Painting
Of the paintings mentioned by Van Mander, the only one to survive is one wing of his triptych for an altar of the Knights of St. John at Haarlem, the two sides of which were sawn apart in about 1600, and are now in Vienna as The Legend of the Relics of St. John the Baptist, and the Lamentation of Jesus. The rest was destroyed during the siege of Haarlem in 1573.
As is typical of the art of the time it was done primarily on oak panels with oil paints made by mixing pigments with drying oil. This allowed the painter to build up layers of paint to provide different visual effects.
The number of works attributed to him (varying between 12 and 16) is under dispute among scholars who discuss the artist (Kessler, Boon, Snyder, Chatelet, Fiero, and Koch).
His paintings are in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the National Gallery, London (Nativity at Night), the Musée du Louvre (The raising of Lazarus) in Paris, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Read more about this topic: Geertgen Tot Sint Jans
Famous quotes containing the word painting:
“I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner—in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)