AACHEN, Hans von

In his few genre paintings, such as the present one, the painter is indebted to Netherlandish models.

The painting, displaying the characteristic Mannerist style of the artist, is also known as The Triumph of Justice.

The allegorical painting in the Hermitage is a characteristic work by Hans von Aachen, who was himself a typical representative of the distinctive cosmopolitan school that formed at the turn of the 17th century at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The three female figures embody Peace (with an olive branch), Science and the Liberal Arts (with a sphere and a palette) and Abundance (with a goblet and a horn of plenty). The subject was intended to symbolically extols the Emperor’s peaceful policies that led to prosperity and the flourishing of learning and the arts. The allegorical, encoded content, the unstable composition with movement along the diagonal, the aristocratic elongation of the figure, the cold tone of the picture, elements of eroticism and disturbing lighting are all features of the Rudolfine artistic circle that eclectically combined features of Italian and Low Countries Mannerism.

The painting represents Archduchess Anna (1585-1618) of Tyrol, daughter of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol, wife of Emperor Matthias. She was by birth Archduchess of Austria and member of the Tyrolese branch of the House of Habsburg and by marriage Holy Roman Empress, German Queen, Queen of Bohemia and Queen of Hungary.

One of the foremost painters of the circle gathered at the Prague court of Emperor Rudolf II, Hans von Aachen synthesized Italian and Netherlandish influences in his portraits and erudite allegories. His portraits are remarkable for their psychological sensitivity. He executed several portraits for Emperor Matthias.

The representation of this group is related to the frequently depicted sentence by Terence: Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus - Without Ceres (bread) and Bacchus (wine) Venus freezes. Aachen gives the mythological figures the facial features of his family: his own, his wife and their son. The motif could allude to the famous picture of the Greek painter Zeuxis. He painted a boy with grapes so naturally that the birds pecked at the painted fruits.

The nude figure of a woman viewed from behind, a favourite motif in Rudolfine art, is represented here in a sensually suggestive way. The elongation of the female body is characteristic of the excessively refined Mannerist art and culture prevalent at the court in Prague c. 1600 and can also be found in the work of von Aachen’s contemporaries at court, Bartholomäus Spranger and Joseph Heintz the Elder.

At the end of the 16th century the court of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague was one of the most important art and cultural centre of Europe. The Emperor gathered together important artists: painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, who developed a characteristic style as important as that of the Fontainebleau school flowered at the same period in France. One component of the Rudolphean style was the painting of the Flemish Spranger, another the German Hans von Aachen and the third the Swiss Joseph Heintz.

Aachen studied in Italy, he spent there 14 years and was known as a portraitist. He went to Munich and worked for the Bavarian Prince. He moved to Prague in 1592 and became court painter at the court of Rudolph II.

In addition to mythological subjects he painted realistic genre pictures with two-three figures.

Hans von Aachen’s allegorical paintings, with their often complicated encoding, carried an intellectual stamp, powerfully influenced by the personality of the Emperor and by his high level of culture. After Rudolf II’s death, von Aachen continued to paint in a similar fashion, though the colouring became darker in his late works, as if he were trying to convey the slow decline of Rudolfine art. During the reign of Emperor Matthias he painted David and Bathsheba, a tribute to the ideal of female beauty of Prague Mannerism; here again the naked female body is at the centre of the narrative. The boundary between mythological and religious painting is blurred in favour of extremely sensual eroticism. The objects surrounding Bathsheba, arranged in a still-life manner, are reminiscent of Netherlandish models, to which Hans von Aachen was also indebted in his few genre paintings.

From a series of what must originally have been twelve compositions of Allegories on the Wars against the Turks (1593-1606), painted on parchment and assembled in book form, seven oil sketches have been preserved (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts), one composition is known from an engraving and four others from drawn copies of which there are eleven in all, likewise bound together as a book (Dresden, Kupferstichkabinet).

The present painting is one of the five preserved in Vienna.

Gaspar Rem (1542-c. 1616) was a Flemish painter. Hans von Aachen travelled to Italy c. 1574, first working in Venice as a copyist and for the painter Gaspar Rem, before going in 1575 to Rome, where he copied antique sculptures and the works of Italian masters.

Von Aachen’s portraits are remarkable for their psychological sensitivity. One of the earliest, of his teacher in Venice Gaspar Rem, clearly shows the influence of Venetian portrait painting (e.g. Jacopo Bassano).

Pan is the Greek god of nature who watches over shepherds and their flocks. He is most commonly depicted as having the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, with the upper body and hands of a human male, resembling a faun.

Pan enticed the moon goddess Selene. Pan accomplished this feat by wrapping himself in a sheepskin to hide his hairy black goat form, and drew Selene down from the sky into the forest where he seduced her.

Rudolf II (1552-1612) was the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. He became King of Hungary in 1572 and King of Bohemia in 1575. Following the death of his father he also became Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria. His reign was a troubled time of great religious conflicts coupled with the external menace of the Turks. Unfortunately, politics was not a great interest of his. Instead he was familiar with a number of languages and was devoted to art and science, the latter including alchemy and astrology, a highly fashionable preoccupation at that time. He was also fascinated by magic and the occult. At the end of the 1590s mental illness rendered him incapable of governing his empire, which by that time was torn by disputes between Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements. As a result, in 1611, he was forced to cede the crown of Bohemia to his brother Matthias and he died soon afterwards.

This painting belongs to the group portraits in which Hans von Aachen represented a number of his fellow artists during his sojourn in Italy (1574-1587). The painter depicted his model slightly from below, with his head turned directly to the viewer. The expression of the young man is not confident, but rather melancholy. In its immediacy and in that it captures a fleeting moment, the painting approaches the spontaneous, genre-like 1580s portraits by Annibale Carracci, to whom it had also been attributed.

The portrayed person was identified as the painter Joseph Heintz the Elder (1564-1609), a native of Basel, later also active at Rudolf II’s court. The painting was created in the period of 1584-85, when the two artists stayed in Rome, and it proves their mutual contacts.

Hans von Aachen was an artist who fully embraced the self-portrait as a means of artistic expression. His earliest self-portrait was executed c. 1574, and he painted several other self-portraits during his career.

Jupiter, the ruler of the gods, is seated on a cloud, his attribute of an eagle with thunderbolts in its beak beside him. He is embracing the goddess Minerva, his daughter. The scene is witnessed by a gathering of the gods of Olympus, clearly shocked by what they see.

Mercury, messenger of the gods, carries his winged caduceus (wand) in one hand and points toward the pair with the other. Diana, goddess of the moon, with her back turned, has abandoned her bow and her quiver full of arrows to watch. Apollo is seated with his lyre; Venus leans, naked, against a boulder as Cupid covers her with a shimmering drapery.