BLES, Herri met de

In this composition the landscape fills the picture space and the events related to the Road to Calvary are integrated in this. The route begins at the town on the left - signifying Jerusalem - through a hilltop village, then the winding path leads to the place of crucifixion in the distant background.

This drawing depicting Jesus, Peter and the other disciples in their boat is one of a series of drawings in the so-called ‘Antwerp Sketchbook’. Bles’s authorship of the drawings has been contested, but five relate directly to panels by him, and it is now thought that they are the work of a hand or hands in his circle or workshop. The drawing seems to have been the basis for a group of seven panel paintings of this subject by Bles.

The painting is signed with the artist’s device of an owl at the base of the tree at the centre.

The subject of the painting is taken from the Gospel of St John, (XXI, 6–10); the figures enacting it are typically set in an immense vista, dwarfed by the towering, fantastical bluffs and buildings above and beyond them. In the foreground on the edge of Lake Galilee, Christ appears to his disciples for the third time following his resurrection. St Peter is seen trying to reach Him across the waves, while to the right the figures appear again in a slightly later episode gathering to grill the fish they have just miraculously caught. The remarkable eagle-shaped overhang in the rocks may be intended as a symbol of the Evangelist and thus refers to de Bles’s biblical source. Upon it may be spied a small owl sitting in a cleft, a pun on the painter’s nickname (civetta in Italian) and his frequent form of signature.

The panel is signed on the rocky bluff with the artist’s device of an owl, and inscribed on an old label affixed to the reverse: Del Civetta.

In the foreground on the edge of Lake Galilee, Christ appears to his disciples for the third time following his resurrection. St Peter is seen trying to reach Him across the waves.

The remarkable eagle-shaped overhang in the rocks may be intended as a symbol of the Evangelist and thus refers to de Bles’s biblical source. Upon it may be spied a small owl sitting in a cleft, a pun on the painter’s nickname (civetta in Italian) and his frequent form of signature.

This detail shows the episode of gathering to grill the fish they have just miraculously caught.

In the foreground on the edge of Lake Galilee, Christ appears to his disciples for the third time following his resurrection. St Peter is seen trying to reach Him across the waves.

The remarkable eagle-shaped overhang in the rocks may be intended as a symbol of the Evangelist and thus refers to de Bles’s biblical source. Upon it may be spied a small owl sitting in a cleft, a pun on the painter’s nickname (civetta in Italian) and his frequent form of signature.

This detail shows the episode of gathering to grill the fish they have just miraculously caught.

This panel depicts a fantastical moonlit landscape with St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child across a river. In the centre the painter has placed a large rock in silhouette, its opacity accentuated by the brightness of the landscape that shines through the peculiarly eroded tunnels at its base. It is a partly anthropomorphic formation, something that we see in varying forms throughout the artist’s oeuvre.

Herri met de Bles was, together with Joachim Patenier, the Low Countries’ first landscape painter.

In the sixteenth century, Old Testament’s sacred texts inspired painters by allowing them to illustrate scenes that had never been portrayed until then. The illustration of the Scriptures gradually became a pretext for the creation of vast exotic landscapes teeming with forests, mountains and rivers.

Herri met de Bles was a significant contributor to the tradition of landscape painting. One of his largest landscapes appears as the setting for the Road to Calvary, now in Princeton. The subject is immersed within a spectacular landscape. The foreground procession of people who stream from the giant turreted gate of Jerusalem is minuscule, and within the city walls the artist scatters more tiny figures, who act out the various episodes of the Passion.

In contrast to the procedure of the early landscapists, met de Bles’s procedure was first to sketch the layout of the landscape omitting figures entirely, to assure a unity and totality to the view. The figures were added later. In this painting, like in his other landscapes, the painter thought in terms of a landscape with figures and not figures in a landscape.

Responding to the enormous trade in metals by South German banking families in Antwerp, Herri met de Bles painted several images depicting miners at work deep in the mountains. Here, like in his other landscapes, the painter thought in terms of a landscape with figures and not figures in a landscape.

The painter based his depiction of the Paradise on the opening page of the Bible translated by Luther and decorated with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach. Several of the small scenes, such as the creation of Eve and the expulsion from Paradise, were also taken from Cranach’s Bible illustrations. The little roundel stands out for the description of the landscape. Herri met de Bles worked as a true miniaturist by including flowers, plants and animals in the microcosm of this painting.