Page 22 - Jordaens

owards the end of her supremacy in the affairs of the duchy of Savoy, the Duchess Maria Giovanna
Battista of Savoy-Nemours (1644-1724), widow of Duke Carlo Emmanuele II (1634-1675),
commissioned a form of dramatic opera, La Ramira, to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of
her son to the Infanta of Portugal. In the event, the marriage did not take place and the opera
T was never performed, but it is of interest in that it dramatised the Duchess’ account of the reason
for the long-drawn-out delay in her marriage to the Duke in 1665. The culprit was the Duke’s mother whose
1
opposition to the marriage was such that it only took place after her death. The young couple had celebrated
2
the event by commissioning Alcesti O sia L’Amore Sincero whose heroine was a paragon of conjugal love and self-
sacrifice, and also by acquiring two sets of tapestries designed by Jordaens, one of which was the Story of Odysseus,
the illustrious hero traditionally revered above all for his devotion to his wife Penelope.
For the couple, Odysseus, whose adventures on his journey home after the conquest of Troy were recounted by
Homer in his venerated and well known eponymous epic, would have been emblematic of patience and steadfast
love. The vicissitudes suffered by the Greek ruler of Ithaca thus would have struck a sympathetic chord as they
recalled the obstacles that had been placed in the way of their own marriage. Of the several sets of tapestry
illustrating the Odyssey then likely to have been available, the newly-weds chose the series of seven designed by
the leading artist of Antwerp at that time, Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678). In order to proclaim their ownership
of the set, they had woven into the borders the Duke’s coat-of-arms and his consort’s initials at the centre top
and bottom of the borders. The set, echoing the history of the House of Savoy itself, is now divided between
3
the royal palace in Turin and the Quirinale in Rome. The opening scene of the series, Hermes at Calypso’s Table,
4
Jordaens’ painting of which is the subject of this essay (Plate 1 p. 16), is also in Rome. Here Jordaens, with a
story-teller’s instinct and confident assurance in the rendering of every detail, depicts the idyllic setting in which
Odysseus’s fate, ordained by Zeus, is tensely settled by his messenger, Hermes, and the beautiful but inscrutable
goddess Calypso, who had kept the hero in her thrall.
a
1. M.Viale Ferrero, [Exh.Cat.] Feste Barroche : Cerimonie e Specttacoli alla corte di Savoia tra Cinque e Settecento, ed. A.di Balme and
F.Varallo, Turin, Palazzo Madama, 2009, pp. 134-135 under no.111.15.
2. Ibid. p. 175 under ‘1665 Tesauro Emanuele’.
3. See K. Nelson, ‘Jacob Jordaens: Design for Tapestry’ (Pictura Nova, V), 1998, pp. 25-26.
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y the year 1666 when the tapestries were bought, Jordaens had been working in Antwerp for just over
fifty years. Indeed, in that year he is recorded as enrolling an apprentice - his sixteenth - in the records of
5
Bthe Antwerp guild of St Luke. Three years later, when he was in his mid-seventies, we learn that he was
6
still ‘painting diligently’. Jordaens had acquired a large property in the centre of Antwerp and was prosperous
as a result of both his parental inheritance and his highly successful career as a painter; indeed he has long been
recognised as the third great artist active in 17th century Antwerp.
In terms of international repute, he has had to cede to two other Antwerp artists, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-
1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), whose geniuses were honoured and recognised all over Europe in
their lifetimes. As one mark of their contemporary reputations, both Rubens and Van Dyck were knighted by
King Charles of Great Britain, and if Van Dyck came nowhere near emulating Rubens’ wide and deep learning
and political expertise, he was more immediately influential in the art of portraiture. Indeed, successful as he
was, Jordaens could not lay claim to any extraneous, intellectual accomplishment or artistic issue or school. He
and his art stand alone.
His oeuvre is large, due to his longevity, fertile imagination and the speedy, fluent technique which gave
expression to it. The catalogue raisonné of his drawings, published over forty years ago by Roger D’Hulst (1917-
1996), the leading authority on Jordaens of his generation, amounts to some four hundred items. No equivalent
publication has been compiled of his paintings and nor has an attempt been made to offer a comprehensive
survey since the early 20th century, but a catalogue raisonné would be likely to contain some seven to eight
hundred items.
In viewing his production as a whole, one is struck by the artist’s versatility. Primarily a figure painter, he
was at ease with every type of subject currently popular except seascape. Notwithstanding, one of his most
famous paintings, now in Copenhagen, depicts the departure of a ferry from a city quay (its ostensible subject
4. Oil on canvas, 116.2 x 154 cm. Provenance: in possession of a family since the early 19th century; sold for that family by
Christie’s, London, 9 July 2015, lot 17.
5. This pupil was Mercelis Librechts. No work by him is known. D’Hulst et al., [Exh. Cat.] Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) (Antwerp,
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1993), 1993, p. 19.
6. This was noted by the Hamburg painter Matthias Scheits (1625/30-1700) on the flyleaf of his copy of Carel van Mander’s
Schilder-Boeck, which was discovered by Wilhelm Bode. See M. Rooses, Jordaens, 1908, pp. 241-242 and d’Hulst et al., [Exh.
Cat.] Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1993), 1993, p. 19.
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