Oil on panel
48 ½ x 36 ¾ in. (123.2 x 93.3 cm.)
Provenance:
Anon. Sale, Lepke, Berlin, 8 May 1906.
With F. Gurlitt, Berlin.
This impressive work depicts an allegory of Spring. Iconographically the voluptuous female appears to be a combination of two goddesses, Venus and Flora. The ancient Italian goddess of flowers, Flora was the Roman equivalent of the Greek deity Chloris, wife of Zephyr, the west wind of springtime, who begets flowers. The depiction here corresponds quite closely to the description given in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a source which Janssens adhered strictly to throughout his career. Ripa writes how Flora could be used to represent Spring, citing a description from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: crowned with flowers and surrounded by white, red and yellow blooms, her beautiful face was rosy and milky in complexion, her teeth like pearls and her lips like coral. (‘Di rose, e latte, è la sua faccia e bella, son perle i denti, e le labra coralli.’; op. cit., Rome, 1603, New York, 1984 ed., pp. 474). The inclusion of the figure of Cupid also suggests the figure might be identifiable as Venus, the goddess of love. Ripa (ibid.) refers to the ‘lascivi amori’ of spring, and the suggestive way in which Cupid touches her breast makes explicit the sensuality associated with this season.
The grand, monumental depiction of the female figure in our work reveals Janssens’s great interest in antique sculpture and the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, which he would have been able to study first hand in Rome. Although he also borrowed from more contemporary sources such as Caravaggio and the Carracci it was classical art that was to be his lifelong inspiration (see below). A number of versions closely related to our picture are also known, something that attests to the popularity of the composition. These include a copy sold at Lepke, Berlin, 13 April 1908, lot 116 (as Flemish School; oil on canvas); another sold, with an Allegory of Autumn, Sotheby’s, New York, 14 October 1992, lot 104, as attributed to Janssens; and two works recorded at the Witt Library, London, one in Mainz, the other in the Acton Collection, Florence. In the Berlin and Acton compositions, Venus’s breast is covered.
It is probable that our picture once formed part of a series depicting the four seasons. Other compositions of comparable dimensions and with similar three-quarter-length female figures are known. Among these are: an autograph Allegory of Autumn (sold, Christie’s, New York, 31 May 1991, lot 46); an Allegory of Spring (a different composition to our work) and an Allegory of Summer (sold Christie’s, New York, 16 January 1992, lot 31, as circle of Janssens); and another Allegory of Spring (again different to ours), offered for sale, Deurbergue and Delvaux, Paris, 15 November 1991, lot 12, as Janssens and Jan Breughel II.
Born in c. 1575, Abraham Jannsens was apprenticed first to the painter and art dealer Jan Snellick I. He completed his training in Italy, where he is recorded in Rome in 1598 and 1601 (as a pupil of Willem van Nieulandt I). The Diano and Callisto of 1601 (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest) reveals his fascination for antique and Renaissance sculpture, something that would last throughout his career. In c. 1602 he returned to Antwerp, where he became a master in the Guild of Saint Luke and senior dean in 1607-8, a sign of his importance there. His position as one of the leading artists in Antwerp was challenged by Rubens’s return there in 1608. Over the next ten years the two supplied works for three known ensembles. For one of these, that in the stateroom of the Antwerp Stadhuis, Janssens painted the magnificent Scaldis and Antwerpia, which is an ingenious transposition of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel (1610; Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp). The other two ensembles (one in the assembly hall of the Oude Voetboog in the Antwerp Stadhuis, the other a series of Roman emperors, now in the Jagdschloss Grunewald, Berlin) reveal the differences between the two artists. While Rubens’s great skill lay in fusing many different types of art into a new and distinctive style, Janssens, however, continued to borrow more literally from his favourite sources of classical sculpture. He also drew from Dutch late Mannerism (the Lascivia 0f 1618 in the Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels is based on a print by Goltzius) and the Bolognese school (see, for example, the Coronation of the Virgin [St Jakobsberg, Antwerp] which draws on works by the Carracci). Although Rubens was to overshadow Janssens, the latter nonetheless continued to work and be held in high regard in his native city until his death there in 1632.
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