Oxford: Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings

I wholeheartedly recommend a visit to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum to see the topstukken - the masterpieces - of Flemish drawing that are on display there until Sunday.

These outstanding drawings, rarely seen in public because of their fragility, were produced during a period of great change and prosperity in the region known as the Southern Netherlands. This area was a hub of artistic production driven by high demand from the established rural aristocracy, newly monied urban patricians, and many religious orders and professional guilds. All were eager to commission sacred and secular paintings, sculpture and decorative artworks which required preparation in drawing.

A highlight is an album containing 43 tiny drawings by the young Rubens from around 1590 when he was aged just 13. These are copies of the Swiss artist Hans Holbein the Younger's popular print series The Dance of Death which demonstrates that everyone - from monarchs to beggars - is equal in death. The Danse macabre was a fixation throughout Europe, from church wall paintings to Calderon's play The Great Theatre of the World.

The album is opened to show Rubens's drawing The Abbot and Death. His precocious talent enlivens the woodcut original. A jesting skeleton pulls away the surprised and discomfited abbot by the 'skirts' with beautiful shading creating superb drapery in the folds of the monk's habit. The skeleton sports the abbot's mitre and balances the abbot's crozier over his right shoulder in jaunty 'Dick Whittington' style. The monk's anatomy is beautifully rendered.

A similar carnivalesque energy can be found in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Temptation of St Anthony (c. 1556) in which the hermit saint Anthony Abbot, kneeling in the foreground, is surrounded by a grotesque phantasmagoria which recalls the work of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516). Focused upon the Bible opened in front of him, the saint remains unperturbed by the host of demons composed of jugs, spheres, and body parts, both human and animal. In the centre, a large head floats on a river with a boat emerging from its ear, while in the foreground, a jousting figure, who would become Carnival in Bruegel's Fight Between Carnival And Lent, rides an ale barrel with a human face.

The drawing is meticulously rendered in pen and brown ink, intended to be made into an engraving by the professional printmaker Pieter van der Heyden. A recently acquired impression of the print is on display alongside.

The exhibition displays several design-drawings created in preparation for works in other media, including paintings, prints, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts, such as metalwork, stained glass and tapestries. Six tapestry cartoons, designed for one of the Vatican's 'Scuola Nuova' series, are reunited, revealing how weavers used them to create the final work.

Anthony Van Dyck's copy of Titian's Christ and the Adulterous Woman, his teenage preparatory drawing of an exhausted Christ succumbing to the weight of the cross, and several preparatory studies for the mocking of Christ by the Roman soldiers, are all remarkable examples of his exquisite sensitivity, spatial awareness and dramatic sense.

Apart from the wealth of religious art on display, there are drawings of the classical world, superb anatomies and portraits, a lively dog, a humble earthworm and a riotous Bean King, presiding over Epiphany merriment having found the hidden bean in the seasonally served sweetmeat.

If time allows, be sure to visit at the Ashmolean too the Wilton Diptych, currently on loan from the National Gallery, where the young Richard II, supported by patron saints, kneels in adoration of the Virgin and Child surrounded by the heavenly host: an artistic wonder. A short stroll to the Christ Church Picture Gallery will further complement the religious art seen with its two fascinating exhibitions on Drawings and Words and Three Tondi.

Bruegel to Rubens ends this Sunday 23rd June

LINKS

Breugel to Reubens: www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/bruegel-to-rubens-great-flemish-drawings

Ashmolean Museum: https://ashmolean.org/

Christ Church Picture Gallery: www.chch.ox.ac.uk/visit/picture-gallery