Renaissance Gothic in the Netherlands: The Uses of Ornament

During the final years of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the century that followed, there arose in the Netherlands a highly refined variant of Late Gothic architecture. [1] Most familiar through the sophisticated baldachins, fountains, and thrones in paintings by Jan Gossaert, Bernaert van Orley, and Quentin Massys, it has been seen as a historically self-conscious reference, a recovery of an ideal past akin to the copying and emulation of the works of Jan van Eyck. [2] Certainly, Gossaert and his contemporaries were aware of their Burgundian heritage, yet their architectural designs were thoroughly up-to-date and contributed to the dramatic renewal of an authoritative artistic manner. Developing principally in the duchy of Brabant, though favored beyond its borders, the style is exemplified by the Ghent Town Hall, the tower of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkerk at Antwerp, and the tombs of Margaret of Austria and her family at Brou (Fig. 1). Prominent patrons and artists continued to nurture this fertile G othic idiom well into the 1530s, commissioning government buildings and guildhalls, churches and their furnishings several decades after Italianate forms had entered the local repertory. In the 1560s the Ghent nobleman Marcus van Vaernewijck still had an eye for a Late Gothic jub[acute{e}] "richly carved with openwork, consoles [for statues], hanging keystones--all splendid and masterful." [3]

The new Netherlandish manner should be seen as one chapter of a much broader revision of Gothic design taking place throughout northern Europe. Many comfortably canonical monuments of Late Gothic architecture, in fact, were planned in the years around 1500: the celebrated fan vaults of Kings College Chapel, the transept facades of Beauvais Cathedral, the south porch at Louviers in Normandy, and the great hall church at Annaberg in Saxony. [4] There is little point in grouping these disparate creations under some vague, homogenizing period style, a problematic notion in itself. [5] In fact, the structures were somewhat anomalous and owed much of their initial impact to the contrast between their richly decorated surfaces and their relatively unadorned environment; the town hall of a powerful city would stand out in its square, much as the portal of a major church (or of an important chapel within) would be distinguished from its surroundings. But there is more to this art than profuse embellishment, than cour tly or ecclesiastical magnyficence.

Such prominent decoration could be an effective instrument for articulating urban sites, for dressing public facades and framing human action in ways that might signal function and status. The copious and elaborate carving, so evident on well-known monuments, should not blind us to subtler but equally significant principles of order. Distinctive motifs or figures in tracery are fundamental elements. Catching the acculturated eye, they act as reference points or guides through the abundant visual information, appearing as nuclei or nodes within a network of filigreelike webbing. The experienced viewer was adept at distinguishing variations on principal figures; trefoils, for instance, might occur in various guises--flattened, narrowed, ogival, or otherwise elaborated--thus comprising a series of forms. These variations might further suggest a hierarchy of motifs, a sequence from the most elaborate embodiment through ensuing simplifications or from the archetypal figure through successive distortions and trans formations. Sophisticated designers could arrange ornamental forms in ways that helped emphasize important sites on a building or work of sculpture.

Viewers today may be overwhelmed by the complexity and extent of such decoration; even writers on Netherlandish art have been slow to grant legitimacy to this aesthetic. Jan Steppe, in his excellent study of rood screens, felt obliged to remark that his praise did "not so much concern the deeper artistic value of the Late Gothic works, but rather their technical virtuosity." For Steppe, "beauty and architectonic unity" had been "replaced by splendor and richness," a curious antithesis that betrays an essentially modernist distrust of ornament. [6] As Anne-Marie Sankovitch has recently discussed in these pages, the polemical distinction between structure and ornament is securely rooted in our tradition of architectural analysis and continues to guide our understanding of earlier monuments. [7] It is easy to forget how much we have lost of the original conditions of viewing--not only the physical setting but also the conventions of ordering that relate to both pictorial and plastic representation.

The term used in the title of this essay, "Renaissance Gothic," emphasizes the inevitable inconsistencies that result when we forget the specific values and perspectives enshrined in our construction of periods and our intuitive expectation of linear progression. The gilded wood altarpieces of the Netherlands, for instance, are rarely considered in discussions of sixteenth-century art despite their significant prestige and ample production. [8] These works demand detailed inspection from several points of view and are notably inaccessible from a single fixed location. Fitted with tiny ogees and ribbed vaults and divided into compartments with numerous statuettes, they are unclassical in their material, their relationship between figure and frame, and their dependence on polychromy for much of their effect.