Jacques Bellange
Encyclopedia
Jacques Bellange was an artist and printmaker from the Duchy of Lorraine (then independent but now part of France
) whose etching
s and some drawing
s are his only securely identified works today. They are among the most striking Mannerist old master print
s, mostly on Catholic religious subjects, and with a highly individual style. He worked for fourteen years in the capital, Nancy as court painter to two Dukes of Lorraine, before dying at the age of about forty, and almost all his prints were produced in the three or four years before his death. None of his paintings are known to have survived, but the prints have been known to collectors since shortly after his death, though they were out of critical favour for most of this period. In the 20th century they have been much more highly regarded, although Bellange is still not a well-known figure.
He is recorded in 1595 as living "at present" in La Mothe; he had travelled to Nancy, where he took on an apprentice, and it is inferred that he must have been at least 20 to do so, hence his approximate date of birth. The complete absence of mentions in the record of his family, his rapid rise from 1602 in the court at Nancy, and his use of the title of "knight" has led to speculation that he may have been the illegitimate son of some court personage.
After the 1595 record there is a complete gap until 1602, although the destruction of La Mothe is likely to be one reason for this. Scholars have speculated that Bellange travelled either in this period or before 1595. The connection with Crispijn de Passe in Cologne
(see below) may mean that he had visited that city. In eight of Bellange's prints, his signature describes him as "eques" or "knight", but it seems clear that this title was not given by the Dukes of Lorraine. It is not impossible that he had acquired it at some other court during this period, and returned to Lorraine around 1602 with the prestige of an artist with international experience.
He appears employed as a court painter in Nancy in 1602, and thereafter appears regularly in the court accounts until 1616, the year of his death. After completing his first commission, to paint a room in the palace, he was taken on with a salary of 400 francs in 1603, twice what any previous court painter had been paid, and given the second rank out of the five court painters, with the additional function or title of valet
de garderobe.
Some jobs for the court attracted extra payments: in 1606 he repainted, for 1,200 francs, the Galerie des Cerfs, the main public space of the palace, used as a law court among other things. He appears to have repeated the previous scheme of hunting scenes. In the same year he was commissioned (1,700 francs, shared) to execute, but not design, a temporary triumphal arch for the royal entry
of Marguerite Gonzaga
, the new wife of Henri
, the heir to the duchy, who inherited upon the death of his father Charles
in 1608. This was Lorraine's first classical triumphal arch, surmounted by a statue of Virgil
in honour of the bride's Mantua
n home. Bellange also produced a car for use in the ballet produced for the celebrations, with 12 papier-maché
putti.
In March 1608, just before the old duke's death, Bellange was given 135 francs for a trip to France to see the new royal art commissions, his only documented travel outside Lorraine. He is not recorded as working on the funeral arrangements in mid-May, so was probably still away. His largest recorded commission, for 4,000 francs in 1610, was to decorate the Salle Neuf of the palace with scenes from Ovid
.
In 1612 he married Claude Bergeron, the 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Nancy apothecary
, with whom he had three sons. The dowry
was 6,000 francs, with a promise that the Bergerons' country house would pass to the couple.
The exact date and cause of Bellange's death in 1616 are unknown. His widow remarried another courtier in 1620 and had a further five children, living into the 1670s. She seems to have neglected her sons from her first marriage, two of whom appear to have died young; Henri, the oldest, was apprenticed in 1626 to Claude Deruet
, his father's old apprentice, and was a minor painter, latterly in Paris.
His style is a very personal version of the Netherlandish or Northern Mannerism
of artists like Bartholomeus Spranger
and Hendrik Goltzius
, but using a technique derived from Italian etchers like Federico Barocci
and Ventura Salimbeni
rather than Netherlandish engraving
. Sue Welsh Reed relates his style and technique more to the prints of the School of Fontainebleau
, while to A. Hyatt Mayor
he combined Italian elements "with an all-out emotion that is German and an intricate feminine elegance that is wholly French". Anthony Blunt
followed a line of 20th-century criticism that saw his work as:
There are no concessions to realism in his work. Female figures predominate; most, but not the Virgin, dressed in a fantasy mixture of contemporary court fashion and antique dress. Men mostly wear fantastical versions of Ancient Roman
parade uniforms mixed with Oriental elements, including some of the most elaborate footwear seen in art. His work for the court in designing costumes for masque
s and ballets may be an influence here, and it has been suggested that the four female "gardeners" are connected with specific costume designs. Regular special effects in his compositions include manipulation of space, and many large figures seen from behind in the foreground of works; both the Apostles and Magi sets of single figures include ones seen only from behind, with no face visible. Technically, he makes much use of stippling
and burnishing to achieve effects of light and to convey texture.
His two prints with a hurdy-gurdy man come from a very different world of genre works and realism, and the violence of the larger one was original at the time, anticipating themes to be taken up in later decades by the slightly younger Lorraine artist Jacques Callot
and others.
His first venture into etching seems to be a single self-portrait inserted into a large print of the ceremonial entry of the new Duke Henri into Nancy in 1610. The established printmaker Friedrich Brentel
and his young assistant Matthias Merian — later a major producer of maps and town views — had been brought in to produce a series of prints depicting the funeral of the old Duke Charles in 1608, and the celebrations for the new duke after mourning was complete. Plate 10 of the series shows a large group of mounted courtiers as part of a procession, and it was realized in 1971 that one of the figures, and his horse, is etched in a completely different style, that can be related to Bellange's other prints. It is now generally agreed that Bellange persuaded Brentel (or vice versa) that he should portray himself. This would have been in 1611, and a bookplate that looks to be an early effort is dated 1613; after that, none of his prints are dated, although most are signed.
Scholars have attempted a tentative chronology for the prints, essentially within the period from 1613 to 1616, based mainly on Bellange's increasing confidence and skill with the medium of etching, which was usually supplemented by a limited amount of engraving
and, in a few cases, touches of drypoint
. However, Griffiths and Hartley are too cautious to do so, noting that differences of technique can arise as much from the different requirements of individual plates as developing skill. Sue Welsh Reed, on the other hand, makes many comments on the assumed place of individual prints in a chronology, placing works like the Annunciation and Pietá among the last, and also seeing an increasing skill in composition as the sequence progresses.
Bellange's widow is recorded as owning 22 of his etched plates in 1619; probably these included the 18 that were later re-issued by the Parisian publisher Jean Le Blond, who added his name to the plate. This suggests that in his lifetime, Bellange supervised the printing of impressions himself; from at least 1615 there was a printing press for intaglio copperplates (a different piece of equipment to a book press) in Nancy. Distribution of prints through a network of dealers across Europe was already becoming rather efficient. Matthias Merian, whom Bellange must have known from his visit in 1610/11, produced 11 pirate copies of Bellange prints for a publisher in Strasbourg
, probably as early as 1615 — a standard sign of a successful print in those days. An impression of Bellange's Pieta records that it was bought by John Evelyn
in Rome in 1645, and Cassiano dal Pozzo
had bought several Bellange prints there, and copies, by the 1650s.
Bellange's subjects can be summarized as:
has been attributed to Bellange since the 1970s, and a related drawing is probably by Bellange, but the Hermitage canvas itself is described by Griffiths and Hartley as "a rather nasty object, with lurid flesh tones, and many have refused to believe that it could be from Bellange's hand". Other leading candidates are Saint Francis in Ecstasy Supported by Two Angels in Nancy, and a pair of panels of the Virgin and Angel of the Annunciation in Karlsruhe
.
To his Nancy contemporaries, Bellange must have been known mainly as a painter, but no very useful descriptions of his work survive. He is recorded as painting a number of portraits, but none are known to have survived. A Beggar Looking Through His Hat in the Walters Art Museum
, Baltimore
, which they attribute to Bellange, was donated by the former Soviet spy Michael Straight (1931-2004): "Given the secretive character of the man depicted, peering at us through a hole in his hat, the painting may have had a particular appeal for its previous owner", the museum suggests. It has been speculated that some of his prints are versions of his paintings, but there is no evidence for this, and the evidence of compositional changes made during the etching process in some prints goes against the theory.
as yet. The concentration on religious subjects in the prints is less marked in the drawings. Only one drawing that is clearly the preparatory working drawing for an etching survives, The Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint Anne at Yale, which has been intensively worked on and was apparently gone over with a blind (inkless) stylus to transfer the main outlines onto the plate at the start of etching. A drawing in the Louvre is of a group of background figures for another print, and many drawings are similar to the etchings but with different compositions, perhaps preliminary sketches; "they are nearly always spontaneous, swift and tense", and often mainly in wash.
Other drawings unrelated to his etchings survive, and in 1600-1602, long before he is known to have etched himself, Bellange supplied the prolific Flemish printmaker Crispijn de Passe, best known in Britain for his print of the Gunpowder Plot
ters a few years later, who was then living in Cologne
, with drawings for eight prints that de Passe engraved, crediting Bellange with the design (inv. or invenit) on the plate. Five of these were a series called Mimicarum aliquot facetiarum icones ad habitum italicum expressi or "Depictions of some droll witticisms, rendered in the Italian manner".
A drawing of a single figure then described as of Hercules sold for the remarkable price of £542,500 at Sotheby's
in 2001, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
, New York, which has decided it represents Samson.
and Charles I
, and a friend of Rubens, wrote a memorial poem for Goltzius
, part of which translates as: "Italy boasts of Raphael and Michelangelo, Germany of Albrecht Dürer, France of Bellange". In another poem of 1652, from Paris, Bellange is included in a similar list of great names from art.
By this time, however, the taste in French art for a cool and classical form of Baroque that had set in from the 1620s was already reducing the appreciation of Bellange, whose reputation continued to fall, along with that of Mannerism in general. For the same reason, there are no artists who can be seen to have been directly influenced by Bellange's style. Unlike the Dutch and Italians, French artists had no large collection of biographies until the latter part of the century, but the great print collector Michel de Marolles
was aware of 47 or 48 prints by Bellange, most of which were in his collections; these would not be exactly the same as the 47 or 48 in modern works, but very largely so. By the mid-18th century, the great French authority Pierre-Jean Mariette
was scornful and dismissive: "Bellange is one of those painters whose licentious manner, completely removed from a proper style, deserves great distrust. It nevertheless had its admirers, and Bellange had a great vogue .... Several pieces by him are known, which one cannot bear to look at, so bad is their taste". Many biographical compendiums simply omitted him, even as late as the 1920s. Another judgment of 1767 was quoted with approval by A. P. F. Robert-Dumesnil in his biographical dictionary Le Peintre-Graveur Français (1841), complaining that Bellange's etchings had "much more bizarreness than judgment, and very little correctness". However, Robert-Dumesnil did recognise that his style had something in common with the Romantics.
Bellange's critical rehabilitation came with a general revival of interest in Mannerism. Ludwig Burchard wrote an article about him in 1911, with somewhat cautious praise. An important lecture by the Viennese art historian Max Dvořák
, Über Greco und den Manierismus ("On Greco and Mannerism", published 1921) focused on four artists: Michelangelo
, Tintoretto
, Bellange, and the almost-as-reviled El Greco
. Bellange became an intellectual fashion and his work was interpreted in various ways. The German art historian Erica Tietze-Conrat pursued a Freudian interpretation: "The way in which the artist sees forms is strongly sexual, perversely sexual; and entirely genuine, since it mirrors the artist's sub-conscious. Otherwise he would never have drawn Saint John in a series of Apostles in so female a fashion...The angel of the Annunciation is a hermaphrodite
, but not with mixed but with marked characteristics of either sex...". Another tradition, reflected in the quotation from Anthony Blunt above, followed Otto Benesch
in placing Bellange in the context of a strain of Gothic mysticism that penetrated French Renaissance art.
The first exhibition devoted to Bellange took place in 1931/32 at the Albertina
in Vienna
, followed by an American one in 1975 (Des Moines
, Boston
, and New York
), based around the excellent collection that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had built up over the preceding decades. In 1997 a European exhibition based on an American private collection went to the British Museum
, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Statens Museum, Copenhagen, as well as the Carnegie Museum of Art
in Pittsburgh
. An exhibition was held in Rennes
in 2001. Bellange has also featured prominently in exhibitions with a broader scope in the period, and there is now a catalogue raisonné of the prints by Nicole Walch, Die Radierungen des Jacques Bellange, Munich 1971.
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
) whose etching
Etching
Etching is the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal...
s and some drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
s are his only securely identified works today. They are among the most striking Mannerist old master print
Old master print
An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition . A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques concerned are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are...
s, mostly on Catholic religious subjects, and with a highly individual style. He worked for fourteen years in the capital, Nancy as court painter to two Dukes of Lorraine, before dying at the age of about forty, and almost all his prints were produced in the three or four years before his death. None of his paintings are known to have survived, but the prints have been known to collectors since shortly after his death, though they were out of critical favour for most of this period. In the 20th century they have been much more highly regarded, although Bellange is still not a well-known figure.
Life
Bellange's place of birth and family background are unknown, according to Griffiths and Hartley, but most French sources assume he was born in the Bassigny region, also apparently known as "Bellange", in the south of the duchy around the fortified village of La Mothe, where he is first documented in 1595. The village was completely destroyed in 1645 by French armies after a siege during their conquest of Lorraine, and no longer exists.He is recorded in 1595 as living "at present" in La Mothe; he had travelled to Nancy, where he took on an apprentice, and it is inferred that he must have been at least 20 to do so, hence his approximate date of birth. The complete absence of mentions in the record of his family, his rapid rise from 1602 in the court at Nancy, and his use of the title of "knight" has led to speculation that he may have been the illegitimate son of some court personage.
After the 1595 record there is a complete gap until 1602, although the destruction of La Mothe is likely to be one reason for this. Scholars have speculated that Bellange travelled either in this period or before 1595. The connection with Crispijn de Passe in Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
(see below) may mean that he had visited that city. In eight of Bellange's prints, his signature describes him as "eques" or "knight", but it seems clear that this title was not given by the Dukes of Lorraine. It is not impossible that he had acquired it at some other court during this period, and returned to Lorraine around 1602 with the prestige of an artist with international experience.
He appears employed as a court painter in Nancy in 1602, and thereafter appears regularly in the court accounts until 1616, the year of his death. After completing his first commission, to paint a room in the palace, he was taken on with a salary of 400 francs in 1603, twice what any previous court painter had been paid, and given the second rank out of the five court painters, with the additional function or title of valet
Valet de chambre
Valet de chambre , or varlet de chambre, was a court appointment introduced in the late Middle Ages, common from the 14th century onwards. Royal Households had many persons appointed at any time...
de garderobe.
Some jobs for the court attracted extra payments: in 1606 he repainted, for 1,200 francs, the Galerie des Cerfs, the main public space of the palace, used as a law court among other things. He appears to have repeated the previous scheme of hunting scenes. In the same year he was commissioned (1,700 francs, shared) to execute, but not design, a temporary triumphal arch for the royal entry
Royal Entry
The Royal Entry, also known by various other names, including Triumphal Entry and Joyous Entry, embraced the ceremonial and festivities accompanying a formal entry by a ruler or his representative into a city in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in Europe...
of Marguerite Gonzaga
Margerita Gonzaga
Margherita Gonzaga was the eldest daughter of Vincenzo I Gonzaga and Eleonora de' Medici; she was also a sister of Francesco IV Gonzaga, Ferdinando I Gonzaga, Vincenzo II Gonzaga and Eleonora Gonzaga...
, the new wife of Henri
Henry II, Duke of Lorraine
Henry II was Duke of Lorraine from 1608 until his death. His two daughters were Duchesses of Lorraine by marriage. He was also the brother-in-law of King Henry IV of France.-History and Family:...
, the heir to the duchy, who inherited upon the death of his father Charles
Charles III, Duke of Lorraine
Charles III , known as the Great, was Duke of Lorraine from 1545 until his death.-History:He was the eldest surviving son of Francis I, Duke of Lorraine, and Christina of Denmark...
in 1608. This was Lorraine's first classical triumphal arch, surmounted by a statue of Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
in honour of the bride's Mantua
Mantua
Mantua is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy and capital of the province of the same name. Mantua's historic power and influence under the Gonzaga family, made it one of the main artistic, cultural and notably musical hubs of Northern Italy and the country as a whole...
n home. Bellange also produced a car for use in the ballet produced for the celebrations, with 12 papier-maché
Papier-mâché
Papier-mâché , alternatively, paper-mache, is a composite material consisting of paper pieces or pulp, sometimes reinforced with textiles, bound with an adhesive, such as glue, starch, or wallpaper paste....
putti.
In March 1608, just before the old duke's death, Bellange was given 135 francs for a trip to France to see the new royal art commissions, his only documented travel outside Lorraine. He is not recorded as working on the funeral arrangements in mid-May, so was probably still away. His largest recorded commission, for 4,000 francs in 1610, was to decorate the Salle Neuf of the palace with scenes from Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
.
In 1612 he married Claude Bergeron, the 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Nancy apothecary
Apothecary
Apothecary is a historical name for a medical professional who formulates and dispenses materia medica to physicians, surgeons and patients — a role now served by a pharmacist and some caregivers....
, with whom he had three sons. The dowry
Dowry
A dowry is the money, goods, or estate that a woman brings forth to the marriage. It contrasts with bride price, which is paid to the bride's parents, and dower, which is property settled on the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage. The same culture may simultaneously practice both...
was 6,000 francs, with a promise that the Bergerons' country house would pass to the couple.
The exact date and cause of Bellange's death in 1616 are unknown. His widow remarried another courtier in 1620 and had a further five children, living into the 1670s. She seems to have neglected her sons from her first marriage, two of whom appear to have died young; Henri, the oldest, was apprenticed in 1626 to Claude Deruet
Claude Deruet
Claude Deruet was a famous French Baroque painter of the 17th century, from the city of Nancy.-Biography:Deruet was an apprentice to Jacques Bellange, the official court painter to Charles III, Duke of Lorraine. He was in Rome between ca. 1612 and 1619, where - according to André Félibien - he...
, his father's old apprentice, and was a minor painter, latterly in Paris.
Etchings
It is generally agreed that 47 or 48 etchings by Bellange survive, and along with a number of drawings these are possibly all that remain of his art today. He probably branched into etching to spread his reputation beyond the rather small world of Nancy, and was successful in this.His style is a very personal version of the Netherlandish or Northern Mannerism
Northern Mannerism
Northern Mannerism is the term in European art history for the versions of Mannerism practiced in the visual arts north of the Alps in the 16th and early 17th century...
of artists like Bartholomeus Spranger
Bartholomeus Spranger
Bartholomeus Spranger was a Flemish Northern Mannerist painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He was born in Antwerp in the Habsburg Netherlands .-Biography:...
and Hendrik Goltzius
Hendrik Goltzius
Hendrik Goltzius , was a Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, or Northern Mannerism, noted for his sophisticated technique and the "exuberance" of his compositions. According to A...
, but using a technique derived from Italian etchers like Federico Barocci
Federico Barocci
Federico Barocci was an Italian Renaissance painter and printmaker. His original name was Federico Fiori, and he was nicknamed Il Baroccio, which still in northwestern Italian dialects means a two wheel cart drawn by oxen...
and Ventura Salimbeni
Ventura Salimbeni
Ventura di Archangelo Salimbeni was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker and among the last representatives of a style influenced by the earlier Sienese School of Quattrocento-Renaissance....
rather than Netherlandish engraving
Engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
. Sue Welsh Reed relates his style and technique more to the prints of the School of Fontainebleau
School of Fontainebleau
The Ecole de Fontainebleau refers to two periods of artistic production in France during the late Renaissance centered around the royal Château de Fontainebleau, that were crucial in forming the French version of Northern Mannerism....
, while to A. Hyatt Mayor
A. Hyatt Mayor
A. Hyatt Mayor was an American art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a leading figure in the study of prints, both old master prints and popular prints....
he combined Italian elements "with an all-out emotion that is German and an intricate feminine elegance that is wholly French". Anthony Blunt
Anthony Blunt
Anthony Frederick Blunt , was a British art historian who was exposed as a Soviet spy late in his life.Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Surveyor of the King's Pictures and London...
followed a line of 20th-century criticism that saw his work as:
the last in a long evolution of that particular type of Mannerism in which a private mystical form of religious emotion is expressed in terms which appear at first sight to be merely those of empty aristocratic elegance. The founder of this tradition was ParmigianinoParmigianinoGirolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola , also known as Francesco Mazzola or more commonly as Parmigianino or sometimes "Parmigiano", was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker active in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and his native city of Parma...
, who invented many of the formulas used by his successors, such as the elongation of the figures, the small heads on long necks, the sweeping draperies, the strained, nervous poses of the hands, and the sweet ecstatic smile which those of Protestant upbringing find it hard not to think of as sickly and insincere, but which incorporates a particular kind of mystical feeling.
There are no concessions to realism in his work. Female figures predominate; most, but not the Virgin, dressed in a fantasy mixture of contemporary court fashion and antique dress. Men mostly wear fantastical versions of Ancient Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
parade uniforms mixed with Oriental elements, including some of the most elaborate footwear seen in art. His work for the court in designing costumes for masque
Masque
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...
s and ballets may be an influence here, and it has been suggested that the four female "gardeners" are connected with specific costume designs. Regular special effects in his compositions include manipulation of space, and many large figures seen from behind in the foreground of works; both the Apostles and Magi sets of single figures include ones seen only from behind, with no face visible. Technically, he makes much use of stippling
Stippling
Stippling is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots. Such a pattern may occur in nature and these effects are frequently emulated by artists.-Art:...
and burnishing to achieve effects of light and to convey texture.
His two prints with a hurdy-gurdy man come from a very different world of genre works and realism, and the violence of the larger one was original at the time, anticipating themes to be taken up in later decades by the slightly younger Lorraine artist Jacques Callot
Jacques Callot
Jacques Callot was a baroque printmaker and draftsman from the Duchy of Lorraine . He is an important figure in the development of the old master print...
and others.
His first venture into etching seems to be a single self-portrait inserted into a large print of the ceremonial entry of the new Duke Henri into Nancy in 1610. The established printmaker Friedrich Brentel
Friedrich Brentel
Friedrich Brentel, a German printmaker in engraving and etching, and miniature painter, was born at Laugingen in 1580, and became a citizen of Strasbourg in 1601. His principal work is a set of plates for 'The Funeral of Charles III, Duke of Lorraine,' and the Royal entry of his son as the new...
and his young assistant Matthias Merian — later a major producer of maps and town views — had been brought in to produce a series of prints depicting the funeral of the old Duke Charles in 1608, and the celebrations for the new duke after mourning was complete. Plate 10 of the series shows a large group of mounted courtiers as part of a procession, and it was realized in 1971 that one of the figures, and his horse, is etched in a completely different style, that can be related to Bellange's other prints. It is now generally agreed that Bellange persuaded Brentel (or vice versa) that he should portray himself. This would have been in 1611, and a bookplate that looks to be an early effort is dated 1613; after that, none of his prints are dated, although most are signed.
Scholars have attempted a tentative chronology for the prints, essentially within the period from 1613 to 1616, based mainly on Bellange's increasing confidence and skill with the medium of etching, which was usually supplemented by a limited amount of engraving
Engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
and, in a few cases, touches of drypoint
Drypoint
Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. Traditionally the plate was copper, but now acetate, zinc, or plexiglas are also commonly used...
. However, Griffiths and Hartley are too cautious to do so, noting that differences of technique can arise as much from the different requirements of individual plates as developing skill. Sue Welsh Reed, on the other hand, makes many comments on the assumed place of individual prints in a chronology, placing works like the Annunciation and Pietá among the last, and also seeing an increasing skill in composition as the sequence progresses.
Bellange's widow is recorded as owning 22 of his etched plates in 1619; probably these included the 18 that were later re-issued by the Parisian publisher Jean Le Blond, who added his name to the plate. This suggests that in his lifetime, Bellange supervised the printing of impressions himself; from at least 1615 there was a printing press for intaglio copperplates (a different piece of equipment to a book press) in Nancy. Distribution of prints through a network of dealers across Europe was already becoming rather efficient. Matthias Merian, whom Bellange must have known from his visit in 1610/11, produced 11 pirate copies of Bellange prints for a publisher in Strasbourg
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin département. The city and the region of Alsace are historically German-speaking,...
, probably as early as 1615 — a standard sign of a successful print in those days. An impression of Bellange's Pieta records that it was bought by John Evelyn
John Evelyn
John Evelyn was an English writer, gardener and diarist.Evelyn's diaries or Memoirs are largely contemporaneous with those of the other noted diarist of the time, Samuel Pepys, and cast considerable light on the art, culture and politics of the time John Evelyn (31 October 1620 – 27 February...
in Rome in 1645, and Cassiano dal Pozzo
Cassiano dal Pozzo
Cassiano dal Pozzo was an Italian scholar and patron of arts. The secretary of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, he was an antiquary in the classicizing circle of Rome, and a long-term friend and patron of Nicolas Poussin, whom he supported from his earliest arrival in Rome: Poussin in a letter...
had bought several Bellange prints there, and copies, by the 1650s.
Bellange's subjects can be summarized as:
- Five large prints of religious narrative subjects:Adoration of the Magi, Christ Carrying the Cross, The Martyrdom of St Lucy, Raising of Lazarus, Three Women/Marys at the Tomb
- Smaller religious prints, with several Madonnas and Child
- An incomplete set of figures of Christ, St Paul and the Twelve Apostles, several in two versions, sixteen in total
- A set of three figures of the Three MagiBiblical MagiThe Magi Greek: μάγοι, magoi), also referred to as the Wise Men, Kings, Astrologers, or Kings from the East, were a group of distinguished foreigners who were said to have visited Jesus after his birth, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh...
- Four figures of female "gardeners" or Hortulanae
- Two subjects with a hurdy-gurdy man
- Two scenes from classical mythology, The Death of Portia and Diana and the Hunter (or Orion), and Military figures outside a city, which is either a capriccioCapriccioCapriccio may refer to:* A capriccio, a tempo marking* Capriccio , a chamber music composition* Capriccio , a piece of music which is fairly free in form* Capriccio , a 1942 German-language opera by Richard Strauss...
, or depicts a classical subject that is now unclear.
Paintings
No firmly attributed painting by Bellange survives; all the palace decorations that were his major commissions have been destroyed. A number of easel paintings have been attributed to him, but there is little consensus among art historians on the correctness of these attributions, and the works have varying degrees of relation to the idiosyncratic style of Bellange's etchings. A Lamentation of Christ in the Hermitage MuseumHermitage Museum
The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been opened to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display,...
has been attributed to Bellange since the 1970s, and a related drawing is probably by Bellange, but the Hermitage canvas itself is described by Griffiths and Hartley as "a rather nasty object, with lurid flesh tones, and many have refused to believe that it could be from Bellange's hand". Other leading candidates are Saint Francis in Ecstasy Supported by Two Angels in Nancy, and a pair of panels of the Virgin and Angel of the Annunciation in Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe
The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states...
.
To his Nancy contemporaries, Bellange must have been known mainly as a painter, but no very useful descriptions of his work survive. He is recorded as painting a number of portraits, but none are known to have survived. A Beggar Looking Through His Hat in the Walters Art Museum
Walters Art Museum
The Walters Art Museum, located in Baltimore, Maryland's Mount Vernon neighborhood, is a public art museum founded in 1934. The museum's collection was amassed substantially by two men, William Thompson Walters , who began serious collecting when he moved to Paris at the outbreak of the American...
, Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
, which they attribute to Bellange, was donated by the former Soviet spy Michael Straight (1931-2004): "Given the secretive character of the man depicted, peering at us through a hole in his hat, the painting may have had a particular appeal for its previous owner", the museum suggests. It has been speculated that some of his prints are versions of his paintings, but there is no evidence for this, and the evidence of compositional changes made during the etching process in some prints goes against the theory.
Drawings
About 80 to 100 drawings attributed to Bellange survive, though many of these would not be accepted by all authorities; there is no catalogue raisonnéCatalogue raisonné
The typical catalogue raisonné is a monograph giving a comprehensive catalogue of artworks by an artist.The essential elements of a catalogue raisonné are that it purports to be an exhaustive list of works for a defined subject matter describing the works in a way so that they may be reliably...
as yet. The concentration on religious subjects in the prints is less marked in the drawings. Only one drawing that is clearly the preparatory working drawing for an etching survives, The Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint Anne at Yale, which has been intensively worked on and was apparently gone over with a blind (inkless) stylus to transfer the main outlines onto the plate at the start of etching. A drawing in the Louvre is of a group of background figures for another print, and many drawings are similar to the etchings but with different compositions, perhaps preliminary sketches; "they are nearly always spontaneous, swift and tense", and often mainly in wash.
Other drawings unrelated to his etchings survive, and in 1600-1602, long before he is known to have etched himself, Bellange supplied the prolific Flemish printmaker Crispijn de Passe, best known in Britain for his print of the Gunpowder Plot
Gunpowder Plot
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of Scotland by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby.The plan was to blow up the House of...
ters a few years later, who was then living in Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
, with drawings for eight prints that de Passe engraved, crediting Bellange with the design (inv. or invenit) on the plate. Five of these were a series called Mimicarum aliquot facetiarum icones ad habitum italicum expressi or "Depictions of some droll witticisms, rendered in the Italian manner".
A drawing of a single figure then described as of Hercules sold for the remarkable price of £542,500 at Sotheby's
Sotheby's
Sotheby's is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation.-History:The oldest auction house in operation is the Stockholms Auktionsverk founded in 1674, the second oldest is Göteborgs Auktionsverk founded in 1681 and third oldest being founded in 1731, all Swedish...
in 2001, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, New York, which has decided it represents Samson.
Reputation
Bellange's reputation was fairly widespread by soon after his death, presumably very largely through his prints. The imitations by Merian and others, the reprints by Le Blond in Paris, and the large numbers of prints that survive, many from plates worn by large numbers of impressions, all imply that his prints had a healthy market. Many drawings have early inscriptions attributing them to him, which are often not supported by modern scholars, suggesting that an attribution to Bellange was a desirable one to have. In 1620 Balthasar Gerbier, a leading Flemish agent for collectors like the Duke of BuckinghamGeorge Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham KG was the favourite, claimed by some to be the lover, of King James I of England. Despite a very patchy political and military record, he remained at the height of royal favour for the first two years of the reign of Charles I, until he was assassinated...
and Charles I
Charles I of England
Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...
, and a friend of Rubens, wrote a memorial poem for Goltzius
Hendrik Goltzius
Hendrik Goltzius , was a Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, or Northern Mannerism, noted for his sophisticated technique and the "exuberance" of his compositions. According to A...
, part of which translates as: "Italy boasts of Raphael and Michelangelo, Germany of Albrecht Dürer, France of Bellange". In another poem of 1652, from Paris, Bellange is included in a similar list of great names from art.
By this time, however, the taste in French art for a cool and classical form of Baroque that had set in from the 1620s was already reducing the appreciation of Bellange, whose reputation continued to fall, along with that of Mannerism in general. For the same reason, there are no artists who can be seen to have been directly influenced by Bellange's style. Unlike the Dutch and Italians, French artists had no large collection of biographies until the latter part of the century, but the great print collector Michel de Marolles
Michel de Marolles
Michel de Marolles , known as the abbé de Marolles, was a French churchman and translator, known for his collection of engravings. He became a monk in 1610 and later was abbot of Villeloin . He was the author of many translations of Latin poets and was part of many salons, notably that of Madeleine...
was aware of 47 or 48 prints by Bellange, most of which were in his collections; these would not be exactly the same as the 47 or 48 in modern works, but very largely so. By the mid-18th century, the great French authority Pierre-Jean Mariette
Pierre-Jean Mariette
Pierre-Jean Mariette was a collector of and dealer in old master prints, a renowned connoisseur, especially of prints and drawings, and a chronicler of the careers of French Italian and Flemish artists...
was scornful and dismissive: "Bellange is one of those painters whose licentious manner, completely removed from a proper style, deserves great distrust. It nevertheless had its admirers, and Bellange had a great vogue .... Several pieces by him are known, which one cannot bear to look at, so bad is their taste". Many biographical compendiums simply omitted him, even as late as the 1920s. Another judgment of 1767 was quoted with approval by A. P. F. Robert-Dumesnil in his biographical dictionary Le Peintre-Graveur Français (1841), complaining that Bellange's etchings had "much more bizarreness than judgment, and very little correctness". However, Robert-Dumesnil did recognise that his style had something in common with the Romantics.
Bellange's critical rehabilitation came with a general revival of interest in Mannerism. Ludwig Burchard wrote an article about him in 1911, with somewhat cautious praise. An important lecture by the Viennese art historian Max Dvořák
Max Dvorák
Max Dvořák was a Czech-born Austrian art historian...
, Über Greco und den Manierismus ("On Greco and Mannerism", published 1921) focused on four artists: Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
, Tintoretto
Tintoretto
Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...
, Bellange, and the almost-as-reviled El Greco
El Greco
El Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...
. Bellange became an intellectual fashion and his work was interpreted in various ways. The German art historian Erica Tietze-Conrat pursued a Freudian interpretation: "The way in which the artist sees forms is strongly sexual, perversely sexual; and entirely genuine, since it mirrors the artist's sub-conscious. Otherwise he would never have drawn Saint John in a series of Apostles in so female a fashion...The angel of the Annunciation is a hermaphrodite
Hermaphrodite
In biology, a hermaphrodite is an organism that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes.Many taxonomic groups of animals do not have separate sexes. In these groups, hermaphroditism is a normal condition, enabling a form of sexual reproduction in which both...
, but not with mixed but with marked characteristics of either sex...". Another tradition, reflected in the quotation from Anthony Blunt above, followed Otto Benesch
Otto Benesch
Otto Benesch was an Austrian art historian. He is considered as a member of the Vienna School of Art History.He was taught by Max Dvořák...
in placing Bellange in the context of a strain of Gothic mysticism that penetrated French Renaissance art.
The first exhibition devoted to Bellange took place in 1931/32 at the Albertina
Albertina
The Albertina is a museum in Vienna, Austria, containing the world's best collection of old master prints and drawings.Albertina, a feminine adjectival form of Albert , may also refer to:...
in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, followed by an American one in 1975 (Des Moines
Des Moines, Iowa
Des Moines is the capital and the most populous city in the US state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small portion of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines which was shortened to "Des Moines" in 1857...
, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, and New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
), based around the excellent collection that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had built up over the preceding decades. In 1997 a European exhibition based on an American private collection went to the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Statens Museum, Copenhagen, as well as the Carnegie Museum of Art
Carnegie Museum of Art
The Carnegie Museum of Art, located in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is an art museum founded in 1895 by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie...
in Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
. An exhibition was held in Rennes
Rennes
Rennes is a city in the east of Brittany in northwestern France. Rennes is the capital of the region of Brittany, as well as the Ille-et-Vilaine department.-History:...
in 2001. Bellange has also featured prominently in exhibitions with a broader scope in the period, and there is now a catalogue raisonné of the prints by Nicole Walch, Die Radierungen des Jacques Bellange, Munich 1971.