Jacques Bellange - Reputation

Reputation

Bellange's reputation was fairly widespread by soon after his death, presumably very largely through his prints. The imitations by Merian and others, the reprints by Le Blond in Paris, and the large numbers of prints that survive, many from plates worn by large numbers of impressions, all imply that his prints had a healthy market. Many drawings have early inscriptions attributing them to him, which are often not supported by modern scholars, suggesting that an attribution to Bellange was a desirable one to have. In 1620 Balthasar Gerbier, a leading Flemish agent for collectors like the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I, and a friend of Rubens, wrote a memorial poem for Goltzius, part of which translates as: "Italy boasts of Raphael and Michelangelo, Germany of Albrecht Dürer, France of Bellange". In another poem of 1652, from Paris, Bellange is included in a similar list of great names from art.

By this time, however, the taste in French art for a cool and classical form of Baroque that had set in from the 1620s was already reducing the appreciation of Bellange, whose reputation continued to fall, along with that of Mannerism in general. For the same reason, there are no artists who can be seen to have been directly influenced by Bellange's style. Unlike the Dutch and Italians, French artists had no large collection of biographies until the latter part of the century, but the great print collector Michel de Marolles was aware of 47 or 48 prints by Bellange, most of which were in his collections; these would not be exactly the same as the 47 or 48 in modern works, but very largely so. By the mid-18th century, the great French authority Pierre-Jean Mariette was scornful and dismissive: "Bellange is one of those painters whose licentious manner, completely removed from a proper style, deserves great distrust. It nevertheless had its admirers, and Bellange had a great vogue .... Several pieces by him are known, which one cannot bear to look at, so bad is their taste". Many biographical compendiums simply omitted him, even as late as the 1920s. Another judgment of 1767 was quoted with approval by A. P. F. Robert-Dumesnil in his biographical dictionary Le Peintre-Graveur Français (1841), complaining that Bellange's etchings had "much more bizarreness than judgment, and very little correctness". However, Robert-Dumesnil did recognise that his style had something in common with the Romantics.

Bellange's critical rehabilitation came with a general revival of interest in Mannerism. Ludwig Burchard wrote an article about him in 1911, with somewhat cautious praise. An important lecture by the Viennese art historian Max Dvořák, Über Greco und den Manierismus ("On Greco and Mannerism", published 1921) focused on four artists: Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Bellange, and the almost-as-reviled El Greco. Bellange became an intellectual fashion and his work was interpreted in various ways. The German art historian Erica Tietze-Conrat pursued a Freudian interpretation: "The way in which the artist sees forms is strongly sexual, perversely sexual; and entirely genuine, since it mirrors the artist's sub-conscious. Otherwise he would never have drawn Saint John in a series of Apostles in so female a fashion...The angel of the Annunciation is a hermaphrodite, but not with mixed but with marked characteristics of either sex...". Another tradition, reflected in the quotation from Anthony Blunt above, followed Otto Benesch in placing Bellange in the context of a strain of Gothic mysticism that penetrated French Renaissance art.

The first exhibition devoted to Bellange took place in 1931/32 at the Albertina in Vienna, followed by an American one in 1975 (Des Moines, Boston, and New York), based around the excellent collection that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had built up over the preceding decades. In 1997 a European exhibition based on an American private collection went to the British Museum, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Statens Museum, Copenhagen, as well as the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. An exhibition was held in Rennes in 2001. Bellange has also featured prominently in exhibitions with a broader scope in the period, and there is now a catalogue raisonné of the prints by Nicole Walch, Die Radierungen des Jacques Bellange, Munich 1971.