Knowing your master

Imperial Treasures brings the best of its own collection together with works from Vienna’s renowned fine arts museum

Here’s the question you have to grapple with when viewing works of art that are considered great: Is Jan Van Eyck a great painter because of works like this, or do I think this is a great painting because it was made by Jan Van Eyck?

One of Van Eyck’s simple, intimate works features in Imperial Treasures at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, and another of his more monumental works is part of the permanent collection of the museum, giving visitors an excellent opportunity to see two very different sides of this epoch-making 15th-century artist, who spent the final years of his life in Bruges.

Imperial Treasures comprises 54 works from the Fine Arts Museum in Vienna, once capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and home of the Habsburg dynasty, patrons and collectors of great art.

The Vienna museum, considered one of the world’s finest art collections, was built between 1872 and 1891 and opened by the emperor Franz-Jozef. Together with its twin, the Natural History Museum, which mirrors it across the Ringstraße, it was intended to house and exhibit the formidable collection of art and artefacts amassed by the Habsburg dynasty.

That collection included many works by Dutch and Flemish artists of the period between 1477 and 1789 when the Habsburgs had close links with the Low Countries, including a period of imperial rule. As well as works by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Rubens, the museum has one of the world’s most important collection of works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who lived in Antwerp and Brussels in the 16th century, including the iconic “Peasants’ Wedding” and “Tower of Babel”.

To give some idea of the wealth of the Vienna museum’s collection, even while 54 of its Netherlandish works are out on loan to Bruges, they’ve still managed to curate an exhibition, running now, on depictions of winter in European art, with the starting point the famous painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Hunters in the Snow”, from 1565, as well as works by Lucas Van Valckenborch, Karel Van Mander and two paintings by Rubens.

More than one person has mentioned to me in relation to Imperial Treasures the case of the Elgin Marbles – a frieze from the Parthenon now housed in the British Museum in London, and long the object of demands by Greece for their return.

According to the Groeningemuseum’s curator, Till-Holger Borchert, however, the two situations are not analogous. “You can’t talk about this as plundered art,” he says. “The Habsburg collectors purchased these works or they were created by artists who were in the service of the family. Although in some cases we don’t know precisely how the work came into their possession.”

Too good to be true

The Groeningemuseum’s own Van Eyck, showing the Virgin and Child – flanked by St Donatian and St George – being presented to Canon Joris van der Paele, is a large, formal work distinguished not so much for its composition as for the artist’s radical new realism and his treatment of materials like the stiff drapery of the Virgin’s robe, her hair, the tapestry and the rich brocade of St Donatian’s robe.

Van Eyck’s realistic touch is usually attributed to his development of pigments mixed with linseed oil rather with than the customary egg tempera – essentially helping invent oil painting. Contemporary British painter David Hockney, however, finds his work so uncannily lifelike he theorises that the artist used optical aids, including a camera lucida, to project an actual image onto the wood panel, which could then be painted over.

When we come to the Van Eyck which is on loan from Vienna, questions of optical cheating become irrelevant. The portrait of goldsmith Jan De Leeuw (pictured), painted in the same year as the Virgin and Child work, is barely 25 x 19 centimetres, a private commission not intended for public show. The panel barely contains the man’s head and chest, and in his crossed hands he holds a simple gold ring to indicate his trade. Nevertheless, it’s an arresting work of penetrating human insight and masterful portrayal of character. It doesn’t resemble the works for which Van Eyck is best known, yet, even if you didn’t know it was by Van Eyck, it would be impossible not to be impressed by its quality.

Imperial Treasures contains many other works by both celebrated and lesser-known artists from the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th centuries, but none of them is as gripping as this portrait.

Space to shine

The big names of the period are all represented: Hugo van der Goes, with a scene from the Garden of Eden; Hieronymus Bosch, with Christ on the road to Calvary, Jan Brueghel the Elder, with a bouquet of flowers in a blue vase; the landscape with figures by Pieter Bruegel the Elder showing a Philistine army under the rock where King Saul has just fallen on his own sword; and another Madonna and Child by Jan Goosaert, painted in stunning trompe l’oeil, as if in 3D.

Each one of the works is a small treasure in its own way, divided up across three rooms into religious works and portraits, the then-new genre painting and finally landscapes, one of which, the mountain landscape by Joos de Momper from 1620, seems to foreshadow German Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich by about 200 years.

Although the Vienna works, small in size, tend to suffer by comparison with the works from the Groeningemuseum’s own collection, they benefit from this more intimate setting away from the embarrassment of riches that the Vienna museum represents: Like the Louvre, the Fine Arts in Vienna can be overwhelming and demands repeated, dose-controlled visits. Here, the works come into their own.

In the meantime, the ticket price includes the galleries of the Bruges collection, much of which would not have been out of place in Imperial Treasures: Roger van der Weyden’s magnificent “Death of the Virgin” from 1475, “Last Judgements” by Pieter Pourbus and Jan Provoost, the grisly diptych “Judgement of Cambyses” by Gerard David (in which the corrupt judge Sisamnes is shown being flayed alive; judgement paintings were popular to hang in courtrooms, to remind officials and the public alike to keep on the straight and narrow), and two works by Hans Memling – the Moreel Triptych, whose wings are backed with portraits of Christ and St George in grisaille, and an Annunciation from 1567 showing Mary and the Angel Gabriel, dressed entirely in white, standing in two trompe l’oeil wall niches.

Information in the exhibition, as in the museum throughout, is in Dutch, French, English, German and Spanish. Audio guides are available, as is a lavish catalogue in four language versions.