The Battle of Fleurus, 1622

Entry

Although acquired as the work of Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573-1647),¹² the present painting was catalogued by the museum in 1903 as by Peeter Snayers and there is no reason to doubt this attribution. The formations of troops in the middle ground and beyond were reserved. The soldiers and horses at least in the right foreground were first outlined in black paint; a sketch of a falling horse, which was not taken any further, now shows up light, as do the contours of a horse’s legs nearby.

The present work was acquired as depicting the battle of Nieuwpoort, 2 July 1600; but this took place among the dunes. More recently Danielsson has proposed the battle of Wimpfen, 6 May 1622, in which Count Tilly (1559-1632) defeated the Protestant Margrave of Baden-Durlach (1573-1638).¹³ However, a near contemporary record shows Baden-Durlach’s cavalry attacking from the left; it did not rout Tilly’s mounted troops, which were not ambushed. Nor does Snayers show the long line of battle wagons, drawn up in the centre of the Protestant echelon.¹⁴ This battle was the subject of Sebastiaen Vrancx’s painting in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.¹⁵

Recently Sennewald and Hrncirík have identified the engagement as that which took place at Fluery in the province of Henegouwen (Hainaut) some fifteen kilometres east of Charleroi on 29 August 1622, in which Protestant and Imperialist forces clashed in a five hour bloodbath.¹⁶ Of the first there were some 5000 casualties out of 7-8000 infantry and 6000 horse; while the smaller Imperialist army of some 6000 foot and 2000 horse lost 300 dead and suffered 900 wounded (all the figues are no doubt approximate). But the Protestant formation led by Count von Mansfeld (c. 1580-1626) and Christian von Brunswick (1599-1626) (the Mad Halberstadter), although badly mauled, broke through Gonsalvo de Cordova’s (1585-1635) Imperialists, to progress further into the Netherlands towards Bergen-op-Zoom, and proved to be a factor in Ambrogio Spinola’s (1569-1630) lifting of its siege in the following year.

The key identifying the lettered formations which must have been attached to, or accompanied the present painting, is not extant.¹⁷ Two anonymous prints with different systems of lettering and with aerial views taken from behind the Protestant lines¹⁸ allow an approximate reading of Snayers’s account of the battle, which according to Sennewald and Hrncirík was of its early phase.

In the foreground is the farmstead, Chassart, before which are Walloon musqueteers with a rondtartschier in the red uniform and plume of the Spanish army.¹⁹ They have ambushed Mansfeld’s cavalry, commanded by Christian von Brunswick (who received wounds which resulted in the amputation of his lower left arm); the squadron is depicted in retreat having charged Cordova’s cavalry manoeuvring in a caracole.²⁰ Beyond on the left are Imperialist infantry battalions, including the marquis of Capolattaro’s Italians and Colonel Fugger’s Germans, opposite are Mansfeld’s battalions of foot including that of (?) Colonel Friedrich von Saxe-Weimar. In the middle distance an extended caracole is undertaken by Protestant cavalry.

Paintings at Neuburg-an-der-Donau²¹ and in the Pinacoteka, Siena,²² of differing sizes show further phases of the encounter, also related is a painting by Sebastiaen Vrancx in Seville.²³ This last has been dated circa 1630-40, which decade may also have seen the execution of the Rijksmuseum painting, and the others, which because of their differing sizes should not be seen as a series.

Gregory Martin, 2022