Object data
oil on panel
support: height 77.6 cm × width 59.4 cm
Maarten van Heemskerck
Portrait of Johannes Colmannus (1471-1538)
c. 1538 - c. 1540
Inscriptions
-
Coat of arms, upper left: three white mallets on a red field
Inscribed, upper left, on a cartellino: 67
Coat of arms, lower right, on the ring: three white mallets
Inscribed, on the frame: Omnino ne sit fato Colmanus ademptus Martini fecit ingeniosa manus (Maarten’s artful hand has done this so that Colmannus should not be completely carried off by death)
Technical notes
The support consists of three vertically grained oak planks (14.1, 24.7 and 20.4 cm), 1.0-1.1 cm thick. Dendrochronology has shown that planks II and III came from the same tree, the youngest heartwood ring of which was formed in 1515. The panel could have been ready for use by 1526, but a date in or after 1540 is more likely. The whitish coloured ground was applied up to the edges of the panel on the right and left sides; at the top and the bottom approx. 1.0 cm is not covered by the ground. There are remains of a barbe visible on all sides. A white priming, visible through the paint layers, especially in the sitter’s left arm, was probably applied with broad brushstrokes over the ground layer. An underdrawing is not visible with the naked eye.
Scientific examination and reports
- condition report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 16 July 2007
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 31 August 2007
Condition
Fair. The painting is abraded, and the varnish is dirty and discoloured.
Original framing
The portrait is mounted in an oak entablature frame consisting of a base frame and a cornice (fig. c). The cornice shows a fillet, a jump, an ogee and two descending fillets. This cornice is mounted on the base frame consisting of a plain frieze, a jump, two descending fillets, an ogee, a jump, a fillet and a jump along the sight edge (fig. a). The face of the frame is gilded, with the exception of the frieze, which is painted in a reddish brown colour with a gilded inscription. The frame has an open rebate. The members of the base frame are connected with partly mitred mortise and tenon joints, which are concealed with blocks of wood on the outside of the base frame (fig. b). Construction marks for the mitres are visible in raking light in the brown paint on the front.
Provenance
…; ? Convent of St Agatha, Delft;1 ? transferred to the Town Hall, Delft, 1566;2 recorded in the Orphanage Chamber, Town Hall, Delft, 1667 (‘een seer goet contrefeitsel van eenen Colmannus, mede gedaen door den meer-gemelten Maerten Heems-kerck, na het uytwysen van de handelinge des pinceels // en daer-en-boven het Opschrift rondt-om in de plinte van de Lijst sulcks oock ghenoeghsaem te kennen gevende met dit Latijnsch Verske: […] Martini kunstighe handt heeft dit gedaen, ten eynde Colmannus door de Doodt niet teenemael soude wech-genomen zijn’);3 recorded in the Orphanage Chamber, Town Hall, Delft, 1729;4 sale, Property taken from the Town Hall of the City of Delft et al. [section Town Hall, Delft], Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 24 April 1860 sqq., no. 54, fl. 37, to Jonkheer Dr Jan Pieter Six (1824-99);5 by whom presented to the KOG, Amsterdam;6 on loan to the museum since 1889; on loan to the Gemeentemuseum, Delft, since 2003
Object number: SK-C-507
Credit line: On loan from the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Maarten van Heemskerck (Heemskerk 1498 - Haarlem 1574)
Maarten van Heemskerck was born in 1498 in the small village of Heemskerk, a few miles north of Haarlem, as the son of the farmer Jacob Willemsz van Veen. Sometime between 1527 and 1530 he worked in Haarlem as an assistant in the workshop of Jan van Scorel, who had returned from Italy in 1524. In 1532, Heemskerck joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke. Soon after 23 May 1532, he left Haarlem for Rome, arriving there before mid-July. At the end of 1536, or possibly the beginning of 1537, he returned to Haarlem, where he spent the rest of his life with the exception of a short stay in Amsterdam during the siege of Haarlem of 1572-73. Heemskerck was a wealthy man and was acquainted with many influential people in Haarlem, such as the magistrate and burgomaster Jan van Zuren, and the Van Berensteyn family. In Delft he had good connections with the humanist prior Cornelis Musius, whom he befriended soon after his return from Rome. Heemskerck’s first wife, Marie Jacobs Coningsdr, whom he probably married at the end of 1543, died in childbirth on 25 October 1544. Around 1550 he married his second wife, Marytgen Gerritsdr (?-1582), the daughter of former burgomaster Gerrit Adamz. She was a fairly wealthy woman and they lived in a large house on Donkere Spaarne in Haarlem between 1559 and 1567. Heemskerck remained childless. From 1551 to 1552 he was the warden of the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem, and was its dean in 1553-54. In 1553 he became a churchwarden of St Bavo’s in Haarlem, which he remained until his death. Heemskerck was a member of the city council from early 1562 until 22 August 1572. In 1570 he was relieved of paying municipal tax in recognition of his graphic work. He died on 1 October 1574 at the age of 76 and was buried in the Nieuwe- or Kerstkapel on the north side of St Bavo’s.
Not much is known about Heemskerck’s training before 1527. Van Mander tells us that his first teacher was Cornelis Willemsz of Haarlem. According to archival documents, Willemsz was a relatively successful painter, and was Jan van Scorel’s master as well. All we know of the second teacher Van Mander mentions, Jan Lukasz of Delft, is that he was the dean of the Delft Guild of St Luke in 1541.
An extremely productive artist, Heemskerck’s extant oeuvre consists of more than 100 paintings, two albums with Roman drawings and sketches, and around 600 print designs. No works are known from his time with Willemsz and Lukasz. Close similarities between Scorel and Heemskerck’s early work stand in the way of determining the latter’s earliest oeuvre. His Rijksmuseum Portrait of a man, possibly Pieter Gerritsz Bicker and Portrait of a Woman, possibly Anna Codde of 1529 (SK-A-3518 and SK-A-3519) are generally considered to be his earliest extant paintings. Heemskerck started to sign and date his paintings from 1531 onwards. His monumental 1532 St Luke painting the Virgin in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem was painted as a farewell gift to his fellow guild members upon his departure for Rome.7 Apart from the two Roman sketchbooks, four paintings survive from his period there, of which the 1535 Landscape with the Abduction of Helen in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore is the most monumental.8
Heemskerck was particularly active as a painter during the 1540s. Major commissions included the large 1538-42 St Lawrence Altarpiece for the Laurenskerk in Alkmaar, now in the Domkyrka in Linköping, Sweden,9 and the 1546 wings of the Drapers’ Altarpiece for the St Bavokerk in Haarlem, now in the Frans Hals Museum.10 Throughout his career he painted works for various religious institutions in Delft, of which the monumental 1559-60 Haarlem Ecce homo11 and the Brussels Entombment triptychs are important examples.12 At the same time Heemskerck executed many portraits of distinguished citizens, and painted numerous allegorical, biblical and mythological scenes. In 1548 he started his grand production of print designs that were brought into prints by professional engravers like Philips Galle, Cornelis Cort and D.V. Coornhert. From 1552 onwards Heemskerck became associated with the influential Antwerp printmaker and publisher Hieronymus Cock. His last paintings are dated 1567. He still remained active as a print designer after that date.
Little is known about Heemskerck’s workshop. The earliest reference to a pupil is a payment record of 1538 in which a 'servant of Master Maerten’ is mentioned in connection with the St Lawrence Altarpiece. Van Mander names three pupils: Jacob Rauwaert, who became an art dealer and collector and housed Heemskerck during the siege of Haarlem in 1572, Cornelis van Gouda, and Symon Jansz Kies of Amsterdam.
References
Van Mander 1604, fols. 244v-47r; Van der Willigen 1866, pp. 126-31; Preibisz 1911, pp. 3-55; Hoogewerff in Thieme/Becker XVI, 1923, pp. 227-29; Friedländer XIII, 1936, pp. 71-83; Hoogewerff IV, 1941-42, pp. 290-386; ENP XIII, 1975, pp. 40-45; Veldman 1977, pp. 11-18; Grosshans 1980, pp. 18-27; Veldman in Amsterdam 1986a, p. 190; Harrison 1987, pp. 2-99; Miedema I, 1994, pp. 236-49; Veldman in Turner 1996, XIV, pp. 291-94; Van Thiel-Stroman in coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 197-201
(Ilona van Tuinen)
Entry
According to the Latin inscription on the oak frame, the man who is portrayed here is Johannes Colmannus (1471-1538), the second-to-last prior of the Delft Convent of St Agatha, one of the richest convents in the Netherlands in its time. He is portrayed at three-quarter length, clad in a dark cloak with brown fur lining and a beret, seated in a wooden armchair and holding a little red book. Between his right thumb and index finger he holds a faded carnation, formerly red, probably a memento mori referring to resurrection through Christ.13 On the upper left wall we see a coat of arms hanging from a lion’s head. It contains three mallets on a red background, and a cartellino with ‘67’, the age of the sitter at the time of portrayal. The coat of arms appears on the sitter’s ring as well.
The portrait belongs to a group of six paintings by Heemskerck that were recorded in 1667 by the historian Dirck van Bleyswijck as hanging in the Town Hall of Delft and which are thus assumed to have originally been Delft commissions. Colmannus hung in the Orphanage Chamber. Considering the identity of the sitter it is likely that the portrait was painted to hang in the chapel of the Convent of St Agatha, in a row of prior portraits in the ‘Gallery of Confessors’, and that it was removed to the Town Hall by city officials, possibly as early as 1570-72, the beginning of the Delft Reform.14
On the basis of the sitter’s age, the painting is generally dated 1538, the year in which Colmannus was 67.15 At the same time, though, Colmannus’s death at the very beginning of 1538,16 together with the content of the inscription, which translates as ‘Maarten’s artful hand has done this so that Colmannus should not be completely carried off by death’, caused scholars from the late 19th century on to regard the painting as a posthumous portrait.17 Preibisz suggested that the inscription might have been painted on the frame after the sitter’s death, in which case the portrait might not have been posthumous. Unfortunately, technical analysis has been unable to resolve this question, and the inscription was already on the frame by the time Bleyswijck saw it in 1667. As Harrison remarked, considering the relatively short space of time between Heemskerck’s return from Rome, most likely in 1537, and Colmannus’s death in early 1538, the lack of documentation disclosing any contact between the prior and the painter, and bearing in mind that the Delft fire of 1536 had probably left the prior preoccupied with rebuilding the damaged parts of St Agatha’s, it seems unlikely that the painting was commissioned during Colmannus’s lifetime. In that case it is likely that the learned Cornelis Musius (1500-72), Colmannus’s successor and a personal friend of Heemskerck, ordered it, and that he composed the Latin distich on the frame, either in late 1538 or shortly afterwards.18
Colmannus is generally considered to be Heemskerck’s first extant portrait after his return from Rome.19 The Italian influence is noticeable in the painting’s dependence on an influential Italian portrait type, developed by Raphael around 1512 in his Portrait of Pope Julius II, in which the sitter is depicted at three-quarter length against a neutral background, seated in an armchair slightly turned away from the picture plane. Heemskerck probably studied this painting whilst in Rome, though he might have come into contact with the portrait type before his Roman period through Jan van Scorel’s Portrait of Pope Adrian VI.20 Heemskerck used Raphael’s composition for several other portraits in the years immediately after his return from Italy.21
(Ilona van Tuinen)
Literature
Van Bleyswijck 1667, p. 129; Thus 1895, pp. 75-76; Preibisz 1911, pp. 46-47, 70, no. 5; De Vries 1934, p. 26; Friedländer XIII, 1936, p. 160, no. 222; Hoogewerff IV, 1941-42, pp. 330-32; Bergström 1958, p. 106; ENP XIII, 1975, p. 91, no. 222; Grosshans 1980, pp. 130-31, no. 25, with earlier literature; Harrison 1987, pp. 414-26, no. 32, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1887, p. 59, no. 465; 1903, p. 120, no. 1128; 1926, p. 80, no. 1128; 1934, p. 123, no. 1128; 1960, p. 125, no. 1128; 1976, p. 264, no. C 507
Citation
I. van Tuinen, 2010, 'Maarten van Heemskerck, Portrait of Johannes Colmannus (1471-1538), c. 1538 - c. 1540', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8648
(accessed 10 November 2024 04:30:59).