By Menachem Wecker
The Indian miniaturist Siona Benjamin once explained to me that the beauty and detail of her paintings’ borders provide her with a perfect venue to hide dangerous and off-putting symbols. Sometimes, it’s the pretty ones you have to look out for.
The same is true of the winter landscapes of 17th-century Dutch painter Hendrick Avercamp. The works of Avercamp’s, which are the subject of an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art called “The Little Ice Age,” seem tame enough at first blush.
Couples hold hands as they skate; elegantly dressed gentlemen play colf, a golf-like game that transpires on ice; and various kinds of dogs can be seen in the company of the skaters. Some of the figures wear festive masks; others ride in horse drawn carts. Avercamp’s entire repertoire evokes a parade – Disney on ice, 17th-century Holland style.
But all is not well in the city of Amsterdam or in Avercamp’s home town of Kampen. If one knows where to look, one can spot fallen skaters – some who have fallen through the ice waiting to be rescued – and beggars in tattered rags between the well-dressed people. Most ominously, Kampen’s iconic gallows appear on the horizon in several of the works, and in one painting from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, titled Skaters and Tents along the Ice (c. 1620), three corpses dangle from the gallows.
This juxtaposition of the living and the dead is typical of northern Renaissance art. Many Dutch and Flemish contemporaries of Avercamp, who died when Rembrandt was nearly 30, painted beautiful landscapes, with brilliant skies and pastel hues, and still lives with fruit, flowers and animals. But however attractive the works are, they are part of an artistic tradition called “memento mori” (Latin for a reminder of death), which used fleeting beauty to remind viewers that time and death ultimately overcome youth and life.
Avercamp could not have predicted it at the time, but there was something more foreboding in the so-called “little ice age,” which ushered in particularly severe winters to northern Europe between 1550 and 1650, than simply winter’s symbolic affiliation with death.
According to a National Gallery release, Dutch canals are freezing less frequently today than they have in the past due to climate change and pollution. But there was good news two winters ago. “In January 2009, however, canals froze for the first time in 12 years, bringing hundreds of thousands of skaters to the natural ice,” according to the gallery.
Old Man Winter is not the sort of fellow that you would want to meet on a cold night on a deserted frozen Dutch canal, but you can almost imagine a mythical or mystical presence of winter as a personified character in Avercamp’s works.
The role of religious iconography in another show at the gallery, The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700, is far more overt.
The show focuses on polychrome, or multicolored, Spanish sacred sculptures, many of them depicting crucifixions and many of which have never left Spain before. This is particularly noteworthy, since the exhibit overlapped with Holy Week, when the sculptures and relics were sure to have been missed back home.
With the exception of Diego Velázquez, the artists featured in the show – Juan Martínez Montañés, Juan de Mesa, Pedro de Mena and Francisco de Zurbarán – will probably be unknown to those who have not studied this period extensively. But there is irony and poetic justice in the fact that the names of the many of the painters who worked on the sculptures in the show are lost altogether.
The period featured in the show was a time when sculptors and painters were members or separate—and often rival—guilds. A century earlier, the rivalry between the two professions surfaced in the debate between Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. Leonardo said sculptors were craftsmen, not artists, who dealt with dust and dirt, and Michelangelo viewed painting as one-dimensional, while sculpture captured objects in the round. With the exception of de Mena, who gained admission to both guilds and was thus qualified to sculpt and paint, sculptors sometimes complained about excessive coloring or gore (of which there is a lot at the exhibit) added by painters.
De Mena’s 1663 Saint Francis Standing in Ecstasy – which is slightly more than 38 inches high – is one of the most remarkable pieces in the show. De Mena used human hair (for the eyelashes), glass (for the eyes) and rope (for the belt) in the work to lend it a naturalistic feel, though it is far from life size. In order to convince the Cabildo de la Santa Iglesia Catedral Primada in Toledo to allow the work to travel, the National Gallery of London, which curated the show, had to promise the work would undergo heavy restoration and cleaning at the gallery’s expense.
The gallery release says the exhibit represents the first time that Spanish Golden Age painting and sculpture are given equal treatment. That seems to be a triumph, finally, for the sculptors.
Hendrick Avercamp: The Little Ice Age is on view at the National Gallery of Art until July 5, 2010. The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700 is on view at the National Gallery of Art until May 31, 2010.