Nature takes star role in Antwerp exhibition of religious art

It is the last special exhibition in the four-year series The Golden Cabinet, showcasing Western European gems from the Fine Arts Museum, which is closed for renovation. Come July, Rockoxhuis will merge with the adjoining Frans Snijders House, reopening as a new entity in 2018.

The Sky is the Limit begins with pioneering Dinant-born painter Joachim Patinir, whose “Landscape with the Flight into Egypt” (c1516) was the first Low Countries work to subordinate its Biblical theme to the sweeping landscape.  

“We call him the inventor of the world landscape,” explains Rockoxhuis conservator Hildegard Van de Velde. “He brought together different elements in fantastical landscapes that didn’t really exist.” 

It was a sleight of hand perfected by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose dramatic pen drawings of the Alps and Netherlandish countryside – rarely displayed – were snapped up in print form by restless city-dwellers.

His son Jan Brueghel later revitalised the genre with his mastery of depth, dense forest scenes – also practised by Paul Bril and David Vinckboons – and animal-crammed “paradise landscapes”.

Neatly, the show ends where the Golden Cabinet season itself began: Frans Francken the Younger’s beguiling Art Gallery (c1618), depicting a collector’s gallery lined with landscapes by Brueghel, Bril and Joos de Momper.

The gallery proper holds more fine landscapes and Flemish contemporary artist David Claerbout’s mesmerising video “Travel”. A slow pan through a divine forest, it’s the ultimate fantasy landscape – being made entirely from computer images. Until 2 July at Rockoxhuis, Antwerp