The Story of Bruges

by Ernest Gilliat-Smith

CHAPTER XXIV
The Painters and the Pictures of Bruges in the Fifteenth Century

FROM time immemorial the culture of the arts, and notably of the art of painting, has largely entered into the lives alike of the people of Flanders and of the kindred folk of the neighbouring provinces. Thanks to the influence and the fostering care of the great monastic houses, which were everywhere scattered about these lands, the races which inhabited them had at a very early period attained no little proficiency, not only in the science of construction, but in the art of adorning their buildings with sculpture and pictorial representations, and it may be justly said that the monks of Flanders—her first artists and her first artisans—made possible that glorious page in the history of Flemish painting which begins with the divine harmonies of Hubert van Eyck and ends with the colossal splendour of Rubens.

The chronicles which these cloistered toilers compiled, the books which they made beautiful with gold and colour and fantastic devices, the frescoes which of late years have been brought to light in all parts of the country, these things bear witness to it.

Adelard II., Abbot of St. Trond, who died in 1082, was renowned in his day as a painter. At Liège there were frescoes in the Church of St. Martin dating from the close of the nine hundreds, the Cathedral of St. Lambert in the same city was similarly adorned years before the fire which destroyed it at the end of the twelfth century, and at this epoch the artist-monks of the Abbeys of Lobbes and of Stavelot were famous throughout Europe.

The great Abbey of St. Bavon at Ghent as early as the eleventh century possessed a school of artists. Some of their illuminated manuscripts have actually come down to us, and are at present in the Ghent university library. At the little town of Maeseyck in Holland they still preserve an eighth-century manuscript adorned by Harlinde and Rilinde, two of the abbesses who ruled the convent which in those days flourished there. Among the seven hundred and thirty-four manuscripts in the municipal library at Bruges, and in the library of the Bruges diocesan seminary, there are some which date from the thirteenth century, a few from the twelfth. Many of them are of rare beauty. Notably, at the city library, a thirteenth-century missal embellished with exquisite miniatures (No. 314), and, at the seminary, a Cistercian missal and a Cistercian Breviary of the fourteen hundreds, and a splendid Valerius Maximus in four volumes, with paintings which are perhaps by John van Eyck. The greater number of these books were written and illustrated in the famous Cistercian Abbey which once stood on the Dunes at Coxyde, between Furnes and Ostend, or by the monks of the affiliated house, called Ter Doest (All Saints), which Hacket founded at Lisseweghe.

Bruges in the thirteen and in the fourteen hundreds was famed for her miniaturists and her illuminators. The Bibliothèque royale at Brussels contains a whole series of manuscripts which once formed part of the sumptuous libraries of the last Flemish Counts—of Robert of Bethune, of Louis of Maele, of Philip the Rash, and which one and all bear witness to the marvellous skill and untiring patience of the men who wrote and adorned them; these assuredly were not all monks, many of them, doubtless, were laymen, members of that great artist-guild of St. Luke, of which we shall have something to say later on. Some of them basked in the smiles of princes, like John van Eyck, whom Philippe l’Asseuré enriched and to whose son he stood godfather, and who enjoyed too the patronage of the Regent Bedford; or Simon Marmion, who received from Charles the Terrible a sum equal to no less than three hundred and sixty pounds for a single book of Hours; or Jean Fouquet, the friend and confidential adviser of Louis XI. Others there were content with the position of sleek upper servant in the household of some lesser Mæcenas, and others again, who longed to hold such a post, but were unable to obtain it; men like poor Jehan Gillemer, for example, who, on the tramp in search of a patron, was presently arrested as a spy by the agents of Louis XI. and handed over to the tender mercies of Tristam l’Hermite, a circumstance, notes M. Lecoy de la Marche,[43] not too deplorable, since to it we are indebted for the details of his life which have come down to us, and are thereby enabled to lift a corner of the veil which covers the manners and customs of one of the most interesting corporations of the middle ages.

A poor, weak-spirited credulous creature was this obscure miniature painter, but for all that he seems to have had the soul of an artist and no little skill in his calling. Sometimes, indeed, he worked for princes, but he by no means despised the custom of their menials, was not above mere penmanship, and did not think it beneath him to alter or complete, even for a humble client, the unfinished work of a confrère. He journeyed half over Europe to dispose of his productions, to obtain new orders, to have his works bound in the most artistic fashion, to seek inspiration from the best models and to perfect himself generally in his art; and he used to collect wherever he went and from whomsoever he came in contact—from churches, from monasteries, from the private libraries of the nobles whose houses he frequented, from the menials whose acquaintance he made in the servants’ hall, from courtiers, from begging friars, from the chance companions whom he drank with at inns, sometimes, perhaps, new receipts for mixing his colours and for laying on and burnishing gold, more often strange forms of devotion and talismans warranted to cure every imaginable ill, from love-philtres and charms to soothe toothache and settle disputes, to astrological formulæ to drive away the devil, and, above all, to enable him to keep in order ‘those five great hulking apprentices’ at home who always would idle away their time, and whenever he ventured to say a word to them ill-used him.

Amongst the illuminators enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke were all sorts and conditions of men; from polished courtiers like John van Eyck to men doubtless of as questionable character as the obscure individual, half artist, half perhaps fortune teller, though, for the matter of that, he swore on the damnation of his soul he had had no dealings with familiar spirits, whose vagabond life the rack of Tristam has revealed to us. But whatever their social rank may have been, like the monks who worked alongside of them, the cloister was the rock from which they were hewn, and ‘the exquisite work which some of them produced is sufficient to alone explain the origin of Flemish panel painting.’

Thus, Monsieur Fiérens-Gevaert recently,[44] and Lübke and Wauters and Jules Helbig, before him, though these experts tell us that sculpture and wall painting had likewise some measure of influence, and traces of frescoes almost as old as the buildings they once adorned have of late years been found all over Flanders.

At Bruges, for example, we have the frescoes which Mr. Weale discovered at Notre Dame in the Chapel of St. Victor at the entrance to the tower. Here the lower portion of the wall was diapered in crimson and gold, and above were depicted five angels playing on instruments of music. Mr. Weale describes these paintings as exceedingly beautiful and in a sufficiently good state of preservation; alas! they have been again covered with whitewash. Others were found behind the woodwork of the churchwarden’s pew at the west end of the nave, and yet another in the southern ambulatory near the sacristy door—a beautiful figure of St. Louis, dating apparently from the middle of the fourteen hundreds, and there can be no doubt whatever that, if the whitewash were carefully removed, it would be found that the whole building is similarly adorned. So too the Cathedral of St. Sauveur and the Church of St. Jacques, and, just outside the city, the Churches of Notre Dame at Lisseweghe and at Damme, in all of which there are, or rather there were mural paintings. Indeed, those in the last church extended round the whole building. Unfortunately they were much damaged in removing the whitewash, and they have again been hidden from view. Other vestiges of wall painting have been found in various parts of the city, and we know from documentary evidence that in 1336 Jan van Jabbeke was commissioned to paint a series of frescoes in the Justice Chamber of the old Hôtel de Ville. Even the vaults and brick graves in the churchyards were thus adorned, though in ruder fashion. Several discovered at Varssenaere, in the cemetery of Notre Dame, and in the Place St. Jean, where an old church dedicated to that saint once stood, have been bodily removed and are now in the museum beneath the Belfry. They suffered very little injury in the process and are in a marvellous state of preservation.