1525), completed by the older master’s workshop, perhaps during Coxcie’s residency. 1530–39 newly rediscovered by Jonckheere) and the centerpiece of the Holy Kinship Triptych (1540), are juxtaposed with an altarpiece by his probable teacher Bernard van Orley, the Life and Death of the Virgin (ca. Room 1, for example, dubbed “To Rome and Back,” immediately sets the terms of discussion: two ambitious panels by Coxcie, Plato’s Cave (ca. Jonckheere’s exhibition and catalogue function as an elaborate apparatus designed to agree with the first anecdote, even while contesting the second. Van Mander’s reading, however, is quite pejorative: he explicitly states that these prints betray a certain paucity of invention on Coxcie’s part, revealing his compositional faculty ( ordinantie) to have been “less than copious” and perforce derivative (fols. Read in light of its companion anecdote, this one can be seen to imply that Coxcie loathed such prints because they externalized the mnemonic touchstones he had been treating like closely guarded personal property.
The second anecdote, though less positive than the first, nevertheless complements it: Coxcie actively resented the print publisher Hieronymus Cock for issuing reproductive prints such as Giorgio Ghisi’s School of Athens of 1550, engraved after Raphael’s famous fresco the reason was that they laid bare how closely adapted from Raphael were his major altarpieces, specifically the Dormition of the Virgin (ca. As Van Mander explains, the older master was placing a premium on the assimilation of one’s models, which must be thoroughly committed to memory, as if imbibed (Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, Haarlem: Paschier van Wesbusch, 1604, fol. Having been shown a sculpture collection laboriously transported from Rome by a young painter, Coxcie observed acidly that he would have done better to take these works to heart, rather than lugging them home on his shoulders. In the “Life of Michiel Coxcie, Excellent Painter of Mechelen,” part of Book IV on the Netherlandish and High German masters, Van Mander records two telling anecdotes about the artist. It is worth dwelling, at least momentarily, on Van Mander’s assessment, since his chapter on Coxcie remains so influential and in fact underlies Jonckheere’s alternative formulation. The exhibition and its Dutch- and English-language catalogues (which slightly vary in content) constitute a robust response, four hundred years after the fact, to the ambivalent account of Coxcie offered by Karel van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck (Book on Picturing) of 1604. Organized by Koenraad Jonckheere in collaboration with Peter Carpreau, senior curator at M – Museum Leuven, this important, thoughtful, and beautiful exhibition aims to enshrine Michiel Coxcie among the select group of northern masters-Jan Gossaert, Jan van Scorel, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Frans Floris-who visited Rome during the first half of the sixteenth century and engaged inventively with the art of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as with their ancient sources, both sculptural and architectural. Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice.Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.
Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.