The two sides of the Antwerp master Jacob Jordaens
Whoever wants to paint a figurative representation on a ceiling of vault can roughly go two ways. The first possibility is the representation from images if the ‘donkey piece’ concerns a place on the wall. The perspective simply starts from the horizon. Michelangelo, for example, does it in his famous frescoes on the vault of the Sistine Chapel. The second technique takes into account the suggestion that the action is taking place above the viewer’s head: in that case the vault opens up towards the sky. Famous artists of the later Italian Renaissance and Baroque were masters of this.
Although the Antwerp painter Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) never visited Italy, he was undoubtedly aware of the dome and vault decoration of artists such as Antonio da Correggio in Parma, and Pietro da Corton in Rome through crosses. He followed their example when, in 1652, he decorated the ceiling of the show room of his house with nine scenes from the classical myth of Amor and Psyche. The spectacular highlight of the Jordaens Museum in the Frans Hals Museum is a reconstruction of that room, with the original canvases on the ceiling and doors, the walls life-sized or dimmed from drawings Jordaens made in preparation for lost paintings, and a floor entirely covered with mirrors.
The mirrors first view the individual scenes overhead. And whoever even looks in the direction of his own feet, becomes all the more visible what it is like to paint in the perspective from bottom to top. Before you know it, you only see the soles of your feet from below and the figure above disappears. Many ceiling painters cheat a bit with the perspective; Jordaens also plays with it: in the painting Psyche receiving the cup of immortality on Olympus the central scene is surrounded by a crowd of sharply rendered figures on a cloud band. On another canvas, which has been preserved as a fragment, the love takes naked putto, a step forward when he himself steps onto a transparent floor.
Also read: Important painting by Baroque painter Jordaen discovered in Belgian town hall
Different kind of domesticity
Together with Rubens and Van Dyck, Jordaens was the painted painter in seventeenth-century Antwerp. He showed his talent and impressed visitors and customers with the paintings in the representative reception room of his home. They bear witness to a very different kind of domesticity than the works of the elders in the exhibition, which mainly focuses on the informal quality in Jordaens’ work.
Twelve other paintings bear witness to this, with mythological themes, religious episodes and scenes of everyday life. Each time the focus is on the light-hearted, the witty, getting used to the preferences of Jordaens’ client. Like himself, they came from the wealthy urban upper class of merchants and citizens. For example, the appearance of accidental passers-by and written scholars who argue in the temple with the unapproachable Jesus have conspicuously striking heads. Mythological scenes are especially rich and easy to understand. And the moralizing lesson that the viewer might draw from the unseemly way in which the supreme god Jupiter watches the nude-sleeping princess Antiop is hardly to be taken seriously, because the satyr waving his finger admonishingly looks out of the picture with a sneer. The beautiful painting, with Jordaens’s own wife and father-in-law as protagonists, depicting the saying “As the old sang, so the boy squeak” (1640-1645), shows infectious cheerfulness in a lively and subtly illuminated composition.
The captions in this exhibit sometimes have the character of puzzle-search assignments, which may also be due to low-key names, such as: “Do King Midas’s dog-ears also catch your eye first?” The exclusive attention that arises for the details of the performance ignores the style and painterly quality of work. In view of the painter’s large production, this can vary quite a bit. Certainly from very different periods hung right next to each other, the exhibition – with only works from the private Phoebus collection – makes this tacitly clear.
A version of this article also in NRC in the morning of October 29, 2021