Flemish Baroque painting
His innovations helped define Antwerp as one of Europe's major artistic cities, especially for Counter-Reformation imagery, and his student Van Dyck was instrumental in establishing new directions in English portraiture.
Also during this time Frans Francken the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder became important for their small cabinet paintings, often depicting mythological and history subjects.
Following his return to Antwerp he set up an important studio, training students such as Anthony van Dyck, and generally exerting a strong influence on the direction of Flemish art.
Flemish art is notable for the large amount of collaboration that took place between independent masters, which was partly related to the local tendency to specialize in a particular area.
Flower still life painting, which developed around 1600 by artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, was partially a Flemish innovation,[2] echoed in the Dutch Republic in the works of the Antwerp-born Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621).
Painted for the Arquebusiers' guild, the Descent from the Cross triptych (1611–14; Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp)—with side wings depicting the Visitation and Presentation in the Temple, and exterior panels showing St. Christopher and the Hermit—is an important reflection of Counter-Reformation ideas about art combined with Baroque naturalism, dynamism and monumentality.
[5] Roger de Piles explains that "the painter has entered so fully into the expression of his subject that the sight of this work has the power to touch a hardened soul and cause it to experience the sufferings endured by Jesus Christ in order to redeem it.
Many artists follow the tradition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in depicting "low-life" peasant themes, although elegant "high-life" subjects featuring fashionably-dressed couples at balls or in gardens of love are also common.
Adriaen Brouwer (1605 or 1606–1638) typically painted small scenes of ragged peasants fighting, gaming, drinking and generally expressing exaggerated and rude behaviour.
Born in the Southern Netherlands, Brouwer spent the 1620s in Amsterdam and Haarlem, where he came under the influence of Frans and Dirk Hals and other artists working in a loose painterly manner.
Jacob Jordaens, who became Antwerp's most important artist after Rubens's death in 1640, is well known for his monumental genre paintings of subjects such as The King Drinks and As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young.
The Bamboccianti comprised mostly Dutch and Flemish artists who had brought existing traditions of depicting peasant subjects from sixteenth-century Netherlandish art with them to Italy,[7] and generally created small cabinet paintings or etchings of the everyday life of the lower classes in Rome and its countryside.
[8] The Dutch painter Pieter van Laer who was nicknamed "Il Bamboccio" (meaning "ugly doll" or "puppet" in Italian) had started this type of genre painting in Rome.
Forest and mountain landscapes were painted by Abraham Govaerts, Alexander Keirincx, Gijsbrecht Leytens, Tobias Verhaecht and Joos de Momper.
Paul Bril settled in Rome, where he specialized as a landscape painter decorating Roman villas and creating small cabinet paintings.
Hendrik van Minderhout, who was from Rotterdam and settled in Antwerp, continued this latter theme contemporaneous with developments of marine painting in the Dutch Republic.
The genre continued in the later seventeenth century by Anton Ghering and Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg, but the Flemish examples do not demonstrate the same level of innovation found in the Dutch perspectives of Pieter Jansz Saenredam or Emanuel de Witte.
A similar variation of these collections of artistic wealth are the series of the five senses created by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens (Prado Museum, Madrid).
[12] Such paintings continued to be made in Antwerp by Gerard Thomas (1663–1721) and Balthasar van den Bossche (1681–1715), and foreshadow the development of the veduta in Italy and the galleries of Giovanni Paolo Pannini.
They have been interpreted as distinctly Counter Reformation images, with the flowers emphasizing the delicacy of the Virgin and Child–images of which were destroyed in large numbers during the iconoclastic outbreaks of 1566.
The ontbijtje, or "little breakfast", is a type of still life that was popular in both the northern and southern Netherlands showing a variety of eating and drinking vessels and foods such as cheese and bread against a neutral background.
Osias Beert, Clara Peeters, Cornelis Mahu and Jacob Foppens van Es (c. 1596–1666) were all artists who made these types of painting.
They show, on a larger scale than earlier works, complex compositions of expensive items, rare foods, and fleshy, peeling fruit.
[17] Subsequent artists, Jan Fyt and Pieter Boel further elaborated on this type by including a noticeable mixture of living animals and dead game.
Frans Snyders and Paul de Vos created similarly large paintings which are distinct from Rubens's works in their focus on the animals and absence of human participation.
