Art: Sparkling Burgundy

Burgundy is just a good red wine nowadays, but 500 years ago it was Europe’s richest dukedom, spilling from the Alps to the Zuider Zee. Beefy burghers, dressed in furs and velvet, thronged its towns, paid out hard silver for the works of its artists and craftsmen. Last week a sparkling display of the things they bought drew 11,000 visitors to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. The armor, jewelry, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, furniture, banners and polychromed sculptures on show reflect one of the most sumptuous eras of all time.

The paintings are mostly small and glossy, done on panels and crammed with miniature details. The great Flemish artists who produced them—Memling, Dirk Bouts, Roger van der Weyden and the brothers Van Eyk—held a reducing glass up to nature, painted serenely sweet and ordered little worlds. No master before or since has surpassed them in that, but more passionate artists are apt to find them too phlegmatic, and to prefer the thornier works of Hieronymus Bosch, who also lived within Burgundy’s bounds.

Bosch was a sad, pious man with a consuming interest in the sins and stupidities of his fellows, and alternated debunking caricatures, such as The Magician, with huge, opalescent nightmare pictures which foreshadowed surrealism. The neat realism that characterized Flemish painting was as foreign to him as it was to the early masters of the Italian Renaissance.

“Flemish painting,” Michelangelo is supposed to have jeered, “is to women’s taste, especially the old and the very young, and for monks, nuns and all distinguished people who are not susceptible to true harmony. In Flanders they paint principally to render, deceptively, the outward appearance of things, and especially subjects which bring rapture or are irreproachable.”

Applied to such masterpieces as Hans Memling’s painting of Bathsheba leaving her bath, Michelangelo’s judgment is harsh and crude. Instead of mixing his colors, Memling laid them on pure and thin in overlapping glazes. As a result, the picture seems to glow from within. Its narrow space recedes dramatically to the tiny figure of King David peeping from his terrace. The severely angular composition contrasts artfully with Bathsheba’s soft curves.

Legend has it that, in 1477, Memling fought under the banners of Charles the Bold against the Swiss at Nancy, and was wounded. Charles himself, the last of the great Burgundian dukes, died in the battle, and Burgundy’s power was broken forever. A breath of the dukedom’s glory survives in its art.