Between the end of the XNUMXth century and the beginning of the XNUMXth century, a group of talented artists emerged in the Southern Netherlands, named as Primitive Flamingos, which gave the history of humanity endless cultural contributions. Hence the importance of having knowledge about it, so stay with us and enjoy this informative article.
What are Primitive Flamingos?
Paintings made between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth century by a large group of artists from the southern Netherlands are known as Flemish Primitives. One of the most transcendental points in the history of art is attributed to such a period.
In other words, when referring to this denomination, we are speaking historiographically of the masters of the Flemish school of painting in its first centuries, from Jan van Eyck in the first half of the fifteenth century, to Pieter Brueghel the Elder in the middle of the fifteenth century. of the XNUMXth century.
Within this group, made up of Dieric Bouts, Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck himself, among others, its exponents lived and worked mostly in the prosperous cities that make up the region, such as: Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels , Ghent and Leuven.
Flemish painting was founded by various schools: the Italianate and the reactionary during the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, and the colorist or naturalist of the Antwerp School, belonging to the XNUMXth century. The first two are part of the art of the Netherlands, which emerged at the time of the European Renaissance.
In general terms, it was a group of artists who were somewhat isolated from what was the Renaissance revolution and, for some, such as those belonging to the reactionary school, against the coming Italianate artistic influences.
Thanks to the mastery that was born as a result of the new medium of oil painting, and his vision in terms of detail, pictorial art could be propelled to a point never seen before, where the course of art history was changed forever. .
It was simply a time when commissions were not only coming from the upper social strata and religious organizations of the time, but also from ordinary citizens and cities far from the capitals. For the first time in many years, painters were granted an important place in society.
At that time, the artists still preserved a few original features of the Gothic style, both technical, such as the use of a panel instead of a canvas, or thematic, generally religious and spiritual. However, there was also an increase in detail skills, as already mentioned.
These interests notably promoted the empirical investigation and discovery of perspective, as well as the vindication of the landscape as a pictorial topic, and the improvement of the portrait technique, which provided an impressive psychological depth and vindication of the landscape as a theme. pictorial.
Today, you can still admire the wonderful artistic legacy of the Flemish Primitives. In the Flanders region, for example, we find the important Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Antwerp and Brussels, and the Groeninge Museum in Bruges. Likewise, the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, the M of Leuven, the Mayer van den Bergh and the Sint-Janshospitaal are located there.
Likewise, in Spain we also find countless works, since its kings were great admirers of this kind of painting. The deposits of the Museo Nacional del Prado stand out by far, where the painting by the talented Rogier van der Weyden, "The Descent from the Cross" (1438), is protected.
Historical-geographical context of the primitive Flemish
Often, this type of painting is referred to with the expression Flemish Primitives, giving the impression that it is a rather crude and simple artistic movement, which never managed to reach its full potential. This term originated when Renaissance art in general was taken as a point of reference, in addition to the fact that the Middle Ages were considered for a long time as a time of darkness.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, because when this magnificent school emerged, painting in the Netherlands already had an extensive and robust history behind it, which included exceptional moments with styles such as the Romanesque and the International Gothic.
On the other hand, it is still called “Flemish”, despite the fact that the Flemish Region of Belgium, better known as Flanders, is just that, a small area of the Netherlands. This is due to the fact that, throughout the XNUMXth century, there were quite favorable circumstances that influenced the creation of a transcendent school of painting in this northwestern part of Europe.
Economic prosperity was notable in Flanders, this was closely linked to the industry and the cloth trade and, therefore, generated an exceptional urban development from the growing rise of its bourgeoisie.
The heyday of the entire society and bourgeois values were a determining factor in the vigorous development of a new mentality and artistic sensibility. The eye, but that he never renounced, for the rest, his deep-rooted religious devotion.
For the time, the most renowned cities within the territory were Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, each one of them forming link nodes between the commercial networks in charge of uniting Northern Europe with the rest of the known West. Said region was part of the Duchy of Burgundy, with rulers who had played the role of patron of Gothic art.
In addition to this, it had a high population density, one of the highest in all of Europe, whose urban concentration was also higher than the European average. In it there were several prominent cities with great wealth, important merchants and numerous artisans.
In fact, such was the internal cohesion of the society, that it was projected very quickly into a peaceful and organized life. Society was dominated by civil classes: merchants, manufacturers, bankers, etc.
Added to this is the fact that, by approximately 1380, as a result of the Hundred Years' War, Paris was no longer considered the artistic capital of the world, as it had been until then. Therefore, the social groups that used to emigrate began to stay in their country and work for the bourgeoisie and the big merchants of the continent.
This was seen more than anything else in Spanish and Italian society that increasingly appreciated their own art. All the works were at the service of the bourgeois public, very sensitive and rich in culture, joined by the Catholic Church and hundreds of patrons of artists.
The clientele was more than anxious to be able to observe the reflection of their faces and world in the paintings that they ordered to be done. Additionally, urban development made possible the establishment of the first universities which, together with the invention of the printing press, became a valuable source of diffusion and creator of culture.
In that period, practicality was valued more and more, even religion acquired a pragmatic meaning. That is why it is known as a totally realistic period. From the year 1420, the conception that the divine spirit embodied in every little thing, made the representations acquire a higher transcendence.
Both sensible and tangible reality had greater popularity. The objects ceased to be secondary elements to come to the fore as protagonists. When this happened, the Flemish Primitive painter, Robert Campin, lived in the city of Tournai.
At the same time, the capital of the province of East Flanders, Ghent, saw Hubert van Eyck grow up with his younger brother, and with more recognition, Jan van Eyck. Historical studies assert that the three were the greatest representatives of the painting revolution.
Each one in his own way perfected the use of oil with outstanding consequences on the final result, using colors of excellent quality, obtaining incredible effects with glazes, etc. With the turn of the century, from the XV to the XVI, all artists began to conceive the repercussions of the Italian Renaissance.
In this century, specifically in 1477, the duchy that had a total esteem for its economic relevance, became the Habsburg Austrian crown. The House of Habsburg had a Spanish branch since the time of Carlos I of Spain, the Habsburg dynasty.
Because of this, Spanish Renaissance and Baroque art had a close relationship with Flemish forms. However, despite the progressive Renaissance acceptance, painters remained loyal to the richness of the traditional, since it was something still alive and with the possibility of creation.
There were very few who did not renounce the good craft, that taste for detail, realism in portraits and the landscape constituted mainly as the protagonist in his works. The portraits, the group paintings and the costumbrista atmosphere coexist with the religious themes without any problem.
Technical characteristics on primitive flamingos
In general, Flemish painting has a lack of precedents in large formats, with the exception of stained glass. However, it does in the miniatures, on which it does have an extensive tradition of extraordinary quality.
As a result of this, a few characteristics of Flemish art were determined, such as the use of very striking colors that serve to remind the pigments used in the lighting of the miniatures. The application of detail to small masterpieces is also added, which they transmit to the various large-format paintings.
This feature largely favors the technical advance over oil, whose discovery had already been made, but which still had an extremely slow drying process that did not provide much practicality.
For this reason, it is essential to emphasize that the primitive Flemish painters of the fifteenth century did not invent the oil technique, only that they were responsible for applying it systematically, which contributed to its consolidation and diffusion in this century and the next.
For this, fluid and transparent inks were used, applied by means of glazes to obtain the lights, the delicate shading and the nuance of the color of the backgrounds. The painters of the region used a mixed technique between tempera and oil.
The first layer used to be tempera, in order to define the drawing and modeling with its lights, as well as a slight indication of color. The next layer, that of oil, had as its main function that the artist dedicated himself solely to the representation of the chromatic effect.
Despite the fact that in other areas such as Venice, the use of canvas gradually became popular, the panel was always preserved as the primary support, which, during the Late Middle Ages, was the most important of all. A clear indication of the intimate union that the concepts of artist and craftsman still possessed at that time.
Relationship between the Flemish School and the Renaissance
The Flemish Renaissance school of painting is often referred to by scholars and art critics as “Ars Nova”, translated in Spanish as Arte Nueva. However, such name should not be confused with its musical namesake.
Its name comes from a technical and craftsmanship advance that has nothing to do with the intellectual and reflective character of the first approaches to the Renaissance, which occurred in parallel in the Tuscany region.
The artists of the Flemish School did not take Classical Antiquity as a model of recovery, at no time was the craft concept of the trade placed on the table. These, in addition to performing work for the court, also had clients who were part of the bourgeoisie and resident merchants of influential cities.
His main forerunners did not tend to theorize about their various findings, or about their personalities, as Italian contemporaries once did. Similarly, he continued to work within certain late medieval parameters, except for a few painters such as Jan van Eyck.
van Eyck, along with other colleagues, began to have a much clearer awareness of their particular art and created the tendency to sign the works. For the time, there were no Flemish painting treatises, nor biographies of its main exponents.
The aforementioned lack of theoretical elaboration may come from a purely spiritual vocation. While the Italian authors tried to renew all the knowledge of the world through human measurement, making use of the sciences and reason, for the primitive Flemish it was enough to live in the face of a remarkable religious experimentation of the visible.
Takes up the perspective of primitive flamingos
In this same order of ideas, making punctual comparisons between the Italians and Flemish, it is essential to note that both simultaneously discovered linear and aerial perspective, only the latter empirically and not following a mathematical or optical development specific.
In general terms, the transitive process from planism to the linear perspective of the Quattrocento was quite slow, being the last centuries of the Middle Ages a time in which many trials, gropes and inaccurate experiments were carried out, with the main objective of breaking the plane pictorial and return to the third dimension.
Among these various attempts is the representation system that uses the oblique parallel projection, called "Knight's Perspective" or "A bird's eye view", which basically consists of representing scenes in which it seems that the painter is located in a specific point of view. elevated, like a person riding a horse.
In this way, the objects supposedly closest to the viewer are placed in the lower part of the composition in the foreground, from there everything else is superimposed vertically as they are supposed to be more distant, thus scaling the painting to its highest point where the horizon line is often drawn.
From this, the suggestion of the third dimension began very timidly, with a recovery of painting towards the natural world. These essays of «gentleman perspective» became generalized in the period of Gothic painting, to which the name of International or Courtly Gothic was attributed.
Each of these techniques provides a clear naturalistic representation of the world, saturated with spiritual symbols. By the fifteenth century, both Flemish and German painters experimentally used all kinds of perspective systems, coupled with empirical methods such as the convex mirror, used by van Eyck in his work "The Arnolfini Marriage".
Thus they were represented as a wide angle covering a much larger space. One of the theoretical texts that compiles the Nordic perspective systems is Jean Pelegrin's "De artificiali perspective", which is known as Viator and is considered the equivalent of Alberti's Treatise on Renaissance painting.
In addition, there is the collection of other systems such as the "cornuta perspective", commonly known as angular or oblique perspective, whose function was to be a procedure used by primitive Flemish painters for much of the fifteenth century.
However, the representation that arouses the most interest in this treatise is the one that treats the system with a point of distance, very similar to the Albertian linear perspective, except that, with a more simplified formula with easy and clear execution, and that it proceeds by assumption of the practice of Nordic painting workshops.
Unlike Italian Renaissance paintings, where light is responsible for making objects and architectures visible in an attempt to highlight volumetric values, in Flemish painting perspective is closer to natural vision.
In it, the air is palpable sensorially, as if it were an individual reality and one more element that is present in the composition. Likewise, artists opt for the use of color gradation towards slightly more bluish grays for distant objects, as Leonardo da Vinci does in his studies of aerial perspective.
Themes
As in previous periods, religious themes are very preponderant in this stage, of which endless recreations of biblical passages or references about the lives of saints or anchorites could be mentioned.
Some artists such as Bosch or Brueghel the elder, were in charge of making paintings that exemplify the sins and what their respective consequences were. Similarly, these can also be considered as simple philosophical conceptions of the world based on multiple beliefs or popular sayings.
For the realization of these magnificent creations, they were helped by a numerous fantasy of elements and compositions that manage to transmit a message through a highly symbolic and sophisticated language. However, its use was quite appropriate, if one takes into account that its final audience was the bourgeoisie of the region and religious institutions.
landscape vindication
In Flemish paintings you can see the interest in absolutely everything, because with the same precision and care that a human feature is painted, an animal, an object and even a plant are painted. It is quite remarkable how the landscape acquires a greater importance at the time.
In this way, the primitive Flemish artists faithfully reflected the environment that was part of their surroundings, only that it confers a certain symbolic character to such realism. Consequently, it contributes to the allegorical significance of the colors used and the multiple secondary objects depicted.
What was customary in the Gothic style, golden and neutral backgrounds, disappear entirely and are replaced by all kinds of naturalistic landscapes. The light ceases to be capricious and each object begins to have its own specific shadow, just as each room has its lighting frame, each landscape its safe tonality and each element its punctual quality.
In short, every Flemish painting always refers to the landscape in one way or another, either through a window or because it certainly takes place outdoors. These landscapes were made without hints of nature, so their elements were very stereotyped.
With this point we could mention the shape of its rocks, jagged and without vegetation, the cities located in the distance, towered and colored, the trees whose shape was like a feather, with thin and long trunks, among others. The characters were distributed in a balanced way, in the center if there was just one and symmetrically if there were many.
Actions were often intended to be restrained and movement was seldom allowed. Although the participants could share with each other, they were never allowed to steal the spotlight from the main character, the landscape.
In general, the works were made in small format using the board as a support, since they were conceived to be located inside the great bourgeois and aristocratic residences, domestic interiors that with great ease made the painting reflect a piety intimate and bourgeois.
In addition, the boards often consist of three sheets, hence their name Triptych, the two sides are hinged and close on top of the central one. For its part, the outer face is usually painted with gray tones and the grisaille technique in order to produce the sensation of being a sculptural relief.
The portrait
It should be noted that Flanders is credited with the title of one of the forerunner regions in terms of making portraits with psychological penetration of the model. Traditional Flemish portraits, which were later adopted with resounding success in Spain by many, are those that capture their protagonists in a medium shot.
However, not as it is currently known frontally, but rather with a slight curvature turning on itself, always on a neutral background of a dark color and incorporating the face and hands with some symbolic object.
The fact that the character is portrayed slightly rotated favors total involvement in the space, so that representations are not made through tricks of furniture or architectural backgrounds. Only with the presence of a solemn figure, on top of a lost background, is the existence of the volume and the space occupied insinuated.
With the passage of time, already in the XNUMXth century, in the Antwerp school, when the city became the artistic fortress of the Flemish Baroque, this kind of portrait managed to evolve to its maximum glory in a much more naturalistic and colorful style.
Main exponents
Before the establishment of the Flemish Primitives, there were certain predecessors such as the talented teacher Melchior Broederlam, and the Limbourg Brothers, Brothers, Paul, and Johan. However, the first artists to capture these innovations in a painting were Robert Campin, and Jan and Hubert van Eyck.
These are considered to be the formal founders of the primitive Flemish school at the beginning of the XNUMXth century. We could mention among his most important works the "Triptych of the Annunciation", "The Mass of Saint Gregory", "Seilern Triptych", "Virgin of Canon Van der Paele and Virgin of Chancellor Rolin", "Portrait of the Arnolfini Marriage", among others.
As he already mentioned, in them the golden background was renounced and the technique and oil painting began to be used as the main pictorial material. Likewise, the easel painting modality is created in its modern concept, so that it was conceived to be seen up close.
His invoice was extremely meticulous and detailed, with a character that contributed significantly to the intense development acquired by the miniature of codices in the court of the Dukes of Burgundy, to give an example, to whom these states belong during this century.
It is essential to emphasize that, at the service of such a meticulous technique, a fine sense of observation was marked and, therefore, an inherent naturalistic tendency, which is why a perfection was achieved that is very difficult to overcome in relation to the interpretation of the qualities of fabrics, goldsmith pieces (metals, glass, leather, etc.) and in genres such as portraiture and landscape.
In addition to this, among the painters who worked in the second third of the fifteenth century, and helped to concretize many of the features of the Flemish School, we find the outstanding Rogier van der Weyden, also known simply as Rogier de la Pasture.
This Belgian made very important and majestic paintings such as "The descent from the cross", "Diptych of Felipe de Croÿ with the Virgin and Child", "Lamentation and burial of Christ", "Madonna Medici", "Polyptych of the final judgment ”, “San Lucas drawing the Virgin” and many more.
Already at the end of the century and beginning of the XNUMXth century, other primitive Flemish artists stood out who achieved the evaluation and accentuation of some characteristic features of their works, such as the landscape. As a result of this, in a certain way forms and compositions that had already been created in the past are repeated.
This point can be observed in the art of Hans Memling and Gerard David, although there were also a few who avoided this trend with a clear desire to represent their originality, as Bosch did. Throughout this century, at the height of the Renaissance, the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Joachim Patinir stood out.
Great contributions to Flemish painting were also made by Hugo van der Goes, Petrus Christus, Dieric Bouts, Ambrosius Benson and Pieter Coecke. For France, Jean Fouquet, Enguerrand Quarton, Nicolas Froment and the Master of Moulins. For Germany, Konrad Witz, Martin Schongauer, Hans Holbein the Elder and Michael Wolgemut. Portugal only had the contributions of Nuno Gonçalves.
In the case of Spain, the artists were divided according to their crown. The one from Aragon with Luis Dalmau, Jaume Huguet, Jaume Vergós, Rafael Vergós, Pau Vergós, Jacomart, Joan Reixach, Bertomeu Baró, Pere Nisart and Bartolomé Bermejo. And that of Castile with Jorge Inglés, Master of Sopetrán, Juan Rodríguez de Segovia, Sancho de Zamora, Master of the Catholic Monarchs, among others.
If this article was to your liking, do not leave without first reading: