I completed this translation a long time ago and over the years I have shared it with students and colleagues. It is not offered as being entirely my own work, nor as ‘the perfect article’.
The Voor-reden (Preface), to Den Grondt der Edel vry Schilder-const (The Foundation of the Noble and Liberal Art of Painting) was translated by myself and Jacqueline Penniall-Boer and published in Dutch Crossing (Volume 11, 1987, Issue 32, pp 56-75; available online). Jacqueline and I then translated the main text of Hessel Miedema’s edition of Van Mander’s Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters (Davaco, Volume 1, 1994). We subsequently translated the first five books of the Grondt (the Foundation) before abandoning the project. Some years later I completed the translation of books six to fourteen and reworked the whole text so as to make what I hoped would be an accessible, readable English version for students. I have checked it again recently. I make some comments on translation method in the introduction to The Visible World, on this website.
I am putting that translation of the Grondt online now so that it can be compared to a recently published translation of the text, and for anyone looking at it in that context no further introduction is necessary. But for those who have come across this page by chance, a brief introduction:
Karel Van Mander (1548-1606) published his Schilder–boeck (Painter’s Book, Book of Painting – the reading of the title is flexible) in 1604 in Haarlem. It is an encyclopaedic, three-part account of the intellectual, practical and historical materials of the painter’s art, an art that he called ‘schilder-const’ (painter’s art, art of painting). Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) had conceived of a categorical whole within which to frame his own enterprise – he coined (or popularised) the term ‘arti del disegno‘ (arts of design) to encompass painting, the graphic arts, architecture and sculpture. As you will see from another post on this website, Samuel Van Hoogstraten (1627-78) later devised the all-encompassing category of ‘the Visible World’ within which to formulate his notion of the art and science of painting. There are so many categorical framings for art – Techne, the Aesthetic, Fine Art, the plastic arts, Creative Art – each category emerges from within a set of ideological determinants, a place and time, each reconfigures, narrows or broadens the range of human behaviours included and explained and valorised.
The title page of the first edition (Haarlem, 1604) reads: The Schilder-boeck, in which, first of all, the foundations of the noble and liberal art of painting in its various parts are set forth for eager-to-learn youth; then, in three sections, the lives of the celebrated illustrious painters of ancient and modern times; and finally the Explanation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid and also the Depiction Of Figures. By Carel van Mander, Painter.
The first element of the Schilder-boeck, the Grondt, is a fourteen book poem on the theory and technique of painting. It is a giant enterprise and it is a remarkable thing. If it had been written in English or French every (English- or French-speaking) home would have a copy. On the surface it seems a self-explanatory text. It combines what we might recognise as a ‘common sense’ naturalist aesthetic, still common sense for many art lovers, but we should note that there are some (then) contemporary preoccupations and emphases. Aspects that would be invisibly conventional to contemporary readers might attract our attention and puzzle us now. We are no longer so at home with classical references, and even if we can make sense of them we might find them intrusive, pompous or performative. It begins with an exhortation, calling out to the young would-be painter. This is followed by an idealised account of a painter’s development and career, one not unlike Van Mander’s own (early on we come across an allegory on the historian’s role, saving reputations from oblivion, another reference to the author). It is a poem packed with instruction and delight. There is much good sense, if rather a lot of proverbial lore. In the chapter on drawing we are shown how to develop our skills so as to select from nature, and urged to identify and follow good example. In another chapter we are offered advice on composition. We are taught elegance in the disposition of the figure, given suggestions for the expression of emotion, and all the time encouraged in the creation of lively and engaging pictures. In short, we are told how to tell a story. The emphasis, as one would expect from an artist who came of age in the generation after Michelangelo, is on the human figure. But what might also appeal are the ‘secondary’ preoccupations, chapters on light and reflection, on landscape, animals and draperies, and there is a finale provided by four wonderful chapters on paint and colour. These take us from the arrangement of the palette in the workshop to the most esoteric discussion of value, by way of practical technical advice, the history of pigments and the mystery of gemstones and precious metals. Reading this will open our eyes to kinds of enjoyment offered to sixteenth-century eyes by sixteenth century paintings. We should understand that Van Mander was a gentleman by birth, and a celebrated poet. The Grondt is a poem, poetry was an appropriate elevated form in which to treat serious matters. You might feel that the Grondt was more likely to be read by an educated amateur or a patron than an ‘eager-to-learn’ youth, and you might be right. And underneath it all, as in all the parts of the Schilder-boeck, Van Mander insists that painting is a liberal art and not a manual craft, an argument all the more urgent since in the Low Countries painting production was still dominated by guilds and municipal regulations. Painters, though respected, were considered craftsmen. Van Mander desired to see a more educated and liberated kind of art producer, one who composed in pictures as a poet or a rhetorician composed in language, and a more enlightened consumer who could appreciate schilder-const.
The second element, the Lives of the Celebrated Illustrious Painters of Ancient and Modern Times, is in three sections. The first two sections, the Lives of the Classical and Italian artists, are mostly translations (substantially reworked and rethought) of texts by Pliny, Vasari and others, as well as Van Mander’s recollections from his own time in Italy and last minute reports from contemporaries returned from the south. It was completed shortly before 1604 and is so up-to-date that Caravaggio was included; the Schilder-boeck is the first printed reference to him at a time when he would hardly have been known outside the more sophisticated circles of the Roman art world. The final section of the Lives, the lives of the German and Netherlandish painters, represents Van Mander’s own research. It is a history of northern painting, much of which had been destroyed or been made inaccessible by conflict, and which had been radically ‘privatised’ under several waves of protestant iconoclasm. Van Mander used a similar art-historical methodology to Vasari: he gathered together names and paintings; he organised and verified paintings by means of connoisseurship, visiting and identifying the works himself whenever possible, recording his own observations, coincidentally putting together a pioneering account of the history of patronage and art ownership in the Low Countries; he contacted the descendents of painters and of the commissioners of paintings (his text quotes from his correspondence with them); he visited graves and recorded funerary inscriptions; and he pursued archival research in municipal and guild records. Also like Vasari Van Mander presented the Lives critically. Each of the three sections has its own preface or voor-reden (the Schilder–boeck teems with prefaces, a future post in this website will bring them all together) proposing a general theory of the development of art in different places and periods both in terms of techniques and skills, and in terms of intellectual and cultural developments in history generally which links up with the concerns of Den Grondt. Within individual lives there are digressions on art, history, art in history and history in art illustrating these relations and developments.
The third element was the Wtlegginghe, a commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its companion, the Wtbeeldinghe, a dictionary of iconographical advice to painters. Although we might consider them supplementary to Van Mander’s project they do constitute a body of high-status knowledge, a handbook of classical information, an Emblem Book. I very much see them as completing the work, they provide tools for the artist as well as a codebook for the spectator. The book trade knew a good thing when it saw one and, unlike any other part of the Schilder-boeck, they later appeared as a separate publication.
Read on.