Maarten van Heemskerck traveled to Rome in the early 16th century and documented the city. His drawings can be seen in the Kulturforum Berlin.
Maarten van Heemskerck, View of the Roman Forum, around 1532–1536, (detail) Photo: © Staatsmuseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Volker-H. cutter
Rome is the desire of the north. The pious have been making pilgrimages to her for two millennia, and artists and architects for at least half a millennium: Palladio, Serlio, Goethe, the French academics of the 18th century, the post-war modernists. But which Rome do you actually mean? Those of antiquity, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the avant-garde?
The amazing thing about this enthusiasm for Rome is that the city is constantly being updated, even though it seems so old, so eternal. Rome has often changed in radical ways, which seems a model for the transformation of European cities into festival spaces for the bourgeoisie in the 19th century or that of major Chinese cities since the Cultural Revolution, to which large parts of China’s cultural heritage fell victim . .
How radically the Eternal City changed at the beginning of the 16th century can be seen in the more than 170 drawings of Rome by the Dutch painter Maarten van Heemskerck. They are currently being shown in full context for the first time in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett.
Maarten van Heemskerck was born in 1498, in the last years of the period known as the “Middle Ages”. He received his training in the studio of Jan von Scorel, one of the first Dutch painters. who brought the Italian Renaissance to the north.
Exploitation of ruins
In 1532, ‘Maarten’ traveled from the town of Heemskerck – to this day an obelisk there commemorates his father, a wealthy landowner – who was already older but not yet married, on foot, on horseback or donkey or in an ox cart . Trained, for example, by travel reports and stories from his teacher Jan van Scorel, he could expect a Rome full of ruins. But he came to a Rome that made use of these ruins. And he went on to draw many things that are now irretrievably gone.
Maarten van Heemskerck, Lower Statue Court of Casa Gallo, around 1532–1536 Photo: © Staatsmuseum Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Dietmar Katz
Many old or medieval buildings have only been handed down via Heemskerck. And he was clearly fascinated by the construction sites – the vaults and dome pillars of today’s St. Peter’s Basilica tower beautifully on a single sheet above the rows of columns of the doomed late antique Basilica of Alt St. Peter’s.
Heemskerck was just in time to witness the redesign of St. Peter’s Basilica that resulted in Michelangelo’s grandiose dome, after Bramante’s original design had already been heavily reworked by Raphael and Sangallo – but these too were not yet finished. He stood, as it were, in front of a modern building ruin that devoured the ruins of a legendary ancient church, and signed this act of destruction, but without any sign of protest, which was certain.
Heemskerck quickly became popular in Rome, also because it was clear: this painter would carry the city’s fame to the north with his drawings, his paintings and his stories. This is also why he came to many aristocratic palaces, which otherwise remained closed, and was able to draw the sculpture courtyards with their ancient architectural pieces and sculptures arranged in proto-museum style, and the enchanted gardens.
Bacchus, radiant and bold
And amid all this evidence of decay stands Michelangelo’s radiant, bold, ultra-modern statue of Bacchus. All subjects that Italian painters only found attractive decades later.
However, posterity did not see him as one of the ‘great’ Dutch artists. His art is probably too much of an intermediate form: too ‘Italian’ and Renaissance-beautiful like Raphael, not genius like Michelangelo and also too ‘Nordic’ with his desire for bizarre twists and individualistic portraits. The main purpose of his painting “The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan”, which was made before the trip to Rome, is to show that Heemskerck can perfectly portray male muscles in perspective from the front, from the side and from behind – in every possible way. stretches and movements. stretching variations.
You almost think of German late Gothic painters, but more naturalistic. So gay art? Completely trapped by forced updates walked. We do not know what Heemskerck thought about all these images of men. But one thing is certain: they follow a canon that was already firmly established around 1530 and which also included some images of Venus, but mainly images of male heroes and deities.
Heemskerck’s Rome drawings come from an album acquired from Paris in 1879 and which, together with a second volume, was intended as template material for the students of the Berlin School of Applied Arts. It was not until 1889 that they were donated to the Kupferstichkabinett, which has now been declared works of art.
Both sides visible
However, in 2021, one album had to be dismantled for conservation reasons, the leaves had to be carefully examined, their historical sequence largely reconstructed and now on display. They are on display in a circular installation, arranged according to themes from Rome and antiquity, so that both sides of the plates are always visible.
You can experience how the drawings are space-saving yet elegantly constructed on a sheet the size of a jacket pocket, like today’s notes. They are sometimes tightly sketched, sometimes italicized or looped, laid out with straight, diagonal or crossed hatches, contours and shadows, pre-sketched in pencil and then reworked in ink, creating flowing bodies in soft red chalk. There are landscapes, details such as antique shoelaces, panthers, ostriches, candlesticks and always images in often special perspectives.
For example, the legendary, muscular torso of the Belvedere, which still stands today in the Belvedere Palace in the Vatican, almost as it did 500 years ago. A broken statue of Hercules, which had established standard views for draftsmen around 1530: from the front, from the side and from behind on the powerful back arch. But Heemskerck also drew a view from above: you see the broad neck, the gigantic shoulders, the thighs. Did he climb a ladder?
The Belvedere also contains the statue group of Laocoon, who fights the snakes for his own life and that of his sons. Heemskerck literally circled this group, which was already famous in antiquity, down to the soles of its feet. This had an effect right up to his depiction of the Flagellation of Christ on the monumental St. Lawrence Altar, which stands today in Linköping, Sweden. The way Jesus writhes in pleasure – perhaps there is something in a sexualized view of the Dutchman’s art.
Longing for the absurd
In any case, such distorted works were anathema to academic classicists of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Postmodernism, with its delight in the absurd, could start more with works such as the exhibited Heemskerck drawing, which shows a landscape and a cityscape placed upside down opposite each other you can see.
Then you think, not in style, but in attitude, of buildings like James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie, which opened in 1984, and even of the confusing multiple perspectives in drawings by architects like Daniel Libeskind, Steven Holl or Zaha Hadid.
It is absurd that Heemskerck’s recognition as a painter probably suffered, precisely because his drawings were so highly valued and were quickly distributed through print. They seemed to accurately reflect Roman reality. For a long time, Heemskerck was mainly seen as a documentary maker. He certainly was, a brilliant one at that.
The panoramic sheet of the Roman Forum shows how deeply the ancient buildings had sunk into the building rubble of the post-antique era – and at the same time presents these remains as a sign of the transience of people and their cultures before time and God. A very current topic at the time of the beginning of the Reformation.
But to this day he is denied the recognition that another great one has Rome illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesiknew for certain during his lifetime around 1770: that you can document accurately and still be an artist who selects and composes new things.
Because Heemskerck does not, as the subtitle of the exhibition claims, draw “the” city. For example, Byzantine and medieval Rome can only be seen in the background. The painter merely depicts what he believes should be the foundation of modern Rome: a city emerging from the wasteland of antiquity.