … whatever shines gaily, with clarity and brightness” (v. 5). From stanza to stanza, Van Mander explores the denotative and connotative values of gold, constructing a loosely associative chain of signifying functions, mutually, sometimes tangentially linked via relations of analogy: for instance, in stanza 6, the color yellow, by dint of representing the golden light of the sun, stands also for golden-haired Phoebus, who in turn signifies the Godhead, the “fountainhead of all beauty”; and since beauty in all its forms, visible and invisible, comes from God, yellow can be said, too, under certain circumstances, to signify that divinely “beauteous beauty” which consists in “what is invisibly beautiful.”

In fact, twenty-one of chapter 14’s thirty-two stanzas consider the meanings of gold and of the colors used to portray it, starting, as we have seen, with yellow. Stanzas 7 and 8 list the royal connotations of gold, the most “beautiful color,” as well as ascribing the invention of cloth of gold jointly to King Attalus and the Babylonians. Stanzas 9 and 10 inventory some of gold’s uses in Scripture: to ornament Solomon’s Temple, making it “cheerful and beautiful beyond measure, indeed incredibly precious”; to signify the fidelity of Rebecca, in Genesis 24, and the Bride of the Lord in Psalm 44 (45); and to urge the Church of Laodicea to renew its faltering faith, in Revelation 3. In heraldry, says Van Mander in stanza 11, quoting liberally here as elsewhere from Hippolyte Cocheris Sicille’s Blazon of Colors and Arms, Liveries, and Devices, gold, the highest metal, “denotes wealth, high birth, magnanimity, and magnificence.” In stanza 12, he briefly comments on the heraldic significance of the colors blue, gray, green violet, and black; and in stanza 13, he mentions that the meaning of gold somewhat changes when it is displayed beside these and other colors: alongside flesh-tints, for example, it signifies “sober affluence” and a “rational person of good estate.” Summing up, he states in stanza 14 that for all these reasons yellow, especially when it verges on white, was construed in the days of Moses and Solomon as the most eminent of colors.

He distinguishes the latter-day proliferation of yellows from the four-color palette of the Ancients, in stanza 15: whereas they had only yellow ocher, painters now have access to five species of the color yellow—massicot, schiet-yellow, and the two orpiments, in addition to ocher. He adds, in stanza 16, that minium, too, can be used whenever painters need to describe a golden yellow “tilting toward orange,” but on no account should they rely on gold itself to depict gold. Stanzas 17–21 develop this theme: the magnificent golden ornaments worn by Virgil’s Dido as she sallied forth to hunt will be prized when pictured in colors rather than gilt; although golden frames enhance a picture’s beauty, within the well-made picture proper, gold foil should be forbidden.

Stanzas 22–23 turn from gold to silver, the metal most highly placed after gold, the beauty of which can best be portrayed by the color white. Stanza 24 enumerates further heraldic meanings of gold and silver used in conjunction with red, blue, green, purple, and / or black. According to stanza 25, no coat of arms should contain these colors in the absence of gold and / or silver, and conversely, gold and / or silver are never found in such devices without one or more of these adjacent colors. Van Mander brings the chapter to a close in stanzas 26–30, wherein he respectively correlates various colors, gold and silver included, to the planets (v. 26), the virtues (v. 27), the ages of man (v. 28), the temperaments (v. 29), the elements (v. 29), and the four seasons (v. 30). Finally, chapters 31 and 32 constitute a compendious peroration on Van Mander’s poetic project, now ended, of writing a verse treatise on schilderconst. He apologizes that had circumstances permitted, he would have written more chapters—say, on architectural painting; instead he simply refers the reader to books complementary to his own, such as Sebastiano Serlio’s General Principles of Architecture According to the Five Types of Edifice, as translated by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and to Hans Blum’s Five Columnar Orders of Architecture, That Is, the Tuscan, Doric, Ionian, Corinthian, and Composite. For particular exempla of the many points he has raised in chapters 1–14 of the Grondt, he now refers young aspiring painters to Books II–IV of the Schilder-Boeck, the Lives of Ancient, Italian, and Netherlandish and German Painters. By reading, they shall at the same time learn to paint.