Pieter Aertsen, Rhyparographer  

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"Pieter Aertsen, Rhyparographer" is an essay by Reindert L. Falkenburg on Pieter Aertsen (1507-1575) as rhyparographer.

Abstract[1]

This article focuses on the rhetorical figure of the 'paradoxical encomium' (the paradoxical eulogy) as the generic principle for the still life paintings by the Dutch painter Pieter Aertsen (1507-1575), the inventor of the genre. It is shown how Aertsen used the idiom of contemporary art with an artistically and socially high status for his own experiments in 'rhyparography', a mode of pictorial expression associated with the 'paradoxical encomium.

Excerpt[2]

In art-historical surveys that attempt to show how the still life genre emerged in the 16th Century, one of the principal theses is that the genre did not really come to fruition ex nihilo, but that there was a rejuvenation, a reanimation of a genre that existed in the ancient world. According to this thesis, first suggested by Sterling in 1952, during the Renaissance, a period when artists were struggling to revive the ancient art forms, certain painters hit on the idea of breathing new life into what the ancient author Pliny described as rhyparography, the painting of humble objects. Pliny had called this a 'less elevated genre' in which the Greek painter Piraeicus had achieved great fame with his paintings of 'barbers and shoemakers shops, donkeys, food and similar things'. These paintings afforded the viewer 'endless delight and fetched higher prices than the greatest works of many other painters'. Sterling had no proof that 16th-century artists were fired by the idea of reanimating ancient rhyparography, but it is surely far from coincidence that in his Batavia, which appeared in 1588, the Dutch humanist Hadrianus Junius described the art produced by Pieter Aertsen in these very terms:

We cannot pass over Pieter, nicknamed 'the Tall, in silence In my opinion one can compare him with justice to Piraeicus, whom Pliny mentions, in fact he may even be preferred to [this ancient painter]

He apparently set himself to paint humble things and he has, in everyone's view, reached the heights of fame with these humble objects Therefore, I am of the opinion that he, like the other [i e Piraeicus] should be awarded the epithet rhyparographer, because of the grace that shines in all his works when he depicts, in a most tasteful way [elegantissune] the bodies and dress of peasant girls, food, vegetables, slaughtered chickens, ducks, cod and other fish sorts, and all manner of kitchen utensils besides the perfect daylight, the endless variety of his paintings never tires the eyes [of the beholder]

It is not known whether, or to what extent there were any contacts between Junius and Aertsen. However natural it may have been for a humanist scholar of the 16th Century to view the art of his contemporaries through the perspective of rhetorical concepts of ancient and modern writings on art — not only those of Pliny and Vitruvius, but of Alberti and Leonardo too — there is nothing to suggest that Aertsen saw his own art in these terms.

According to Norman Bryson, who supports a structural-semiotic view of art history and has recently described this in a book on still life art, such indications are quite unnecessary: the still life genre is by its very nature 'rhopography', as he prefers to call it. It is worthwhile pausing for a moment to consider Bryson's views, since, however generally, they do open our eyes to a number of interesting aspects of Pieter Aertsen's paintings.