Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape

Joachim Patinir's workshop, Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, c. 1515

The National Gallery's early landscape-related art is now in a Sainsbury Wing room called 'Looking at Nature: European Painting 1430-1540.' One of the works there is Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, attributed to the workshop of Joachim Patinir. I've always loved looking into this - as Erika Langmuir wrote in the 1997 NG Companion Guide 'our eye travels to a hill town (more accurately a monastery complex), valleys, woods, mountains, fortresses, farm houses, fields, the sea, the high horizon, sky...' It is a whole world. And what we see now isn't even the whole picture - it was cut down from a larger original. Patinir and his workshop did several versions of Saint Jerome and the magnificent landscape at the end of this blog post is from one that is now owned by the Prado (this too was cut down). 

 

The historical record on Patinir is scant, although we do know Dürer admired his landscapes and attended his second wedding. The first monograph on him was written by Robert A. Koch and published in 1968. This includes an analysis (pp 17-19) of his 'world landscape' paintings, and from it I have extracted these ten characteristics. 

1. Distance and Scale

'In every Western landscape painting before the nineteenth century,' Koch writes, 'the illusion of distance was created in principle by the diminution of scale and a progressive loss of clarity; but Patinir is inclined to mock this law of aerial perspective until the eye of the spectator is close to the horizon line.' His example of this is the Met's St. Jerome triptych, shown below. Koch says Patinir 'permits us to scan the landscape as though through a telescope.' I remember visiting New York in 2008 and being amazed that you were now allowed to take photos in their museums, so I zoomed in and photographed lots of details visible in Patinir's painting. Sometimes 'the scale changes irrationally and abruptly' but Patinir was seemingly happy to do this 'in order to make his landscape more immediate and more exciting.' 

Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, c. 1515

2. Perspective

Patinir lavished attention on individual objects to make them as realistic as possible but the effect as a whole was clearly not 'realistic.' As an artist he sometimes resembled an architect or cartographer. 'In constructing his vast vistas of space, he was either disinterested in or unaware of scientific rules of perspective, which in any event would have availed him little in his conquest of landscape.' 

3. Foregrounds

The highly-detailed, sharply-focused plants, animals, rocks etc. in his foregrounds are designed to make the viewer feel connected to the picture space. He would sometimes put a tree there to help provide scale. Sometimes these were dead (symbolic) and sometimes they were lacking leaves, so as to leave gaps through which the landscape would be visible. 

4. Light and Shadow

'The lighting of the landscape is artificial and rather arbitrary in the nearer distances.' But while overall it 'tends to be flat, for the sake of over-all clarity, tree foliage and rocks are usually accented in light and shadow.' Few things in Patinir's landscapes cast shadows, and if they do they are rather weak ones.

5. Colour

Flemish painting deployed the formula of the 'three distances' - reddish brown in the foreground, green in the middle and then that beautiful blue for the distance, a colour I've talked about on this blog before. Patinir, though, went beyond this simple schema, using different colours to create transitions. 'The far distant blue permits little color play, though Patinir varies its intensity and may shade it to green or gray. Bright red may occur in its traditional role as the local color of the costume of a foreground figure, and touches of it may also spark the sky, or a distant earthly or infernal fire. The sky is usually shaded from a bright, creamy tone on the horizon through white and bluish white to a deep azure blue at the frame.' 

6. Sky

When it comes to weather effects, Patinir's skies usually contain 'white cumulus clouds, evoking the mood of a clear, late summer afternoon, the atmosphere cleared of dust by a recent rain.' The subject of the painting may require a change to this of course - Koch relates St. Jerome's 'dark night of the soul' to the blackness in the sky above him (see above), and the same can be said of other works like the Prado's The Temptations of Saint Anthony. 

7. Ground

Here we see 'overlapping folds of earth' with land either swelling from a darker shade to a bright summit or vice versa. 'In either case a contour line is created when dark and light meet, clarifying the earth mass.' 

8. Water

'From the trickle of a foreground stream to rivers that empty in the foreground or meander in the distance, from ponds and lakes to great bays, water is an important element of the Master's world landscape.' Koch notices that it is always 'smooth or gently rippled, but never angry', even when the religious stories being illustrated might suggest turbulent waters or rough waves. 

9. Trees

Patinir's 'compact, trimly rounded, distant trees' are produced with dots of paint that were referred to by the late sixteenth century artist-writer Karel Van Mander as getippelt. Koch doesn't translate this term but I see it implies light, quick steps (and hence a street prostitute in modern slang!) 

10. Rocks

Finally, rock formations are particularly memorable elements in all his landscapes and dominate the National Gallery's Saint Jerome. I've always thought of these as 'fantastical' but Koch believes Patinir was 'deeply affected by the noted landmarks along the Meuse River around Namur and Dinant: the Marche-les-Dames, a bright gray wall which rises precipitously from the river; the bluish limestone Rochers de Frènes; and the dramatic chimney-like Bayard Rock at Dinant. What appear to be melodramatic rock fantasies in Patinir's paintings are really constructions based upon his personal observation of nature.' 

Joachim Patinir, Landscape with Saint Jerome (detail), 1516-17