Jacques Bellange

Jacques Bellange (c. 1575–1616) was an artist and printmaker from the Duchy of Lorraine (then independent but now part of France) whose etchings and some drawings are his only securely identified works today.

[4] He is recorded in 1595 as living "at present" in La Mothe; he had travelled to Nancy, where he took on an apprentice, and it is inferred that he must have been at least 20 to do so, hence his approximate date of birth.

In the same year he was commissioned (1,700 francs, shared) to execute, but not design, a temporary triumphal arch for the royal entry of Marguerite Gonzaga, the new wife of Henri, the heir to the duchy, who inherited upon the death of his father Charles in 1608.

She seems to have neglected her sons from her first marriage, two of whom appear to have died young; Henri, the oldest, was apprenticed in 1626 to Claude Deruet, his father's old apprentice, and was a minor painter, latterly in Paris.

[6] It is generally agreed that 47 or 48 etchings by Bellange survive, and along with a number of drawings these are possibly all that remain of his art today.

[12] Sue Welsh Reed relates his style and technique more to the prints of the School of Fontainebleau,[13] while to A. Hyatt Mayor he combined Italian elements "with an all-out emotion that is German and an intricate feminine elegance that is wholly French".

[14] Anthony Blunt followed a line of 20th-century criticism that saw his work as: the last in a long evolution of that particular type of Mannerism in which a private mystical form of religious emotion is expressed in terms which appear at first sight to be merely those of empty aristocratic elegance.

The founder of this tradition was Parmigianino, who invented many of the formulas used by his successors, such as the elongation of the figures, the small heads on long necks, the sweeping draperies, the strained, nervous poses of the hands, and the sweet ecstatic smile which those of Protestant upbringing find it hard not to think of as sickly and insincere, but which incorporates a particular kind of mystical feeling.

Men mostly wear fantastical versions of Ancient Roman parade uniforms mixed with Oriental elements, including some of the most elaborate footwear seen in art.

[18] His two prints with a hurdy-gurdy man come from a very different world of genre works and realism, and the violence of the larger one was original at the time, anticipating themes to be taken up in later decades by the slightly younger Lorraine artist Jacques Callot and others.

[19] His first venture into etching seems to be a single self-portrait inserted into a large print of the ceremonial entry of the new Duke Henri into Nancy in 1610.

Plate 10 of the series shows a large group of mounted courtiers as part of a procession, and it was realized in 1971 that one of the figures, and his horse, is etched in a completely different style, that can be related to Bellange's other prints.

[21] Scholars have attempted a tentative chronology for the prints, essentially within the period from 1613 to 1616, based mainly on Bellange's increasing confidence and skill with the medium of etching, which was usually supplemented by a limited amount of engraving and, in a few cases, touches of drypoint.

[34] Five of these were a series called Mimicarum aliquot facetiarum icones ad habitum italicum expressi or "Depictions of some droll witticisms, rendered in the Italian manner".

[35] A drawing of a single figure then described as of Hercules sold for the remarkable price of £542,500 at Sotheby's in 2001,[36] and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which has decided it represents Samson.

In 1620 Balthasar Gerbier, a leading Flemish agent for collectors like the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I, and a friend of Rubens, wrote a memorial poem for Goltzius, part of which translates as: "Italy boasts of Raphael and Michelangelo, Germany of Albrecht Dürer, France of Bellange".

[38] By this time, however, the taste in French art for a cool and classical form of Baroque that had set in from the 1620s was already reducing the appreciation of Bellange, whose reputation continued to fall, along with that of Mannerism in general.

Otherwise he would never have drawn Saint John in a series of Apostles in so female a fashion...The angel of the Annunciation is a hermaphrodite, but not with mixed but with marked characteristics of either sex...".

Another tradition, reflected in the quotation from Anthony Blunt above, followed Otto Benesch in placing Bellange in the context of a strain of Gothic mysticism that penetrated French Renaissance art.