Bles, Herri met de

Description:

Dinant um 1500/1510 - Antwerpen oder Ferrara nach 1560
63 x 89 cm
Mountainous landscape with Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian of Austria. C. 1540. Oil/partly cradled panel.
The scenes depicted in Herri met de Bles' numerous fantasy landscapes refer almost exclusively to biblical motifs. They are hidden in tiny form in the details of the mountain, river and forest landscapes, inviting the viewer to search for and discover the figurative staffage. This is the dawn of a new era in landscape painting, which began at the latest with Joachim Patinir's ‘World Landscapes’.
Our panel is directly comparable to the painting ‘Landscape with the Parable of the Good Samaritan’ (ca. 1540; 29 x 42 cm) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The same towering and rugged rock formation crowned by a castle occupies the centre of the picture, with tiny figures moving into the rocks and up a long staircase to the castle. The tree trunks and foliage of the vegetation in the foreground are almost interchangeable in both paintings.
However, there is a significant difference between our work and theirs in terms of the figurative scenes. The lower right-hand section of the picture is occupied by two group depictions that clearly have nothing to do with each other (neither in terms of time nor space). The group on the right shows a couple dressed in princely or courtly attire, the lady nestled close to the gentleman, who wears a red, sweeping barrette on his head facing her, holds a falcon in his right hand and points the way (or out of the picture) with his outstretched left hand. The clothing of the two is historical and describes a time before or around 1500. The figures depicted are Mary of Burgundy and her husband Maximilian of Austria.
The scene, set on rocky ground, is clearly separated from the background by the river flowing from the mountains. To the left is a saddled horse (a late medieval side saddle?), the groom and Mary of Burgundy, who is about to fall, her arms flailing (shadows under the figure's feet and legs suggest she is floating or falling).
History records that on March 6 1482, Mary of Burgundy fell from her horse during a falconry hunt and lost consciousness. On 27 March 1482, at the age of only 25, she died in the presence of her husband Maximilian as a result of the riding accident.
Unusually, Herri met de Bles recounted episodes from his recent past. Mary's marriage to Maximilian, the union of Burgundy and Habsburg, was of extraordinary importance for whole Europe. The ensuing wars of succession with France, which lasted for decades, would have been fresh in the minds of Flemish contemporaries, and in the years around 1540, there was certainly no need to explain who the figures depicted on our landscape panel might have been.