Van Mander's Protean Artist: Hendrick Goltzius, Mythic Masculinity and Embodiment

Abstract

Detail from HendrickGoltzius, Mucius Scaevola from Roman Heroes, 1586 (plate 7). IntroductionKarel van Mander's 'Life of Henricus Goltzius' is a crucial part of his Schilder-boeck (Book on Painting, Amsterdam, 1604), which consists of various texts. It begins with a didactic poem, The Groundwork of the Noble and Free Art of Painting, and finishes with two sections on iconography: a gloss on Ovid's Metamorphoses and a list of emblems, personifications, and their meanings. Sandwiched between are biographies of ancient, Italian, and northern artists that form the core of the book. As Walter Melion has argued, Goltzius's biography (Schilder-boeck, fols. 281v-287r) is intertextually related to the other parts of the book and serves Van Mander's overall goal of establishing the northern tradition of art as different from, but equal to, that of Italy, as presented by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists (1550; second edition 1568). Certainly, the northern biographies distinguish the two traditions by highlighting, for example, northern landscape painting, Jan van Eyck's development of oil painting into a meticulous 'mirror' of nature (Schilder-boeck, fol. 201r), and the inventive graphic works of Van Mander's close friend Goltzius (plate 1). Beyond comparing artistic traditions, the Schilder-boeck promoted (as did Vasari's Lives) the liberal status of the visual arts and their relationship to poetry. It also provided moral and practical advice for young artists with the Groundwork and the exemplars in the biographies. 'The Life of Goltzius' is central to these aims. 1 In numerous publications, Melion has discussed the construction of Goltzius as the epitome of the virtuous artist-hero, a trope rooted in the profession and techniques of art, and Jürgen Müller has stressed Christ-like allusions in Van Mander's account of his friend. 2 In this essay, I raise new questions about the 'Life of Goltzius' from a feminist and materialist perspective. How are the superhuman, masculine attributes of the artist-hero inflected by early modern concepts of gender, and how do they relate to the artist's work and embodied life?Van Mander based his 1604 biography on first-hand knowledge, making it central to research on the artist. Goltzius, born in 1558 in the German town of Mulbracht, moved to Haarlem in 1576 and met Van Mander shortly after the latter's arrival in 1583 as a Flemish refugee. With the painter Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, they formed what was described in an anonymous biography of Van Mander, appended to the 1618 edition of the Schilder-boeck, as an 'academy' to study 'from life', and clearly Van Mander's knowledge of classical and European art (especially Bartholomeus Spranger's drawings) was important for Goltzius. 3 Although Van Mander knew Goltzius well, he also based his biography, surely with his friend's input, on an elevated construction of the artist that served as self-fashioning for both men: Goltzius emerges as the