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拍品专文
Willem Key was, as Max Friedländer put it, a ‘harmonizer and mediator in an age marked by a lack of discipline’. Key established his artistic reputation as an eccentric cultivator of a local style but was also a great innovator who reconciled disparate yet concurrent artistic traditions in sixteenth-century Flanders: the Netherlandish and the Italian. After leaving his native Breda for Antwerp as an adolescent, Key began an apprenticeship in 1529 in the studio of Pieter Coecke van Aelst. The vibrant studio afforded the young Key the opportunity to work with some of the greatest patrons of the period and study imperial collections with outstanding examples of works from classical antiquity as well as more modern Italian masters. He subsequently travelled to Liège, where he was a member of the workshop of Lambert Lombard, an erudite artist who helped Key understand and employ the theoretical principles of Renaissance art, from circa 1538-9. These experiences formed the basis of Key’s unique artistic disposition and, upon his return to Antwerp in 1542, helped him become one of the leading artists in the city.
Though portraiture accounts for roughly two-thirds of Key’s known output, he was also a gifted painter of multi-figure religious and historical subjects. The present painting testifies both to Key’s achievements in this arena and the manner in which the artist merged his dual artistic influences. The painting’s smooth, almost enamel-like modeling is distinctly Flemish, while Koenraad Jonckheere has recently proposed that the artist’s use of the standing Cupid may derive from his knowledge of Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, which had been in the Flemish city since 1514 (op. cit., p. 174). This reflects a change in Key’s manner of depicting children which took place in the 1550s and, provided the connection with Michelangelo’s sculpture is accurate, suggests he may have visited Bruges around 1550. Similarly, the use of a reclining Venus would seem to be modeled on Venetian prototypes by Titian and other artists, perhaps filtered through paintings by Jan van Scorel and Maarten van Heemskerck. The strikingly diagonal bed, however, appears to have been Key’s own contribution to Netherlandish painting, one that would be adopted by other artists, including Jacob de Backer, who may have spent time in Key’s workshop.
Several pieces of evidence suggest this painting enjoyed considerable early fame. A workshop copy is today in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, having been acquired by the Duke in or before 1710 (see Jonckheere, op. cit., no. A110), while a reduced copy also recently appeared Bruun-Rasmussen, Copenhagen, 29 November 2022, lot 911/144. Moreover, it features at upper left in a painting of a collector’s cabinet by Hieronymus Francken II (fig. 1; Sinebrychoff Museum, Helsinki). Finally, as Jonckheere has proposed (loc. cit.), Lucas de Heere may have had the painting in mind when he penned a sonnet on a painting of a naked woman by Willem Key (for the sonnet, see Jonckheere, op. cit., Appendix I, p. 229). De Heere, drawing upon the themes of Pliny’s account of the classical competition between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, relays how two friends entered a room and were startled by a nude woman whom they believed they had awakened. Filled with shame, they touched the panel and realized that they were deceived.
Though portraiture accounts for roughly two-thirds of Key’s known output, he was also a gifted painter of multi-figure religious and historical subjects. The present painting testifies both to Key’s achievements in this arena and the manner in which the artist merged his dual artistic influences. The painting’s smooth, almost enamel-like modeling is distinctly Flemish, while Koenraad Jonckheere has recently proposed that the artist’s use of the standing Cupid may derive from his knowledge of Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, which had been in the Flemish city since 1514 (op. cit., p. 174). This reflects a change in Key’s manner of depicting children which took place in the 1550s and, provided the connection with Michelangelo’s sculpture is accurate, suggests he may have visited Bruges around 1550. Similarly, the use of a reclining Venus would seem to be modeled on Venetian prototypes by Titian and other artists, perhaps filtered through paintings by Jan van Scorel and Maarten van Heemskerck. The strikingly diagonal bed, however, appears to have been Key’s own contribution to Netherlandish painting, one that would be adopted by other artists, including Jacob de Backer, who may have spent time in Key’s workshop.
Several pieces of evidence suggest this painting enjoyed considerable early fame. A workshop copy is today in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, having been acquired by the Duke in or before 1710 (see Jonckheere, op. cit., no. A110), while a reduced copy also recently appeared Bruun-Rasmussen, Copenhagen, 29 November 2022, lot 911/144. Moreover, it features at upper left in a painting of a collector’s cabinet by Hieronymus Francken II (fig. 1; Sinebrychoff Museum, Helsinki). Finally, as Jonckheere has proposed (loc. cit.), Lucas de Heere may have had the painting in mind when he penned a sonnet on a painting of a naked woman by Willem Key (for the sonnet, see Jonckheere, op. cit., Appendix I, p. 229). De Heere, drawing upon the themes of Pliny’s account of the classical competition between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, relays how two friends entered a room and were startled by a nude woman whom they believed they had awakened. Filled with shame, they touched the panel and realized that they were deceived.