CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

The Exhibition

The Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin owns two spectacular albums containing 173 drawings made by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) during his stay in Rome between 1532 and 1536/7. Along with two individual sheets, these represent 86% of the Dutch artist’s entire known Roman oeuvre of some 200 drawings. These are among the oldest and most valuable sources of visual information about the Eternal City.

Employing the greatest of care, Van Heemskerck recorded the topography of the Eternal City in vedute and detailed studies shortly before the urban planning changes under Pope Paul III Farnese. He was interested first and foremost in the ancient ruins, and drew the poorly accessible Forum Romanum (fig. 1), the neighboring Imperial Fora and public bath complexes, the Colosseum, and the monuments on the Palatine Hill. But he also impressively documented the new St. Peter’s Basilica under construction and Capitoline Square before it was remodeled by Michelangelo. Furthermore, Van Heemskerck’s drawings depict world-famous antique sculptures such as the Laocoön, the Belvedere Torso and the Belvedere Apollo—often from surprising angles—before their presentation in a museum. Not least, he created the first views of the newly emerging collections of antiquities such as that housed in the Casa Galli (fig. 2).

To mark the 450^th anniversary of his death, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Roman studies have, for the first time, been the focus of an exhibition, which opened on 26 April 2024, curated by a three-person team comprising Tatjana Bartsch, Hans-Ulrich Kessler, and myself in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana—Max-Planck Institute for Art History. This was made possible by the unbinding for conservational reasons of the so-called Album I (in its 1980s incarnation), in which seventy of Van Heemskerck’s double-sided Roman leaves were mounted. The drawings were removed from the album and liberated from the mounts attached to their verso sides, meaning that they could now be displayed individually. Sixty-six of these leaves, with 131 drawings recto and verso, were originally part of a small, landscape-format sketchbook acquired by Van Heemskerck in Italy. This sketchbook was disassembled by a collector in, it is believed, the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century its leaves are known to have belonged as loose sheets to the collections of Pierre Crozat and Pierre-Jean Mariette. Evidently the drawings were pasted back into an album, along with some individual sheets and works by other artists, at a later date, as a result of which they have remained together until this day. In 1886 they passed from the collection of the French architect Hippolyte Destailleur into the possession of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin.

Bound in red morocco and dating from the eighteenth century, the second album, in addition to seventy-three leaves by various artists, contains thirty-six drawings by Van Heemskerck on twenty-one leaves (fig. 3), including large-format views of the Colosseum and St. Peter’s under construction. It was acquired from the London antiquarian Bernard Quaritch just six years after the first album. By means of regular turning of the pages every two weeks, it is also possible to display a proportion of these leaves in succession.

The exhibition focuses on the Roman drawings and highlights Maarten van Heemskerck as an outstanding draftsman who, with extraordinary sensitivity, created impressive small-format compositions and possessed a remarkable eye for perspective, contrast, scale, and composition. The aim of the exhibition is to pay tribute to the outstanding aesthetic quality of the drawings, which has, until now, all too often been eclipsed by an interpretation of the drawings as historical source material for archaeology and urban and architectural history. From the very outset, we wanted to present both sides of the drawings in the center of the room without passepartouts or frames, thereby deviating from the usual approach of hanging works on walls. We wanted, in other words, to come up with a new and unusual form of presentation. In conjunction with the exhibition designers and the Kupferstichkabinett’s conservators Antje Pent and Georg Josef Dietz, we developed the idea of a round structure made of wood and glass, each segment of which would accommodate a group of drawings organized thematically, thereby rendering both sides of the leaves immediately accessible (fig. 4).

The exhibition is divided into three sections. By way of introduction, the first considers Van Heemskerck’s work prior to his trip to Rome. In addition to the earliest biographical appreciations of the artist—by Giorgio Vasari, Hadrianus Junius, and Karel van Mander— this section presents paintings by Jan van Scorel, in whose studio Van Heemskerck worked between 1528 and 1530, prints of Roman buildings and sculptures then in circulation in Holland, and early paintings by Van Heemskerck himself. Historic plans of Rome and examples of the rich travel-guide literature of the day illustrate the development of foreign travel in the first half of the sixteenth century.

On display in the central area are Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings and two of his three known paintings of 1535/6 (conserved today in Prague and Milan). Instead of being displayed as the double pages of a book, the leaves from the first album are thematically grouped to enable visitors to imaginatively reconstruct Van Heemskerck’s wanderings through Rome. A printed facsimile of the original sketchbook provides visitors with an impression of the complete ensemble and allows them to experience its object character. The drawings are complemented by numerous precious loans from Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Rome, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and elsewhere, offering a near-complete picture of the artist’s oeuvre of Roman drawings. A selection of plaster casts of antique sculptures in the original dimensions, including the famous Belvedere Torso, demonstrates through juxtaposition the sometimes considerable differences in size between the sculptures and the sketches.

The final room (fig. 5) is devoted to Van Heemskerck’s production after his return to Haarlem and the artistic reception and afterlife of the drawings. The artist’s Roman studies served him as a source of inspiration for the rest of his life, as demonstrated by a focused selection of later paintings and print series including loans from Dresden, Lille, Paris, and Vienna. Examined here are the functions of Van Heemskerck’s drawings as well as the evolution of form and motif and the adaptation of compositional principles in the artist’s painted and printed oeuvre. With regard to the latter, his Roman motifs were reproduced and disseminated by etchings and engravings after his designs, and these were to influence visual language into the next century.

Analysis

In preparation for the exhibition, Antje Penz and Georg Josef Dietz of the Kupferstichkabinett’s Restoration, Conservation and Art Technology Department carried out technical investigations focusing on the handling of the sketchbook by the artist and later collectors, the processes of origination and use of the drawings, and their original sequence in the sketchbook. A stereo microscope and multispectral imaging were employed in addition to meticulous visual analyses. Based on their investigations, the conservators were able to reconstruct the original sequence of pages, which had repeatedly been an object of research since the Hülsen-Eggers facsimile edition of 1913–16, and to establish additional double-page spreads (fig. 6) in the sketchbook. This involved the examination of material parameters such as watermarks and paper structure, codicological aspects, as well as production marks und signs of wear. In their comprehensive contribution to the catalog, Antje Penz and Georg Josef Dietz establish the sequence in which the sketchbook’s gatherings (groups of sheets) were bound, ascertaining that the book comprised at least eleven gatherings of eight individual leaves, each folded from a single reale format sheet. Moreover, they concluded from various visible impressions (devoid of corresponding original motifs) and the absence of counterparts in the structure of the paper that there must have been at least twenty more pages.

Furthermore, in March 2023, Carsten Wintermann (Klassik Stiftung Weimar) carried out X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy analyses of forty-five selected Roman drawings by Van Heemskerck from Album I, another eleven from Album 2, six individual sheets (including post-Roman preliminary drawings for print designs) and a number of comparative examples by another hand from Album 2 in order to determine the inorganic chemical composition of the drawing media. For each drawing, between three and ten predetermined one-millimeter spots were selected and analyzed, including the inks and loose drawing medium but also the unmarked paper. A total of almost 500 measurements were taken, making this one of the most comprehensive analytical campaigns relating to a collection of drawings by a single artist. An initial result demonstrated that leadpoint was used for most of the—often very delicate—preliminary drawings that were analyzed.

Maarten van Heemskerck was evidently a creative and inquisitive artist, appropriating new drawing techniques and experimenting with inks. In Rome he discovered red chalk—a drawing medium little used in the Netherlands at the time—with which he depicted mainly sculptures. Due to the natural heterogeneity of this material, however, it has not been possible to identify the mine of origin.

Because Van Heemskerck drew en plein air, the ink he regularly used had to possess various specific properties. In addition to ease of manufacture and handling while traveling, it had to be durable and strong in color, possess good flow and covering properties, and dry quickly. The X-ray fluorescence analyses showed that the main element in the inks used for the Roman drawings was iron. However, they were largely free of impurities in the form of other trace elements such as sulfur, copper, or zinc, which are generally attributable to the iron vitriol (ferrous sulfate) used in the manufacture of iron gall ink. Material testing by Birgit Reissland, Art Proaño Gaibor, and Frank Ligterink of the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed in Amsterdam has also revealed the presence of

tannins, demonstrating that the ink used by Van Heemskerck was made from gallnuts. This led Carsten Wintermann to conclude that the ink was no “classic” iron gall ink based on iron vitriol, rather it was based on a simplified recipe, which, despite clearly visible variations in color, remained constant throughout the artist’s Roman period. Because of its simple composition, Wintermann also surmised that the ink may have been produced from rusty nails and vinegar. Also required were gallnut acid, gum arabic, and rainwater (or red wine, which gave the ink a brownish hue). The variations in color from greenish or yellowish all the way to gray or violet presumably depended on the liquid (rainwater, red wine, or wine vinegar) with which the ink was mixed or thinned.

A further insight yielded by the X-ray fluorescence analyses is that the composition of the inks used by Van Heemskerck for his later, post-Roman preliminary drawings for use in printmaking corresponds to a classic iron gall ink with substantially more impurities and trace elements, resulting from the use of iron vitriol. This means that the ink recipe used by Van Heemskerck during his stay in Italy differed from the one he used after his return to Haarlem, making it possible to differentiate between the drawings that originated in Italy and those made in the Netherlands. This has consequences for the dating of works, for example the sheet depicting the Statues Court of the Casa Sassi (fig. 7), the composition of whose ink resembles that of the iron gall ink he used in the Netherlands—suggesting a post-Roman date rather than the considerably earlier one previously discussed by researchers.

The technical investigations into materials are described in detail in the catalog, while the exhibition itself focuses on the presentation of the drawings and their contextualization within Van Heemskerck’s overall oeuvre.

Christien Melzer is Curator for Netherlandish and English Art before 1800 at the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in Berlin. She has been a member of CODART since 2013.

Translated from the German by Richard George Elliott