In Gouda, city of cheese and candles, an exhibition is devoted to candlelight in Dutch painting. Cheese in art could also have been done, but there are many more candlelit paintings: in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, flames were the main source of light after the sun and moon. To emphasize how dark the world was after sunset, they have arranged one exhibition room in Museum Gouda as a seventeenth-century interior, which is lit by twenty softly flickering fake candles. Candles were expensive, so a chandelier full was already a great luxury. Still, by contemporary standards, it is an unusually dim room.
This theatrical setting is not just for the exciting experience added to the exhibition, but also really contributes something. The visitor understands: the painter of a candlelight scene had to make do with so little light. And so dimly lit, his painting then hung in houses and churches. If he wanted his depiction to be legible, he had to make sure that the most important parts glowed in the dark. Oil paint does not emit light by itself, so the glow had to be suggested by means of contrasts. Light strokes will look like light if you paint a deep dark around them. In most paintings in Gouda, the light source is therefore the whitest part.
The most beautiful flames were painted around 1700 by Godfried Schalcken: blue near the fuse, orange above, white-hot in the middle. They shine convincingly through the wax at the top of the candle and reflect in the melted edge. Further away from the flame, the reflection is weaker, but – also with the other painters – all sorts of things still glitter in the dark: jewellery, eyes, nails, skin and hair (if shiny), table edges, crockery and fish on a night market. A clever candlelight painter scatters the subtle reflections into the farthest corners of his composition.
Not logical
Gerard van Honthorst, the Utrecht painter who worked in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century and who mastered Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro there, proves that a candlelight scene does not necessarily have to be logical to convince. In his Mocking of Christ (c. 1614, a special loan from a private London collection) the candle itself is less bright than its reflection on the bystanders. Their bright sides have been enhanced by Van Honthorst to make the painting stand out in the dark – perhaps a dim chapel in a Roman church. Too much light for that one candle, that’s not right, but it’s okay because it works. The Body of Christ is an anatomical still life filled with nuances of light and shadow, the grinning lower lip of the mocker in the lower right has been given an effective line of light, and the figure in the upper right is illuminated from below as the narrator of horror stories with a flashlight below for even more eerie effect. chin holds.
In order to get rid of the candle as the dominant extreme, Van Honthorst and other Caravaggists often concealed the light source by painting something in front of it. The light intensity of other picture elements was then no longer subordinate to that of the flame. In The meal at Emmaus (c. 1630) by Matthias Stom, the candle on the table is shielded by hand gestures, for example, and in Christiaen Dusarts Young man reading by candlelight (1645) the flame is largely hidden behind an open book. Above the pages, the reading boy’s profile glows. The twenty-first century viewer might think of an iPad for a moment. Perhaps in the future that will become an exhibition: paintings in which everything in the room is lit by screens. But in Gouda all the light still comes from candles.
#Godfried #Schalcken #painted #beautiful #candle #flames