PATENIER, Joachim

Patenier lived and worked in Antwerp. He was an influential forerunner of the modern landscape painting. The Baptism of Christ - one of his few surviving and signed paintings - is a landscape in which the figural subject has only secondary importance.

Patenier, working in Antwerp, was a landscape specialist, often providing the backgrounds to the figures of other masters such as Massys or Isenbrandt. In his own work the landscape becomes the dominant element, so that the figure subject which justifies it becomes sometimes no more than a tiny incident in the foreground. The impression is sought of vast panoramic vistas, which are seen not from a natural but from an artificially high viewpoint. Typically the landscape is enlivened by dramatic effects of wheather or the outbreak of fire, in a manner influenced by Bosch.

According to classical tradition, Charon, the boatman carried the souls of those entering Tartarus or Hades across the River Styx in his boat. In this painting the artist constructed a deep vista of a river and its two banks. Because of the bird’s-eye view and horizontal picture format, the world seems to unfold beneath us. In spite of many naturalistic details, this is a highly contrived landscape; the perspective is applied inconsistently and the movement through three distinctive colour zones is formulaic. Nevertheless, the painting, independent of its subject, is alluring.

Patenier painted and signed his Landscape with St Jerome in about 1515. From a high vantage point, the eye is initially drawn to the foreground motifs, but then passes on stage by stage through an immense landscape, a spatial continuum that extends to the far horizon and narrow strip of sky. In the left foreground, in front of a soaring rock formation with a cavity that attracts the gaze, the saint is seated in front of a primitive shelter built up against the rock. He is concentrating on extracting a thorn from a lion’s paw. In the distance, barely detectable, Patenier has depicted further legendary events in which the lion, St Jerome’s companion, plays a role. Finally on the rocky plateau with monastery building, St Jerome forgives and blesses the repentant merchants who had stolen a donkey from him.

With this painting the artist created a universal landscape, not because he depicted a particular panorama but because he went beyond the aspect of landscape to expound a view of the world, a comprehensive Christian view. The subjectivity of the visual experience that transforms a depiction of nature into a landscape compels the individual viewer to assume a very personal standpoint with respect to this implied world view.

The painting offers us a bird’s eye view of a vast imaginary landscape, dominated by a calm sky. At the centre, a gathering of people is listening attentively to John the Baptist, bending on a simple branch which is serving as a pulpit. To the left is a rocky mass, to the right a river winds its way into the horizon. The subtle succession of brown, green and blue planes creates the effect of an infinite perspective.

This delicate work is from the hand of Joachim Patenier, originally from the Namur region, but who settled in Antwerp, where he was registered as a master of the Guild of St Luke in 1515. The artist appears to have been first and foremost a landscape painter. It is as such that he was described during his lifetime by his colleague and friend D�rer, who came to Antwerp in 1520. Whilst Patenier was probably not the first specialist landscape painter, he certainly contributed decisively to reversing the formal relationship between landscapes and human figures. His composite panoramas, which appear to embrace the entire earth, have received the German name of Weltlandschaften (world landscapes). But we must not be mistaken: these are devotional images where both the landscape and the human figures - however small - play a vital role.

According to the biblical account, John the Baptist, after receiving the word of God in the desert, preached a gospel of repentance and the coming of the Messiah. Christian art was to locate this preaching in the woods, as here. The river probably represents the Jordan: on the left bank is depicted the baptism of Christ. The Saviour appears a second time, walking towards the sermon. Several natural elements clearly contain an allegorical dimension: the dying tree in the foreground, with a vine twined round it, probably symbolises the Tree of Knowledge which, according to the legend, withered after Adam and Eve’s disobedience, but began to flower again once Christ had redeemed the world’s sins. The vine is a motif of faithfulness and immortality, but in this context could refer to the tree of life, that is to Jesus himself.

The Netherlandish Joachim Patenier is viewed as the inventor, or at least principal initiator, of the “universal landscape.” His paintings enjoyed wide renown throughout Europe in the early sixteenth century and Albrecht D�rer praised him highly as a landscape artist.

A narrative, most commonly biblical, remained a necessary component of the landscapes for some time. Here, the rural European view is populated by Gospel personages and peasants of the artist’s own era,although it is no easy matter to tell them apart.

Joachim Patenier’s marvelous Flight into Egypt has a three-fold scheme of colour, landscape and geometrical form.

In this painting Patenier’s characteristically high viewpoint creates a panorama seen from a bird’s-eye view, with a very distant horizon and a sense of boundlessness. The figures are totally integrated into the natural setting.

Patenier is considered to be the first landscape artist of the Renaissance. Like many painters of the period, he uses landscape to create a suitable setting for the figures in his scenes. But although he integrates his narrative within them, his landscapes become more than mere backgrounds, and begin to assume their own autonomy. For the most part, Patenier maintains an equilibrium within his paintings between the presence of the figures and the landscape, and only in a few is he bold enough to shift this balance in favour of his vision of nature. His detailed technique is typical of Flemish artists, but his novelty lies in his creation of space and depth through subtle gradations of light and colour, as well as a certain effort at capturing the atmosphere of the scene.

The painting was executed probably by the workshop of the artist.

An influential painter in terms of the development of landscape painting in the 16th century was Joachim Patenier, who was born in Bouvignes, near Dinant. Like Quentin Massys, with whom he worked occasionally, he lived and worked in Antwerp. His contribution to the development of a new genre, the independent landscape painting, was considerable. In his religious paintings, he placed his figures against a background of immense vistas presented as a bird’s eye view of a host of cosmic elements: mountains and crags, sweeping valleys, rivers and meadows, towns and villages - one after the other they draw the eye of the beholder on to a distant horizon. Although these are not yet fully independent landscape paintings, the landscape is the most important element in his compositions. The human figures play only a secondary role, as can be seen in St Christopher bearing the Christ Child, a very popular subject at that time and on into the 17th century, because St. Christopher was believed to give protection against sudden death. There can be no doubt that Pieter Bruegel studied Patenier’s landscapes before leaving for Italy and painting the Alps.

This meditative master is unparalleled in his power of absorbing the parable of some Biblical episode or the meditation of St Anthony into a natural scene in which he makes us completely forget the picture’s dimensions through the amplitude of what it suggests. We have before us space painted, time and space rendered sensible to our eyes. In his St Jerome, those bluish vistas fade beautifully into the distance under wide white skies. The painter has an exquisite way of sketching in tiny people, farms and groups of houses, or of leaving some animal - a goat or a bird - straying among the slaty blue of his rocks.

This is one of the few paintings that bears the artist’s signature. It is the result of a collaboration of Joachim Patenier and Quentin Massys who painted the figures.

The central panel depicts the Penitence of St Jerome.