[ART] Joachim Patinir And His Striking World Landscapes 🎨

We will stay in Antwerpen for a while longer and take a look at another pioneering landscape painter. At the beginning of the 16th century it was Antwerp, a town in full bloom, that was the new art metropolis, and not Bruges, whose harbor was silting up. In Antwerp there were especially three painters who deserve in-depth attention: Quinten Matsys, Jan Gossaert (also called Mabuse) and Joachim Patinir. This article will be devoted to the latter.

Patinir might not have been a brilliant figure painter, but as a landscape painter his contributions are invaluable. Little is known about his life, but he was born in Bouvignes or Dinant around 1480 and was active in Antwerpen where he died in 1524. It's unknown from where he received an artistic training, but due to stylistic similarities in his early work, it's assumed that he was an apprentice of Gerard David. In 1521, Albrecht Dürer visited him on his journey to the Low Countries, where Dürer made two portraits of him (now lost) and called him a "gut landschafft mahler" (a good landscape painter) in his diary. This was actually the first documented use of the term landscape painter. 

Patinir was the very first Flemish artist to specialize mainly in painting landscapes, thus preceding Cornelis van Dalem with at least 40 years. However, there is always a biblical or mythological theme in his paintings, depicting everything from St John the Baptist preaching, to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is why I place Cornelis van Dalem as more of a pioneer, since his landscapes are pure landscapes.

In the landscapes around Dinant, from whence Patinir came, one finds strange and surreal rock formations (see above). But even if he was influenced by these landscapes, he compressed its forms and intensified them. His paintings are abundant with buildings and peculiar rock formations, and they are usually composed with an unusually elevated horizon. The landscapes never create a natural impression, but instead speak directly to the imagination.

The middle grounds and far distant backgrounds are dominated by blues, from hazy and pale (resembling Delft pottery) to intense and saturated. The foregrounds are dominated by vivid greens and earthy brown. Patinir's landscapes, with their broad panorama views, are often referred to as 'world landscapes' (Weltlandschaft), and these triggered an international boom of landscape painting, not least lending inspiration to the more famous painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Albrecht Altdorfer.

Joachim Patinir's "Baptism of Christ" (below) is by many considered the main work of the great Flemish landscape painter. Christ stands in the water, naked, except for the white loincloth; John kneels on the bank and pours water from his bare hands over the head of Christ. Above the baptism, the heavenly father appears through a dark cloud, sending the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove down to his son. John appears a second time on the left of the picture, as he preaches to the Jewish people of the coming of the Redeemer. Christ is also there, emerging from a pair of bushes behind the prophet and his crowd. He stands alone in a blue cloth, waiting to fulfill his destiny. But the characters are only playing supporting roles.

The landscape with its unique wealth of details offers the viewer an almost inexhaustible pleasure. Everything in this landscape looks real and at the same time bizarrely exaggerated. In the midst of lush green meadows and thick bushes towers a mighty gray-brown rock. Behind the huge rock, there is an immense plateau with hills and mountain expands, lost in the blue haze of the far distance. Driven by the urge to show as much as possible of what makes up the visible world, Patinir created a picturesque sum of nature.

The encyclopedic approach becomes all the more clear in the near view: the minutely painted animals that populate the earth alongside numerous people who perform their duties. The lizards and amphibious creatures that slither around the roots of the dead tree on the lower left. A rabbit hopping out of a hollow above. The distant deer in the middle of the picture next to Christ. The heron standing on the shore to the right, staring on the fisherman across the water.

In general, the painting shows a lot of water. One could say that the main character of the picture is not Christ, but the River Jordan. It rushes into the picture as a foaming waterfall from the left, but immediately calms down. Smooth as a mirror, it spreads out in a wide arc behind the rock massif and finally forms a ford at the bottom of the picture where Christ is standing. The two characteristic boulders in the midst of the foaming water might seem familiar. It's because it's the first depiction ever of the Rhine Falls. Behind the cataract rises, as in reality, the large hill with castle Laufen.

This way of relegating the human figures to a secondary position and to give nature predominance, thus emphasizing the divinity of God's creation, was unique at the beginning of the 16th century.

 @SteemSwede

Sources:

Falkenburg, R. (1988) Joachim Patinir: Landscape As An Image Of The Pilgrimage Of Life.
Smith Chipps, J. (2004) The Northern Renaissance.
Friedländer, M.J. (1973) Early Netherlandish Painting.
Jenson, S.H. (2001) Renaissance and Reformation, 1500–1620.
Snyder, J. (1985) Northern Renaissance Art.