By this time Avercamp, in order to better concentrate on his figures, was playing down the framing buildings and trees that formerly appeared on either side of his canvases. The Bruegel-like high horizons that had characterized his earlier work were moving lower, giving a less distant and more immediate perspective on the ice activities. Increasingly the viewer feels a part of the activities rather than a distant spectator to them, a trend that culminates around 1625, with a painting of colf players on the ice, in which the viewer feels almost a part of the game. In the LACMA painting, figures in the front row are strongly detailed while those more in the distance are more sketchily drawn in more muted colors. A laborer looks on at the activity from the left while a man and two women load goods in an ice cart and a horse pulls a sleigh. A gentleman fastens his skates next to a bird hunter who is accompanied by his dog. A gypsy carrying a baby on her back reads the palm of a stylishly dressed woman. Fashionable skaters sashay toward the viewer hand in hand. A lady (it has been suggested that she may represent Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of King James of England, who visited around this time, but this is questionable) wears a mask as protection against the cold. Behind her a bearded old man trudges forward carrying a basket. More distant figures fall down, play colf, fish, sit in sleds and propel themselves with poles, and engage in many other activities. As is typical of Avercamp’s work, the painting is a secular one. Avercamp was not interested in the classical and religious themes that dominate the work of Southern European contemporaries such as Artemsia Gentileschi. Instead, even though the scene does not depict any specific place, it is meant to capture the everyday life of Northern Europe.
pp. 144–145 (full painting): Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal, 1610–1620, by Hendrick Avercamp. Oil on wood. Partial gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter and purchased with funds provided by the Ahmanson Foundation, the Paul Rodman Mabury Collection, the William Randolph Hearst Collection, the Michael J. Connell Foundation, the Marion Davies Collection, Mr. and Mrs. Lauritz Melchior, Mr. and Mrs. R. Stanton Avery, the Estate of Anita M. Baldwin by exchange, and Hannah L. Carter, M.2009.106.23.
Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) painted this scene in his home town of Kampen, about sixty miles east of Amsterdam, during the “Little Ice Age,” a prolonged period of global cooling.
Because he lived in an artistic backwater outside the main centers of artistic activity, only the general outlines of Avercamp’s life are known. He was the son of educated parents. His father was a schoolmaster in Amsterdam when Hendrick was born in 1585, but that gig did not last long. He moved to Kampen the next year to become an apothecary and doctor. The family briefly returned to Amsterdam, but his services were missed in Kampen and he reesumed his medical practice there. One reason he was needed was that the town was experiencing an outbreak of plague. It was a fatal decision: in 1602 the doctor himself became one of the plague’s casualties. Avercamp and his siblings were left in the care of his mother, who seems to have been clever and resourceful and who took over her husband’s business before passing it on to one of Avercamp’s brothers.
Probably deaf as well as mute, Avercamp was taught to read and write, and he was sent to study in Amsterdam with the artist Pieter Isaacsz. Isaacz was a mannerist history and portrait painter whose influence is nowhere seen in his pupil’s work; instead Avercamp shows affinities with other artists who were students around the same time and with Bruegel and other Flemish and Dutch predecessors. Some elements in his paintings, such as a bird trap made from an old door, are directly drawn from Breugel’s own winter scenes. Around 1613 Avercamp returned to Kampen, where he apparently lived for the remainder of his life, producing an endless stream of charming, lively depictions of amusements on ice; they were popular and sold well. Some critics have the impression that he continued to live with his mother, but there is no hard evidence for this. In 1633, however, shortly before her death, she produced a document that requested an additional allowance for Avercamp of one hundred guilders a year beyond his regular portion of the family inheritance on the grounds of his “mute and wretched” condition. While many critics think that this indicates he had difficulty functioning in society, this conclusion is hardly supported by the evidence of his paintings (in which the artist himself sometimes appears). It is possible that his mother’s comment alludes instead to an illness. Just five months later, at the age of forty-nine, Avercamp followed her in death.
Colf Players on the Ice (detail), ca. 1620–1625, by Hendrick Avercamp. Oil on panel. Edmund and Sally Speelman Collection.
A gentleman plays colf while a man carrying an axe for cutting through the ice looks on. Colf was enormously popular in the Netherlands, and it was depicted in most of Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings. Players struck a sheepskin, or sometimes wooden, ball with a metal-headed club. In the most common variation of the game, players tried to hit a post in the fewest number of strokes; in another version they competed to achieve the greatest distance in a set number of strokes.
The paintings of Avercamp and others who focused on winter scenes document the period of intensely cold winters from about 1550 to 1700, when the climate cooled worldwide (in a broader view the “Little Ice Age” could be thought to extend from about 1300 to 1850, and any of a number of alternate start and end years have been proposed). During one year in the fifteenth century so heavy a snow fell in Florence, for example, that Piero de Medici ordered Michelangelo to make a snowman in the courtyard of his palace (we don’t know what it looked like, except that Giorgio Vasari, who recorded the lives of Renaissance painters, said that it was “very beautiful”). The cooling is remarkable because, while climactic temperature fluctuations are common, this is the only period in recorded history where such cooling occurred across much of the globe rather than in restricted regions. The northern hemisphere experienced a period of particularly cold winters from about 1600 to 1616.
Huaynaputina Volcano, drawing from El Primer Coronica y Buen Gobierno (“The First New Chronicle and Good Government”), 1615–1616, by Guaman Poma. Bound book; ink and colors on paper, 119 × 205 cm. Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.
The massive eruption of Huaynaputina volcano, near the present Peru/Chile border, spewed large amounts of ash that contributed to global cooling in the early seventeenth century.
The causes of this cooling are a subject of debate. Ash from volcanic eruptions was certainly a contributing factor. The eruption on February 19, 1616, of Mayon Volcano, the first recorded eruption of the Philippines’ most active volcano, was only the latest of a series of volcanic activity. Toward the end of the sixteenth century one of the largest volcanic discharges in history occurred in New Guinea. Yet even it was outdone by the enormous eruption of Peru’s Huaynaputina Volcano in 1600 (also, strangely, on February 19). The Huaynaputina eruption was likely the largest in historical times, on a similar scale to the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The sixteen-day blowout — Guaman Poma produced a drawing of the event — destroyed several villages. Lava flowed to the Pacific Ocean, some seventy-five miles distant. Volcanic ash was dispersed for great distances; it was so thick that it collapsed roofs in Arequipa, about forty-five miles away. The ash spread globally — the distinctive Huaynaputina ash has been detected in high levels at the South Pole and as far north as Greenland. Such ash can block incoming solar radiation, leading to worldwide cooling that can last for years. Following the eruption the winter of 1601 was the coldest in six centuries. The haze was so thick that it was reported there were no shadows. Famine was widespread, especially in Russia, where more than two million people died.
Volcanic activity is not the only possible cause of the cooling. Normal fluctuations in solar activity have an effect on climate, as can changes in the flow of ocean currents (perhaps caused by melt from the Medieval Warm Period). Changes in forestation and land use may have affected climate in ways that are not fully understood. Migration of peoples and changes in agriculture practices caused widespread deforestation (Japan, which had a refores
tation policy, was the most notable exception). Adaptation of American crops such as corn and potatoes allowed farming at elevations unsuitable for rice. Yet population was declining. Urbanization caused squalid conditions that helped to spread plague and made large populations susceptible to disease. Smallpox and other European diseases decimated the population of the Americas.
Spread of the plague was facilitated by the new globalism. During the fourteenth century the Mongol empire — the largest empire geographically that the world has ever seen — stretched from East Asia to Europe. Rats, probably from the Gobi Desert region, attached themselves to Mongol supply trains, and fleas attached themselves to the rats. The fleas transmitted the bacteria that caused the bubonic plague. The plague reached India and China by the mid-1300s, and Europe soon afterward. As just one example of its devastation, by the late 1400s the population of Paris was only a third of what it had been a hundred and fifty years before. The plague continued to reappear frequently for some time thereafter. But the rats the fleas hitchhiked on were black rats, Rattus rattus. In recent centuries those rats were largely driven out by the larger and more aggressive brown or Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus. The brown rat is more resistant to the disease and this, together with better practices of quarantine and disinfection, much reduced the threat of plague by the eighteenth century. Next time you come across a sewer rat you can blame it for, among its other disagreeable doings, the world’s present overpopulation.
“Icarus,” 1588, from the series The Four Disgracers by Hendrik Goltzius. Engraving, 13 × 13⅛ in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mary Stansbury Ruiz Bequest, M.88.91.104.
Goltzius’s strongly foreshortened Icarus demonstrates his skill as an engraver. His study of anatomy is apparent, yet the figure is individualized and expressive. Above all, Goltzius possessed a highly sophisticated understanding of tonality that helps to give his engravings a seemingly three-dimensional quality.
Another artist named Hendrick, based near Amsterdam in Haarlem — an open-minded town that welcomed both Catholics and Protestants and attracted immigrants from the Catholic southern Netherlands, France, and elsewhere — exemplified the mannerist mode of painting that looked to the later works of Michelangelo as a model. A generation older than Avercamp, Hendrick Goltzius was a virtuoso who excelled in just the sorts of mythological scenes that failed to interest the Mute of Kampen.
Goltzius had come to painting late, having first won international renown as a printmaker and engraver. He was born in Germany, in a town near the Dutch border, of a long line of workers in the arts trades: his great-grandfather and grandfather were painters, his father a stained-glass worker, a cousin an engraver and publisher. When Goltzius was about a year old he fell into the family’s hearth — especially needed for heat during the cold weather of the Little Ice Age — and was severely burned. The worst damage was to his hands, especially his right hand. The pain must have been excruciating. A neighbor wrapped the toddler’s hands tightly with cloth. The burn caused tendons to fuse in his right hand. He was never able to fully open its fingers. Nonetheless, he remained right-handed, and that was the hand he used in producing his engravings and paintings. He was forced to hold the engraver’s burin, and later the brush, in an unconventional way and to propel the movements of his hand with his arm, which may have contributed to the characteristic exuberance of his compositions. He did several images of his damaged hand. A 1588 pen drawing is a sort of self portrait — it was not done with a mirror; instead, the same hand that produced the drawing was its subject.
Right Hand of the Artist, dated 1588, by Hendrick Goltzius. Pen with brown ink, 32 × 23 cm. Signed “H Goltzius fecit. Anno 1588.”
This closely observed drawing of Goltzius’s injured hand was analyzed by the plastic surgeon F. Groenevelt, author of The Burned Hand, who wrote that “The person in question probably fell into the fire with the side of the hand striking the coals, after which the hand was twisted outwards so that the back of the fingers was also burnt.”
The artist’s hand became, appropriately, something of a personal brand. He did a number of images of it, and on at least one occasion he presented his hand while traveling to prove his identity.
Compare this to the hand of Artemisia Gentileschi shown on p. 127.
When he was sixteen Goltzius began to study with an engraver named Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert, who was a refugee from Holland. Coornhert had fallen afoul of both the Spanish and hard-line Dutch Protestants in his war-torn homeland by having made an appeal for tolerance and rationality, which offended both sides. Under Coornhert Goltzius learned the engraver’s trade and was exposed to forward-thinking humanist ideals of the Italian Renaissance. After the liberation of Haarlem from Spain in 1577 Coornhert returned there, and Goltzius soon joined him. His teacher arranged for him to get assignments producing engravings for publishers in Antwerp. He began to develop a reputation. When he was twenty-one he married a thirty-year-old widow whose inheritance from her first marriage bankrolled his business; this became so successful that he succeeded in breaking the monopoly previously exercised by the printers of Antwerp. (One prominent engraver in Antwerp was Crispijn Van de Passe, father of the young man who produced the engraving of Pocohontas during her visit to London.)
But Goltzius was troubled by ill health and severe depression. He was chronically consumptive. He is said to have vomited blood almost daily for three years. The cause of these problems is unknown, and doctors were unable to find a cure. Could they have been related to Goltzius’s alchemical researches? A Haarlem poet wrote of the artist, “a seeker after the Philosopher’s Stone, he was deemed to be above many alchemists.” His work with minerals may have developed from an interest in improving paint pigments, but one source claims that Goltzius’s alchemical experiments cost him a fortune, and an eye. Records of a lawsuit suggest that he was defrauded by another alchemist who lived for a time in his house while searching for a means of making gold.
The Fall of Man, dated and signed 1616 by Hendrick Goltzius. Oil on canvas, 140 × 106 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Patron’s Permanent Fund, 1996.34.1.
Jupiter and Antiope, 1616, by Hendrick Goltzius. Oil on canvas, 133 × 100 cm. Louvre, Paris, R. F. 2125.
In part to seek relief from these troubles, or at least to view the works of the Italian masters before dying, Goltzius traveled to Italy in 1590 with a servant. Unlike other prominent Northern European artists who made the Italy trip, Goltzius traveled incognito, under the guise of a Dutch cheese merchant and other invented identities. The reason for this is unclear, though it has been attributed to his sense of humor. On at least one occasion Goltzius’s servant was entertained as a visiting dignitary while the artist was left to his own devices. This may have been his objective, for he industriously sketched a wide range of artworks during his trip — a friend later claimed that “of all the Netherlanders who visited Rome … there are none who made so many excellent drawings there.” He also visited places where his own prints were being sold in order to hear candid assessments of them.
On his return to Haarlem following a year in Italy, Goltzius was reinvigorated: he produced his best pen and ink drawings, among other works. But his health continued to decline, and by the end of the century friends again feared for his life. But in 1600 he made an abrupt change in his life. At the age of forty-two, he abandoned engraving and took up painting for the first time. Scholars (who tend to favor the engravings) have long speculated on the reason for this change, but all of their theories remain speculation: no written records offer an explanation. My guess is that Goltzius’s interest in symbology led him to consider the year 1600 a significant moment for a break (the vision that inspired the German mystic Jacob Boehme also occurred in 1600; p. 223): he had reached the highest rank in engraving, and painting was increasingly regarded as the most prestigious (and potentially profitable, as the young Antwerp painter Peter Paul Rubens — who Goltzius entertained in 1612 — would demonstrate) of the visual arts.
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Lot and His Daughters, dated and signed 1616 by Hendrick Groltzius. Oil on canvas, 204 × 140 cm. Rijksmuseum, SK-A-4866.
Goltzius became regarded as the foremost Dutch painter of his day. Between the turn of the century and his death on New Year’s Day, 1617, he worked with characteristic industry on his paintings, producing about a hundred, of which around half survive. The last years of his life in particular saw a great burst of productivity: nearly half of his extant paintings date from his final three years. In his last year, 1616, he produced several important paintings. He seems to have been especially inspired by the theme of seduction. A depiction of Lot and His Daughters shows Lot being seduced by his daughters following the destruction of the city of Sodom, which is ablaze in the upper right (with the patriarch’s wife as a pillar of salt in front of it). The leering Lot reclines with a bowl of wine. Behind the figures is a fox, symbolic of the daughter’s cunning in seducing their father (believing themselves to be the last survivors on earth). A dog looks out at the viewer, its paw on a stone, symbolic of resolve; Lot’s foot, by contrast, is about to slip from the stone on which it is set. Goltzius brings a raw sensuality to the subject, also seen in his The Fall of Man (p. 151), which shows Adam being seduced by Eve, as the serpent, depicted with the head of a woman, looks on. The first couple are surrounded by goats and a cat, symbols of carnality. (Cats were associated with sexuality and witchcraft; persecution of them contributed to the spread of plague.) The sensuality and seductive content of Goltzius’s painting is in marked contrast to traditional paintings on the theme, which focused on the punishment and shame of the first couple. The artist’s erotic interests are also evident in his Jupiter and Antiope (p. 151), in which the god, having taken the form of a satyr, and apparently abetted by Cupid, leers at the reclining maenad whom he will soon ravish.
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