My first historical sensation I had when I was ten, on holiday with my parents near Lyon. In a field right by the imposing aqueduct at Beaunant that used to supply water to Roman Lugdunum, I found a piece of a terracotta tile from the ancient waterwork. Once I had cleaned it, I discovered a fingerprint, left by a Roman brickmaker when the clay was still wet and fixed by the firing process almost two thousand years ago. At that moment, history could not have been made more tangible or more intimate for me. Although I eventually lost the tile fragment some time in the course of my life, that Roman finger left as clear an impression on my memory as in the clay.
F. Chabrol, Roman Aqueduct, Beaunant, France, c. 1857. Albumen print from wet collodion negative; 24.2 x 31.1 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art (John L. Severance Fund), inv. 1995.233
Photo: The Cleveland Museum of Art)
The sculptures of Adriaen de Vries, which are the focus of this study, stir a similarly intimate sensation in me every time. His ostensibly nonchalant way of working, in which the motions of his modelling fingers seem to continue to resonate in the surface of his bronze figures, evokes a very direct, personal tactility. It is the feeling of being, for a moment, very close to his creating hands – to the interaction of hand, touch and medium, which can be summed up in the term ‘manner’. This word is primarily associated with all kinds of (manual) activity, and more specifically with the way (‘manner’, from manus) the hand does its work. In art, the term also stands for an embodied process of the shape-giving hand (with or without a tool). While manner is not synonymous with the term ‘style’, it does correspond to it to a significant degree. As early as 1604, for instance, Karel van Mander spoke of een treflijcke Titiaensche en Italiaensche handelinghe (‘a clear Titianesque and Italian manner’), implying that a group of artists linked by their origins would produce the same identifiable style as an individual artist, in this case the great Venetian painter.
This process of ‘shaping form’ is usually most manifest in the loose way of working with spontaneous and unfinished sketches in clay or wax (or on paper), which triggers a similarly direct experience. In the work of Adriaen de Vries, as in Titian’s, however, this applies not to sketches, but to finished works of art – a phenomenon for which very few parallels can be found in the sculpture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century (and certainly not consistently implemented). This exceptional fact motivated the writing of this book: why did a sculptor of the late Renaissance break so explicitly with the prevailing stylistic paradigm of his time?
In painting, a clear division between a rough and a fine way of working had existed for some time, but such a distinction was not at all the norm among sculptors. De Vries’s lively ‘manner’ was in fact radical and innovative in sculpture, and was acknowledged as such by his contemporaries, albeit not always appreciatively. It is significant that two of his contemporaries labelled De Vries a ‘modeller’. In 1610, the art agent and collector Philipp Hainhofer called him ein feiner possierer (‘a fine modeller’), and ten years later the bronze caster Wolfgang Neidhart wrote that He Adrian, in these days the most famous modeller, does not cast himself, because he only models in wax. These descriptions touch on the essence of his sculpture: the act of modelling an initial, loose sketch flows seamlessly, for De Vries, into the finished model of the intended sculpture. Not as two separate stages of the working process, but seemingly as a single fluid and organic process, with the looseness of modelling maintained as a guiding principle.
In Titian’s work, the ‘rough’ manner was associated by his contemporaries with animation and the illusion of a viva figura, a goal that Adriaen de Vries must have had in mind as well, as this study will argue. This, however, implies a paradox: striving for a natural liveliness and lifelike quality by means of a loose touch seems to be diametrically opposed to the intentional display of the ‘manner’, in which the unnatural and ‘made-ness’ are in fact emphasized. In short, it is the delicate balance between a convincing mimesis on the one hand and the display of authenticity through an individual, identifiable style on the other; between the illusion of a living work of art and the traces of its genesis, as Franciscus Junius aptly phrased it in 1638 in The Painting of the Ancients (p. 332):
certainly, the chiefest and most lively force of Art consisteth herein, that there appeare in the worke that same prosperously prompt and fertile Facilitie which useth to accompany our first endeavours: this is the life and spirit of Art; which if it be extinguished with too much care of trimming, the whole work will be but a dead and lifelesse thing.
A variety of explanations have been proffered for the idiosyncratic style of Adriaen de Vries. The final stylistic phase of his career has often been classified, including by myself, as an example of Altersstil, as the artist’s ultima maniera, or as a malerische Spätstil. In some cases, this has led to artists being suspected of defects such as mental instability or failing eyesight. It is very doubtful, however, that Adriaen de Vries’s ostensibly nonchalant style can be credited to his psychological development, his state of mind or physical infirmities due to his advanced age. The beginnings of the loose modelling tendency appear too early in his oeuvre for that. In 1998, I characterized the sculptor’s style as a form of sprezzatura, an explanation that in my view still has validity but only tells part of the story. There are other notions and circumstances that (may have) played a role in forming De Vries’s unique style. This study may be seen as an attempt to identify and elucidate these. As a result, this book is not a traditional artist monograph, but rather what I would call a ‘circumstantial monograph’. Its leitmotif is the genesis of a bronze, and the chapters that follow are therefore more or less arranged to progress from sketch in wax to completed sculpture, from raw material to embodied figure.
Many individuals have contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to this book. For their help, support and inspiration, I wish to thank Charles Avery, Eric Boot, Duncan Bull, Stijn Bussels, Andrew Butterfield, Perry Chapman, Michael Cole, Valentina Conticelli, Penelope Curtis, Taco Dibbits, Dorothea Diemer, Arjan van Dijk, Miekie Donner, Harula Economopoulos, Reindert Falkenburg, Peter Fuhring, Eliška Fučíková, Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Titia de Haseth Möller, Linda Hinners, Jan de Hond, Michael Hoyle (†), Liesbeth Hugenholtz, Megan Hunter, Eddy de Jongh, Alex Kader, Daniel Katz, Barbera van Kooij, Claudia Kryza-Gersch, Alexis Kugel, Hans Locher, Bieke van der Mark, Tine Meganck, Willem Noyons, Martin Olin, Femmy Otten, Flavia Puoti, Dino, Raffaello and Giovanni Tomasso, Bart Ramakers, Herman Roodenburg, Pieter Roelofs, Gert Jan van der Sman, Robert Schindler, Volker Seiberth, Ellen Slob, Maud Soethout, Giovanni Di Stefano, Gudrun Swoboda, Matthias Ubl, Hans van der Ven, Jeremy Warren, Guido de Werd, Max Wiringa and Dimitrios Zikos. Particular thanks I owe to Tine Meganck, Bieke van der Mark and the anonymous reviewers for their critical reading of my manuscript and their invaluable remarks, and to Pierre Bouvier for his excellent English translation of my Dutch text. My special gratitude goes to the Irina and Marcel van Poecke Foundation and a private donor through the Rijksmuseum Fonds for their generous financial support of this publication. Last but not least, I thank my ‘bronze mates’ Robert van Langh and Arie Pappot for the many instructive conversations about the making of bronze sculptures and our joint excursions in the footsteps of Adriaen de Vries and his contemporaries.