VOS, Marten de

The depictions of the Liberal Arts: Grammatica, Dialectica, Rhetorica, Arithmetica, Musica, Geometrica, Astrologia, are undoubtedly influenced by those of De Vos’ teacher Frans Floris, painted for Nicolaes Jonghelinck’s house in Antwerp, and popularized by Cornelis Cort’s engravings. The artist combined the liberal arts into one painting thus creating an influential model for subsequent Antwerp painters.

A new style of composition is displayed in the many retables produced by Marten de Vos for the renewal of the guild altars in Antwerp Cathedral. In the centre panels of the guild altars, such as that of the Longbowmen of 1590 (shown in the present reproduction) the Mannerist elements practically disappear and the clear and descriptive structure of the composition makes an almost classical impression.

Three little angels kneel with Mary and Joseph in worship of the newborn Child. The ox and the ass stand behind them. Other angels in the distance announce the birth of Christ to a group of shepherds. The ruin behind Joseph symbolises the defeat of paganism by the coming of the Saviour. The artist has made the symbolism even plainer by including a relief in the classical ruin - a recumbent female nude, possibly Venus, and several playful little naked figures. These represent the pagan world and ‘impure’, earthly love, as opposed to the divine love in which Christ was conceived.

Marten de Vos spent some time in Italy, where he familiarised himself with the new art of the Renaissance. This is apparent in details like the lively poses, the realistic approach to the anatomy and the references to classical antiquity. The divided upper zone, one half containing an architectural setting and the other a deep landscape, was also typical of 16th-century Venetian art.

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Thomas Tallis: Mass (Puer natus est)

Family harmony is a source of prosperity and happiness. So proclaims the Latin inscription in the cartouche at the top of the picture. This is the message of this family portrait, which does much more than simply depict wealthy members of Antwerp high society. Antonius Anselmus, an alderman of the city from 1580 to 1582, and his wife Joanna Hooftmans, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, are placed in front of a neutral background, accompanied by their two children, both born in Antwerp, Gillis in 1575 and Joanna in 1576. A third child was to be born in Hamburg, where the family sought refuge for a time after the city of Antwerp was returned to the Catholics. The Anselmus family, like the Hooftmans, were Calvinists.

The family’s high social ranking is immediately visible in the various items of decor: the carved furniture, the silver inkwell on the table, and the fragile Venetian glass vase, as well as the costly lace on the parents’ garments and the children’s aprons. The little girl holds a sumptuous vermeil rattle, a prestigious object symbolising the wealth of the newly born child. This object was offered to very young children by a godfather or an important person. The one represented here has at one end a whistle and at the other a wolf’s tooth, to which popular belief attributed the double power of protecting children against the evil eye and reducing teething pain. On the table between the couple are the marriage gloves and a rose, symbols of the love that unites them. The children express the prosperity of the couple as does the fruit being held by the elder. At the same time the tame bird on his shoulder is a metaphor for a successful education.

Maerten de Vos, who excelled in the portrait genre, was also known for his religious paintings, producing, among other works, six paintings of episodes from the life of St Paul for the dining room of Gillis Hooftmans, Joanna’s father. It is possibly following this commission that he painted the family portrait. By creating a unified and enveloping space around the figures, the artist succeeded in given a new dimension to the genre, intensifying both the psychological study and the allegorical significance. A partial replica of this painting, containing the head of Joanna, is conserved at the Wallraf Richartz-Museum in Cologne.

Rarer in religious iconography, the Return from the Flight to Egypt portrays the return journey of the Holy Family and Christ as an older child to Nazareth, which they had left to escape the fury of Herod. Set in a panoramic landscape, the scene describes the crossing of a river. The Family is sitting in a boat steered by two boatmen, one perched on the bow and the other on the stern. The Virgin, Joseph, Christ and their donkey are all on board. A fifth person is not identified.

Maarten De Vos, who founded the fraternity of Romanists in Antwerp, was Frans Floris’ best pupil and successor. His works are clear precursors of the 17th century Baroque. The Saint Luke painting the Virgin Mary is a late work by De Vos who died in 1603. His rich and varied use of colour might be attributable to the six years he spent in Florence, Rome and Venice (where he studied with Tintoretto); his paintings are clear, balanced and often symmetrical in composition, and despite his preference for shallow spaces, he succeeded in creating a strong sense of drama and plasticity. On the other hand, although a Lutheran for a long time, De Vos was also a figure-head of the Counter Reformation. The best evidence of this is to be found in the monumental scale of his works and his strict adherence to the iconographical precepts laid down by the Council of Trent.

Marten de Vos probably began his career in the workshop run by his father, Pieter de Vos. He travelled to Italy around the year 1552 accompanying Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and settled in Rome and Florence. In Venice he worked in Tintoretto’s studio as a specialist in landscape painting. Upon his return to Antwerp in 1558 he became the most distinguished Italianate artist in the city.

The Emperor’s Toll was the central panel of the triptych of the Coin-Makers’ Guild from St Andrew Church, Antwerp. It is a late work by De Vos who died in 1603.

The painting is a classic example of the Italian influence on Antwerp painting in the 16th century and illustrates the secularisation of religious painting on the eve of the Baroque. What makes this particular work so interesting is not so much its overall impact as the refined treatment of the individual figures and the realistic rendering of the various objects.

The painting is signed and dated upper centre on the frieze of the portico: FECIT MERTINO DE VOS 1585.

What makes this particular work so interesting is not so much its overall impact as the refined treatment of the individual figures and the realistic rendering of the various objects.

The painting shows Christ’s first miracle. When the wine ran out at a wedding at which Jesus and his mother were guests, he changed the water into the finest wine - a perfect theme for the Tavern-Keepers’ altar in the Antwerp Cathedral. The guild commissioned from marten de Vos, who was a very famous artist at the time. The time he spent in Venice had a noticeable effect on his work.

The wedding reception is set in an attractive Renaissance interior with a table full of fine food and expensive crockery, and festively dressed guests. Three lute-players and a young singer play from a gallery. Most of the guests look like 16th-century Westerners. The three crowns above the bride and her immediate neighbours were a customary feature of weddings in de Vos’s time. He tried, nevertheless, to evoke a somewhat Oriental, biblical atmosphere - several guests wear turbans, the bridegroom has a laurel crown and some of the servants’ costumes are vaguely Roman. The large wine-jugs in the foreground have an especially classical appearance. Jesus and his mother stand out because of their simple, ‘biblical’ clothes. The guests are sure to include several senior members of the Tavern-Keepers’ Guild.

The theme represented by de Vos in this painting was related by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The god Jupiter, in love with Europa, daughter of the Phoenician King Agenor, turned into a bull to abduct her and take her to Crete, where he possessed her. The young girl can be seen in the background, before the abduction, playing on the shore with her companions while Mercury glides in the sky surrounded by cupids, one of whom holds Jupiter’s rays in his hands.

Martin de Vos, having attained the full maturity of his style, was inspired by a composition painted by Titian between 1559 and 1562. The painter reveals his skill in the execution of grounds and of anecdotal details, in the purest Flemish tradition, and in the portrayal of the female nude. This figure is impeccably rendered in sfumato, and the light seems to emerge from the flesh through soft transparencies. The yellow robe and the undulating red cloth grant the composition its colour and movement. This work shows a perfect synthesis of Italian taste and the painter’s refined Flemish training.

This characteristic creation of Flemish mannerist painting was the centre panel of a triptych and originally decorated the St. Antony altar of the cathedral in Antwerp. In the background we can see several episodes from the lives of St. Antony the Hermit and St. Paul, such as their miraculous feeding by the raven, their conversation with an architect concerning the building of a monastery (which is also visible in the centre of a forest), the burial of St. Paul, and the kidnapping of St. Antony by demons.

In the fifteenth century they often used the episode of St: Antony’s temptation as the illustration for one of the four human temperaments, and in this they utilized their astrological theory. The pensiveness of the monk who withdrew from human society and dedicated himself to God is similar to the immersion into a state of melancholy. “Thinking about matters which are not to be thought about and understanding things which do not exist”, so goes an eleventh-century Arab doctor’s definition of melancholy (Constantinus Africanus Opera I, 287, Basel, 1536). At the same time, however, melancholy is a demonic state (“In Saturni parte sunt diabolici”), and this provides direct contact with the temptation scene.

In this context, music appears on Satan’s side as an instrument of temptation. The beautiful female figure wearing antlers and carrying a gold-filled box is escorted by fantastic figures. Among them we can see a couple dancing and two musicians dressed in a peculiar manner. Music, however, appears in the same picture in a positive role as well. The ceremony of St. Paul’s burial is accompanied by singing and music-making animals who pay him their last respects in this way.

This, however, is not the only example of the twofold interpretation of the symbols in the painting. It is a well-known fact that one of the attributes of St. Antony the Hermit is the swine, as - among others - he was the patron saint of domestic animals. The malady called St. Anthony’s fire (herpes zoster) that ravaged Europe from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, was cured with lard and the sick were cared for by Antonites in their own hospitals. In Martin de Vos’s painting the swine-headed figure holding a book, who accompanies the Hermit, also plays a positive part. At the same time, however, the demonic female figure is also escorted by a swine, this time symbolizing temptation.

With Pieter Bruegel, the great era of the Flemish Primitives reached a new zenith, and at the same time the beginning of the end. With the death of this master whose art was firmly rooted in the fatherland, the coast was clear for the invasion of foreign ideas from Italy. There were successive influxes of imported art from Rome, Venice and Florence, and much work produced by Flemish artists in the Italianate style, some of it without a clear understanding of the principles involved. But in all this, there was nothing which could spark off a new creative development of specifically Flemish art.

In the second half of the 16th century, many Italianate painters looked to the work of Frans Floris, which was based on the formal language of Michelangelo, and Titian and Tintoretto’s use of colour, as their ideal. One of his followers in Antwerp was Maarten de Vos, who was strongly influenced by Venetian art, but did not adopt Michelangelo’s muscular figures. He was the inspiration behind these late Mannerists and the most productive painter of his time; his death marked the end of a period in the history of art in Antwerp. Shortly after, Rubens was to return from Italy in 1608 and give a powerful new impetus to the School of Antwerp.

The Tribunal of the Brabant Mint in Antwerp is a representative example of the work of de Vos, not just as a figure painter but also as a portraitist.

The painting, which is a tableau representing justice, was painted in 1594 to hang in the Law Court of the ‘Minters’ of the Duchy of Brabant. Such paintings were intended to remind both Judges and those seeking justice of their duty and responsibilities.

The members of the Brabant League of Minters commissioned the painting, and had themselves depicted (from the waist up) in the background, behind the symbolic figures from classical antiquity surrounding Justitia herself. Justitia, crowned with laurels and holding the scales of justice and a sword, triumphs over deceit and violence, symbolised by a masked woman caught in her own web and a violent miscreant who has been disarmed.

In the foreground on the left, Moses is depicted with the Tables of the Law, and on his right the Emperor Justinian, the codifier of Roman Law. On the right there is the bearded Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, who compiled sacred laws inspired by his wife, the nymph Egeria. On the far right, Pliny the Elder can be seen, with his left hand resting on the 37 scientific works he wrote.

In a nutshell, the message of this scene is that justice triumphs over deceit and violence, and that judges should judge according to sacred and civil law, guided by knowledge and science.