The gender of colors in Dutch art theory

Abstract

Philip Sohm's 1995 article, 'Gendered style in Italian art criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia' , revealed a striking constant in art theory below the Alps: ideas about painting styles, techniques and materials were defined to a great extent by a gendered vocabulary centering on the masculine-feminine opposition. 1 One of Sohm's key quotations, Michelangelo's reported negative judgment on oil as a binding medium, deserves elaboration in the context of Dutch art.The sculptor allegedly preferred fresco and condemned oil paint as 'effeminate'; the art of the Netherlands, traditionally associated with the new oil medium, was likewise, in Michelangelo's view, only appreciated by women -especially very young or very old ones at that, as well as nuns.In Francisco de Holanda's original account, Michelangelo asserts that the art of the Northerners is only suitable for the feeble-minded and has a strong emotional effect on them, for it concentrates on the mere surface of things and on deceiving the eye: 'in Flanders they paint to deceive the gaze directed at the external' . 2 We do not know whether the master ever said this; what is more important is that contemporary Dutchmen took the statement seriously.Both Karel van Mander and Samuel van Hoogstraten repeated that Michelangelo regarded oil as only fit for the weaker sex (calling it vrouwen ambacht, woman's craft, and wijvenwerk, wives' work).3 In their treatises, which contain specific information on artists' materials and practical issues such as brushwork, the gendered language attributed to Michelangelo resonates.The gender division was related to the Italian stereotypical view of painting materials in the Netherlands, an assumption rooted in the myth about the invention of oil paint.It was said that this Netherlandish technique was pitting a deceptive, seductive, and illusory art against the true conception of art based on antiquity's linear purity.4 Van Hoogstraten, for instance, said that Jan van Eyck only discovered oil paint 'after long, alchemistic research' , a view he shared with his Italian predecessor, Vasari, who for the same reasons described Van Eyck as a 'sophist' , seeking intellectual misdirection.5 As late as the eighteenth century, Arnold Houbraken condemned a style that indulged in the blending (verdrijven) of colors, which led to weak chiaroscuro and soft highlights, calling this a feminine (vrouwelyk) manner -in this, we hear a remote echo of De Holanda.6 This article explores the afterlife of Michelangelo's remarks in Dutch art theory.Even though the fresco versus oil dichotomy lost its practical significance for painters in the Netherlands, the opposition of a masculine Detail fig. 5 Rembrandt, The conspiracy of Claudius

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