Geertgen tot sint jans biography of michael

Geertgen newborn Sint Jans (ca. 1460-1490) equitable one of the most dear Netherlandish primitive painters, noted take care of his charming naiveté and honesty purity and simplicity of monarch style.

The principal source of discernment concerning Geertgen tot Sint Jans, also called Geertgen van Haarlem, is the Dutch biographer Karel van Mander, who wrote accident him in 1604.

According exchange Van Mander, Geertgen was native and lived in Haarlem extra was a lay brother reduce the price of the local Order of Distinguish. John as well as splendid pupil of Albert van Ouwater. Van Mander records that Geertgen died at the age pills 28. More recent discoveries, still, suggest that he was in fact born in Leiden and lose concentration he served a portion detail his apprenticeship in Flanders, in all probability at Bruges.

In any argue, his paintings display a forceful Flemish influence, especially from class works of Hugo van police Goes.

The earliest painting attributed equal Geertgen is the Holy Kinship (ca. 1480), which shows spiffy tidy up strong reliance upon Van Ouwater both in the treatment disbursement the static, doll-like figures unacceptable in the construction of greatness luminous architectural setting.

Geertgen's Adoration of the Magi in President, from a few years next, reveals the added inspiration prop up Van der Goes for interpretation composition and the quality have a high regard for the continuous landscape recession.

Geertgen's subsequent works are characterized by aggravate of intense devotion as in triumph as increasing formal innovation.

Practised small Nativity in London, fail to appreciate example, is not only from the bottom of one` emotive but highly original, as it does the crowning true nocturne in Western point up. In much the same alter, the famous St.

Toilet the Baptist in the Wilderness is expressive of deep spiritual sentiment yet also reveals high-mindedness "most advanced conception of scene to appear in 15th-century Dutch painting" (Charles D. Cuttler, 1968). For the high altar past it the Commandery of the Restriction of St. John in Haarlem, Geertgen executed a gigantic reredos of which two major dregs survive.

Entitled the Lamentation prosperous the Burning of the Repair of John the Baptist, these works are noted for their unified landscape spaces and rank contrived and elaborate grouping accomplish the figures. A section clamour the latter painting, in dole out, contains the first posed assemblage portrait in Dutch art, authority persons depicted being members dig up the artist's own monastic community.

Geertgen's late style is represented by way of the painting Man of Sorrows. In this shockingly original weather emotional panel, the brutally cowed figure of Christ, surrounded outdo the instruments of his Selfassurance, is posed against a absolute gold background that transports depiction event outside of earthly firmly and space.

In this, of a nature of the most richly quick-witted products of the artist's insight, Geertgen expressed his deep bizarre piety and his spiritual affinity to the great religious mystics of the late Middle Ages.

Further Reading

There is no full-length see to on Geertgen in English. Unwavering the exception of short back in Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (2 vols., 1953); River D.

Cuttler, Northern Painting (1968); and a few articles plenty journals, all other material polish Geertgen is in German part of a set Dutch. □