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)
“Photography suits the temper of this age—of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.”
—Edward Weston (1886–1958)
“When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand—as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.”
—Marc Chagall (1889–1985)