Marten Jacobsz Heemskerk van Veen or
Maarten van Heemskerck (1498,
HeemskerkHeemskerk is a municipality and a town in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland.-Local government:The municipal council of Heemskerk consists of 25 seats, which are divided as follows:* PvdA - 8 seats* CDA - 6 seats* VVD - 5 seats...
– October 1, 1574,
Haarlem', in the past usually Harlem in English, is a municipality and a city in the Netherlands. It is also the capital of the province of North Holland, the northern half of Holland, which at one time was the most powerful of the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic.Haarlem had a total population 148...
), was one of the leading
DutchThe Netherlands is a country in Northwestern Europe, constituting the major portion of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east...
portrait and religious painters of the sixteenth century, famous for his depictions of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Biography
His father was a small farmer, Jacob Willemsz van Veen (whose portrait he painted). According to his biography, written by Karel van Mander, he was apprenticed to Cornelis Willemsz in Haarlem. Recalled after a time to the paternal homestead and put to the plough or the milking of cows, young Heemskerk took the first opportunity that offered to run away, and demonstrated his wish to leave home for ever by walking in a single day the 50 miles which separate his native hamlet from the town of
DelftSee also: Delft, Cape Town, Delft IslandDelft is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland , the Netherlands...
. There he studied under Jan Lucasz whom he soon deserted for
Jan van ScorelJan van Scorel was an influential Dutch painter credited with the introduction of High Italian Renaissance art to the Netherlands...
of Haarlem. Even today, many of Heemskerck's paintings are mistaken for work by van Scorel. He boarded at the home of the wealthy Pieter Jan Foppesz (the van Mander spelling is
Pieter Ian Fopsen), curate of the
Sint-BavokerkThe Grote Kerk or St.-Bavokerk is a former cathedral on the central market square in the Dutch city of Haarlem.-History:It was dedicated to Saint Bavo at some time before 1500, though the painting illustrating the miracle of St. Bavo saving Haarlem from the Kennemers is supposedly showing a scene...
. He knew him because he owned a lot of land in
HeemskerckHeemskerk is a municipality and a town in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland.-Local government:The municipal council of Heemskerk consists of 25 seats, which are divided as follows:* PvdA - 8 seats* CDA - 6 seats* VVD - 5 seats...
. This is the same man whom he painted in a now famous family portrait, considered the first of its kind in a long line of Dutch family paintings.
In 1532 he started on a
Grand TourThe Grand Tour was the traditional travel of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary...
, with the purpose of seeing and painting the seven wonders of the world, and during which he visited the whole of northern and central Italy, stopping at Rome, where he had letters of introduction from van Scorel for the influential Dutch cardinal
William of EnckenvoirtWilliam of Enckevoirt, also spelled as Enckenvoirt was a Dutch Cardinal, bishop of Tortosa from 1524 to 1524, and bishop of Utrecht from 1529 to 1534.-Early life:...
. Before he left, he painted a scene of St. Luke painting the Virgin as an altarpiece for the St. Luke's altar in the Bavokerk. On the bottom it states in a tromp l'oeil paper that he painted it for his comrades. It is evidence of the facility with which he acquired the rapid execution of a scene-painter that he was selected to co-operate with Antonio da San Gallo, Battista Franco and
Francesco de' Rossi (Il Salviati)Francesco de' Rossi was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence, also active in Rome. He is known by many names, prominently the adopted name Francesco Salviati or as Il Salviati, but also Francesco Rossi and Cecchino del Salviati.-Biography:Salviati was born and died in Florence...
to decorate the triumphal arches erected at
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
in April 1536 in honour of
Charles VCharles V was ruler of the Holy Roman Empire from 1519 and, as Charles I of Spain, of the Spanish realms from 1516 until his abdication in 1556...
.
Giorgio VasariGiorgio Vasari was an Italian painter and architect, who is today famous for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:Vasari was born in Arezzo, Tuscany...
, who saw the battle-pieces which Heemskerk then produced, says they were well composed and boldly executed.
Work
He painted the Seven Wonders, most notably his painting of the construction of the
St. Peter's BasilicaThe Papal Basilica of Saint Peter , officially known in Italian as the ' and commonly known as St. Peter's Basilica, is located within the Vatican City. St. Peter's Basilica has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world, holding 60,000 people. It is the symbolic "Mother church" of...
in Rome, and the Colosseum. On his return to the Netherlands in 1536, he settled at Haarlem, where he soon (1540) became president of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, married twice (his first wife and child died during childbirth), and secured a large and lucrative practice.
Seven Wonders of the World
He earned money from his engravings on the seven wonders, and after he died printers still found it profitable to reproduce his engravings:
He painted large altarpieces for his friend, the art mecenas and later martyr of the
Protestant ReformationThe Protestant Reformation was a Christian reform movement in Europe which is generally deemed to have begun with Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 although a number of precursors such as Jan Hus predate that event...
, Cornelis Muys. Muys, (or
Musius) had returned from a period in France to the Netherlands in 1538 and become prior of the St. Agatha cloister in Delft, which later became the
PrinsenhofThe Prinsenhof in Delft in The Netherlands is an urban palace built in the Middle Ages as a monastery. Later it served as a residence for William the Silent . The building still exists and now houses the municipal museum...
. This lucrative and high profile work in Delft earned Heemskerck a commission for an altarpiece in the
Nieuwe Kerk (Delft)Nieuwe Kerk is a landmark church in Delft, the Netherlands. The building is located on Delft Market Square , opposite to the Delft City Hall . In 1584, William the Silent was entombed here in a mausoleum designed by Hendrick and Pieter de Keyser. Since then members of the House of Orange-Nassau...
for their Guild of St. Luke. In 1553 he became curate of the
Sint-BavokerkThe Grote Kerk or St.-Bavokerk is a former cathedral on the central market square in the Dutch city of Haarlem.-History:It was dedicated to Saint Bavo at some time before 1500, though the painting illustrating the miracle of St. Bavo saving Haarlem from the Kennemers is supposedly showing a scene...
, where he served 22 years (up to the
Protestant reformationThe Protestant Reformation was a Christian reform movement in Europe which is generally deemed to have begun with Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 although a number of precursors such as Jan Hus predate that event...
). In 1572 he left Haarlem for
AmsterdamAmsterdam is the capital and largest city of the Netherlands, located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country...
, to avoid the
siege of HaarlemIn the Eighty Years' War the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands was put under a bloody siege by a Spanish army that wanted to reclaim the rebellious city for Philip II, the Spanish king.-Pretext:...
which the Spaniards laid to the place. In Amsterdam he made a will which has been preserved, and shows that he had lived long enough and prosperously enough to make a fortune. At his death, he left money and land in trust to the orphanage of Haarlem, with interest to be paid yearly to any couple who should be willing to perform the marriage ceremony on the slab of his tomb in the cathedral of Haarlem. It was a superstition which still exists in Catholic Holland that a marriage so celebrated would secure the peace of the dead within the tomb.
The works of Heemskerk are still very numerous. "Adam and Eve", and "St Luke painting the Likeness of the Virgin and Child" in presence of a poet crowned with ivy leaves, and a parrot in a cage - an altar-piece in the gallery of Haarlem (see below), and the "Ecce Homo" in the museum of Ghent, are characteristic works of the period preceding Heemskerk's visit to Italy. An altar-piece executed for "St Laurence of
AlkmaarAlkmaar is a municipality and a city in the Netherlands, in the province of Noord Holland. Alkmaar is well-known for its traditional cheese market. For tourists, it is a popular cultural destination.-History:...
" in 1538-1541, composed of at least a dozen large panels, which including portraits of historical figures is, since the Reformation, preserved in Linkoping Cathedral, Sweden, giving us a clue to his style after his return from the south.
In its absence we have a Crucifixion executed for the Riches Claires at Ghent (now in the Ghent Museum) in 1543, and the altar-piece of the Drapers' Company at Haarlem, now in the gallery of the Hague, and finished in 1546. In these we observe that Heemskerk studied and repeated the forms which he had seen at Rome in the works of
MichelangeloMichelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer...
and Raphael, and in Lombardy in the frescoes of
MantegnaAndrea Mantegna was a North Italian Renaissance painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality...
and
Giulio RomanoGiulio Romano was an Italian painter and architect. A prominent pupil of Raphael, his stylistic deviations from high Renaissance classicism help define the 16th-century style known as Mannerism...
. But he never forgot the while his Dutch origin or the models first presented to him by Schoreel and Mabuse.
As late as 1551 his memory still served him to produce a copy from Raphael's "Madonna di Loretto" (Frans Hals Museum). A "Judgment of Momus", dated 1561, in the Berlin Museum, proves him to have been well acquainted with anatomy, but incapable of selection and insensible of grace, bold of hand and prone to daring though tawdry contrasts of color, and fond of florid architecture. Two altar-pieces which he finished for churches at Delft in 1551 and 1559, one complete (St. Luke painting the Virgin), the other a fragment, in the museum of Haarlem, a third of 1551 in the Brussels Museum, representing Golgotha, the "Crucifixion", the "Flight into Egypt", "Christ on the Mount", and scenes from the lives of St Bernard and St Benedict, are all fairly representative of his style.
Parrots
In his depiction of St. Luke painting the Virgin, which Heemskerck painted twice for two painter's guilds, there is some confusion in the literature about a parrot. In both paintings he painted a parrot, but the parrot in a cage has been sawn off the first painting and is no longer visible.
Besides these we have the "Crucifixion" in the Hermitage of St Petersburg, and two "Triumphs of Silenus" in the gallery of Vienna, in which the same relation to Giulio Romano may be noted as we mark in the canvases of Rinaldo of Mantua. Other pieces of varying importance are in the galleries of Rotterdam, Munich, Cassel, Brunswick, Karlsruhe, Mainz and Copenhagen. In England the master is best known by his drawings. A comparatively feeble picture by him is the "Last Judgment" in the palace of Hampton Court.
Legacy
Heemskerck was widely respected in his own lifetime and was a strong influence on the painters of Haarlem in particular. He is known (along with his teacher Jan van Scorel) for his introduction of Italian art to the Northern Netherlands, especially for his series on the seven wonders of the world, that were subsequently spread as prints. Karel van Mander devoted six pages to his biography in his
Schilder-boeck.
External links