The books under review here support exhibitions of works by the Haarlem artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) on the 450th anniversary of his death. With The Allure of Rome, spearheaded by Tatjana Bartsch, Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett exhibited their Van Heemskerck holdings, comprising most of the drawings he executed during his Roman sojourn (1532– c. 1537). Relevant paintings, prints, and material culture also appeared. Shortly after The Allure of Rome’s closing, three exhibitions simply entitled Maarten van Heemskerck, staged by Bartsch’s mentor and “dean” of Van Heemskerck studies, Ilja Veldman, displayed the artist’s paintings, prints, and select drawings. Veldman’s exhibitions ran concurrently in Van Heemskerck’s North Holland stomping grounds, Alkmaar and Haarlem, at the Stedelijk, Teylers, and Frans Hals Museums. Jointly, they comprised the first ever holistic presentation of Van Heemskerck’s sizable oeuvre. Although some crucial works did not appear (e.g., The Walters Art Museum’s monumental Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the World, 1535/36), the shows were nearly comprehensive. The catalogues under review will function as standalone books assessing Van Heemskerck’s art. This longer-term use, moreover, appears to be their primary purpose, as neither gives readers a vivid sense of the exhibition it supports.

These efforts punctuate a revival of scholarly interest in Van Heemskerck after a relatively long silence. Well into the 2000s, Veldman’s compilation of her previously published articles on the artist, Maerten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century (1977), stood as the only in depth illumination of the artist in his milieu.^[1] Her compilation of his massive print oeuvre (numbering over 500) contains no interpretive commentary.^[2] Catalogues raisonnés by Rainald Grosshans and Jefferson Harrison published in 1980 and 1987, respectively, cover his paintings.^[3] His Roman drawings, though omnipresent as illustrations in books on sixteenth-century Rome, had not received any sustained critical attention since Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger published a facsimile of the Kupferstichkabinett’s albums.^[4] Van Heemskerck’s Roman sojourn has figured most prominently in recent scholarship. Martin Stritt’s 2004 monograph on the Helen canvas, which Van Heemskerck painted in Rome, is the first exploration of the painting’s origins, sources, and significance.^[5] In 2012, Tatjana Bartsch and Peter Seiler co-edited an anthology with essays by Stritt and others, including the present reviewer.^[6] In 2019, Bartsch published a comprehensive account of the artist’s extant Roman drawings, and I published a book elaborating Van Heemskerck’s interest in Rome’s ruins and their impact on his post-Roman oeuvre.^[7]

The 200-plus extant drawings Van Heemskerck made in Rome comprise the most complete document of the Eternal City’s antiquities by a single artist of the early modern period. He drew the city’s vistas, ancient ruins, Renaissance buildings, antique sculptures, ornament, and the occasional figure from a fresco in an astonishing variety of techniques, pictorial frameworks, and scales. Single buildings, building groups, panoramas, and individual sculptures – in isolation, in parts, and in collections – appear in varied combinations: pen and ink hatching, ink wash, red chalk, and black charcoal. While important drawings from his Roman phase are scattered, the 150-plus drawings in two albums in Berlin remain fundamental evidence for understanding how Van Heemskerck approached Rome. Album I contains most of Van Heemskerck’s “sketchbook,” a portable bound booklet of small sheets; however, it has long presented these drawings out of their original sequence. Album II contains larger unbound sheets of varying sizes, plus drawings by other hands.

The Allure of Rome attempts a holistic integration of Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings with the rest of his oeuvre. Its twelve concise, chronologically organized chapters by thirteen scholars is followed by a checklist with thumbnail images of exhibited works. The book mostly synthesizes earlier scholarship on Van Heemskerck before Rome, his technique, choices of monuments, interactions with Italian contemporaries, his reuse of Roman drawings in later prints and paintings, as well as their posthumous provenance and fortuna critica. Within this framework, The Allure of Rome offers some new insights. Erik Eising explores how earlier Haarlem paintings could have influenced the young Van Heemskerck. He follows Van Mander’s suggestion that Van Heemskerck’s admiration for Albert Ouwater led to his emulation of Ouwater’s crowded figure groupings and physiognomies. Utilizing digital technology, Georg Josef Dietz, Antje Penz, and Carsten Wintermann discovered that time has faded the broad range of hues within the drawings’ palette. Thus, Van Heemskerck’s careful drawings were once livelier descriptions of their subjects than today’s monotoned appearances suggest. Bartsch’s definitive 2019 reconstructed sequence of drawings in the Roman sketchbook reappears here in a clear diagram, created by Georg Josef Dietz and Antje Penz. Francesca Mattei offers a fresh, digitally informed assessment of the Kupferstichkabinett album’s de-attributed drawings – the so-called “Mantuaner Skizzenbuch” and those by an unknown artist, dubbed by Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger as “Anonymous A,” works attributed by Nicole Dacos to the Frisian painter and Van Heemskerck’s Roman companion, Hermannus Posthumus (1512–1566). Mattei conclusively dates those drawings much later than the 1530s and refutes previous speculation of their authorship by either of the Floris brothers. Enrico Fontalan closes the volume with contemporary photographs of Heemskerck’s vistas. These pictures situate Van Heemskerck’s drawings at the interstices of accuracy, invention, and the passage of time.

Even as The Allure of Rome consolidates ideas from earlier publications, it ignores or misrepresents them. Just a few examples: Hans-Ulrich Kessler’s chapter, ostensibly about the importance of the Roman drawings for Van Heemskerck’s paintings, ignores earlier scholarship about their meanings. On Momus, Kessler cites David Cast without acknowledging Cast’s ideas even as he deploys them. Shira Brisman’s recent article on Momus receives no mention.^[8] Cecilia Mazzetti di Pietralata’s “Players and Networks” replicates Kathleen Christian’s essay on Van Heemskerck’s Roman contacts without citing it (even though Christian’s essay appears in the 2012 anthology that Bartsch co-edited).^[9] Melzer finds “doubtful” (193 n. 50) an assertion I never made, that Van Heemskerck’s drawings enjoyed a larger audience than his prints. And the catalogue contains sentence-long entries with bibliographies limited to Bartsch’s 2019 catalogue. Thus, while The Allure of Rome will serve any reader as a weighty introduction to Van Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, scholars should still consult monographs by Bartsch and DiFuria.

Beyond this recent focus on his Roman drawings, Ilja Veldman’s Maarten Van Heemskerck provides the first assessment of the artist’s paintings since Grosshans and Harrison. Her book blends both chronological and thematic structures. She begins with the young Van Heemskerck, taking us from Haarlem to Rome and back in four chapters. She then addresses the forty-year post-Roman period in eight more loosely chronologized chapters about specified topics, such as the monumental St. Lawrence Altarpiece (ca. 1540; recently brought from Linköping, Sweden, to its original home in Alkmaar’s St. Lawrence Church). Later chapters address: Van Heemskerck’s gradual achievement of a thriving print practice after the 1540s; his sustained employment of antiquity and humanism; and the impact of the image debate on his work. An assessment of his materials and techniques follows with an epilogue. Throughout, Veldman shows us works and addresses questions that had previously received nominal attention. For example, Van Heemskerck’s exquisite drawings of putti from Giulio Romano’s Sala di Costantino frescoes – now in the Teylers and Rijksmuseum – receive their first integration into Van Heemskerck studies. Veldman also provides the first modern account of the artist’s approach to stained-glass design. Also valuable are her continual reminders about his post-Roman altarpiece works lost to the beeldenstorm.

This book’s greatest strength, however, is its embedded biographical details with Van Heemskerck’s artistic trajectory. Veldman describes his career-long cultivation of a prestigious patronage network, the various personages with whom he collaborated and for whom he worked. Wherever possible, she shows us their donor portraits among the crowded figure groups of his altarpieces. She also expounds on his two marriages, his network of friends in the northern Netherlands, the use of his bridal fund for charitable projects, and his will. Thus, this book integrates Van Heemskerck’s art and life. He now appears in multiple dimensions: a sophisticatd artist with a singular artistic vision, an evolving market savvy, and a versatile skillset that he continued to adapt over the turbulent changes of the middle third of the sixteenth century.

However, questions remain. Veldman claims that Jan Gossart “had the greatest influence on the young Heemskerck apart from Jan van Scorel” (76), but chiefly reiterates observations by Grosshans, Harrison, and the present reviewer on formal similarities in their portraits. On a related note, she has titled a newly discovered three-quarter-length painting, “Genre Scene,”(private collection), despite its portrayal of no genre activity and its likely status as one of Van Heemskerck’s animated portraits. In general, Veldman reports much more than she analyzes. Most of her text recounts  when and where Van Heemskerck executed his works, their subject matter, and patron. But we learn less about what these works might have meant to their audiences than a book this big would suggest. The result is disappointing in a publication about an artist whose works employ sophisticated poetics that invite viewers to draw judicious and copious interpretations.

Much discourse on Van Heemskerck since Van Mander stronly suggests the artist’s singularity, a condition Koenraad Jonckheere noted in his review of Bartsch and Seiler’s anthology, despite that book’s chapters elaborating Van Heemskerck’s Roman network and his post-Roman audience for his drawings.^[10] Moreover, Van Heemskerck’s style does not match the modern definition of Netherlandish art. Even with his Netherlandish antiquarian cohort he occupies a marginal place. Neither celebrated as the “Flemish Raphael,” like his contemporary, Frans Floris (1516–70), nor as the heroic culmination of Van Mander’s biographies, like his Haarlem admirer, Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Heemskerck remains an odd man out. In the seventeenth century, as Veldman notes in her epilogue, he was already seen as “out of keeping with the balanced seventeenth-century classicism and realism of Dutch genre art.” (244). He has never enjoyed high-profile blockbuster presentations, like Gossart. Somehow, it has seemed that no matter how hard we have worked to compare his art to his Netherlandish and Italian contemporaries, to demonstrate his art’s connectedness to its time and place via artistic and humanistic collaborations, he has mistakenly appeared to have worked in an art historical vacuum, rendering figures and settings in his unmistakably unique style, which Friedländer long ago marginalized as “noisy and blatant.”^[11] Van Heemskerck’s historiographic status has thus lacked accurate definition – until now, that is, thanks to these useful volumes.

No scholar has done more to show us the complete Van Heemskerck than Ilja Veldman. And Tatjana Bartsch’s status as Veldman’s student makes her unmatched expertise on Van Heemskerck’s drawings a significant part of Veldman’s legacy. With these exhibitions and the two volumes under review here, Maarten van Heemskerck can assume his rightful place as one of the sixteenth-century’s most important Netherlandish artists.

Arthur J. DiFuria
Savannah College of Art and Design

[1] Ilja Veldman, Maerten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century, trans., Michael Hoyle (Amsterdam: Gary Schwartz, 1977).
[2] Ilja Veldman, comp., Ger Luijten, ed., The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts 1450–1700: Maarten van Heemskerck, 2 vols. (Roosendaal – Amsterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive), 1994.
[3] Rainald Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck: Die Gemälde (Berlin: Boettcher) 1980; Jefferson Harrison,The Paintings of Maerten van Heemskerck: A Catalogue Raisonée (PhD. diss., University of Virginia, 1987.
[4] Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger, Die Römischen Skizzenbücher von Marten van Heemskerck im Königlichen Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, 2 vols. (Berlin: Bard, 1913–1916, facsimile edition, Soest: Davaco, 1975).
[5] Martin Stritt, Die schöne Helena in den Romruinen. Überlegungen zu einem Gemälde Maarten van Heemskercks, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld, 2004)
[6] Tatjana Bartsch and Peter Seiler, eds., Rom Zeichnen. Maarten van Heemskerck 1532–1536/37 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag), 2012.
[7] Tatjana Bartsch, Maarten van Heemskerck. Römische Studien zwischen Sachlichkeit und Imagination, Veröffentlichungen der Biblioteca Hertziana, Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Hirmer), 2019; Arthur J. DiFuria, Maarten Van Heemskerck’s Rome (Leiden: Brill Publishers), 2019.
[8] David Cast, “Marten van Heemskerck’s Momus Criticizing the Works of the Gods: a problem of Erasmian Iconography,” Simiolus 7 (1974): 22–34; Shira Brisman, “Maerten van Heemskerck’s Momus and the moment of critique,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 73–74 (2020): 23–40.
[9] Kathleen Christian “For the Delight of Friends, Citizens, and Strangers. Maarten van Heemskerck’s Drawings of Antiquities Collections in Rome,” in Bartsch and Seiler, 129–156.
[10] Koenraad Jonckheere, Review of Rom Zeichnen, Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews 30 no. 2 (2013): 39. RSA review.
[11] Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting v. 13 (Leiden: Springer, 1937, trans. Heinz Norden, 1975), 43.