Cities under siege portrayed ad vivum in early Netherlandish prints (1520–1565)

From the early sixteenth century printed city views often claim to offer a reliable likeness or ‘true portrait’ (‘vero ritratto’, ‘vray pourtrait’, etc.) of the city they depict – a claim sometimes reinforced by the explicit statement that the view was drawn from life. This article examines a particular class of such ‘ad vivum’ city views: news prints of cities under siege. Here the notion implies not only that the image is topographically correct, but also that it offers a truthful narrative of the historical event. This little-studied type of image is especially relevant since many siege prints were indeed based on first-hand observation. Moreover they often constitute the earliest accurate depiction of the city in question and were frequently used as prototypes for ‘normal’ city views. This article studies the earliest examples from the Low Countries (1520-1565), including Cornelis Anthonisz’s woodcut of the siege of Thérouanne in 1537 (‘gheconterfeÿt na tdleven’), Antoon van den Wijngaerde’s etchings of the sieges of Le Catelet and Ham in 1557 (‘na dleven gheteeckent ende ghesneden’, ‘ad vivum delineavit et sua ipsius manu in aes incidit’), and Hieronymus Cock’s engraving of the siege of Malta in 1565 (‘contrefait au vyf’). A critical assessment of these rare prints and their sources shows that their ‘ad vivum’ statement was sometimes true in the strict sense that the artist was himself an eyewitness of the siege he portrayed, though the term was also employed on prints based on other images. -- The article is based on a paper delivered at the ‘Ad Vivum?’ conference held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in November 2014.

ISBN:978-90-04-39399-8

Jaar van publicatie:2019

Toegankelijkheid:Open