In his book The procedure tells Harry Mulisch about a scientist who studies the origins of life. The story takes you past the legendary 16th-century Emperor Rudolf II in his Prague castle Hradcany, where alchemists work day and night with their flasks and retorts to unravel the secret of creation. In reality, too, Rudolf was an imperial dreamer, who identified with Orpheus, and collected everything that aroused his avid interest. Only state affairs interested him moderately – eventually his younger brother deposed him and locked him in his castle.
By that time, the emperor had already gathered the most famous scientists and artists around him in his Prague paradise. His menagerie included hundreds of species of animals, his gardens were full of fountains and mechanical statues. His private museum was the largest ever assembled, full of art and priceless curiosities. Naturally oversensitive, Rudolf had made the world come to him, as far as he could tolerate it. He was a great art lover, and he was an enlightened spirit who sheltered controversial thinkers of his time and left both Protestants and Jews in his empire in peace. .
To life
One of the people who brought Rudolf into his home was the southern Dutch artist Roelant Savery, who spent more than ten years at the Prague court. There is a collection of his drawings that really takes us back to Prague in the early 1600s. These are the drawings that Savery himself described as 'Nae t leue'; to life. About two hundred and fifty have been preserved, modest sketches and detailed drawings with ink and watercolor, applied with the tip of a brush. Forty-three of those drawings can now be seen at the exhibition Roelant Savery's wonderful world in the Mauritshuis.
Savery mainly made a name for himself with his animal and flower arrangements, which you can also view there, but it is the drawings that still make him a rare phenomenon. They are often made quickly, and sometimes so faded that you have to look closely. But if you give them attention, you suddenly find yourself, together with the artist, on a hill outside Prague, looking at the 16th-century city with its towers and Hradschin Castle.
With the artist you witness a group of Jews praying in the Prague synagogue, the Altneuschul, which still exists. On the back of the same sheet, Savery drew his fellow countryman, the cloth merchant Pieter Boddaert, asleep on a chair. Market traders, beggars, timber traders on the river, the artist captured everything. He often provided his sketches with notes ('dirty white stockings', 'rags'). Remarkably often he portrays his figures from the back or from the side, from which you can conclude that he usually did not ask his models for permission.
Make me a Brueghel
What was this Ed van der Elsken doing at the court of the art-loving emperor in 1610? Where did he live and what was his relationship to the emperor? Was he really sitting at the imperial dining table, between Kepler and Tycho Brahe, conversing with his master about the source of all life, as Mulisch described it?
Almost everything is speculation in this area, but it is suspected that Rudolf invited the artist from the Low Countries as the best representative of Pieter Bruegel's style. If the emperor couldn't get the original, he wanted something similar. Savery's drawings have also long been attributed to his Flemish predecessor.
Savery doesn't match Bruegel, but you get the link. You often have the impression that he worked on commission: 'Make me a Bruegel'. And the artist obeyed, squarely. Dancing villagers, birds in the sky, animals in a landscape, some of his paintings are so overflowing with livestock that your eye misses them. Even his flower still lifes are teeming with creatures. Just as Rudolf brought the world within his walls, Savery exhausted himself to cram the entire world into his paintings. Too much, too much, the modern viewer mutters.
But limit your field of view to a single figure and you will see how accurately he often depicted those creatures, just like the flowers. A wild boar in agony, a civet cat watching us. The highlight of Savery's animal portraits is an elephant rubbing against a tree. He observed such an animal with an intense attention and empathy, vaguely reminiscent of Rembrandt.
The rocks of Tyrol
Rembrandt was also, decades later, the proud owner of a group of drawings that Savery made in the mountains of Tyrol. The group dates from around 1607, when Emperor Rudolf was already in a dire position. Troubles between Protestants and Catholics, attacks by the Turks, persistent plundering and skirmishes in that large, complex empire; Even then Hradschin became a hiding place. And so he sent Roelant Savery to Tyrol, more than five hundred kilometers southwest of Prague, to give him the mountains and waterfalls that he could not visit himself.
These drawings are among the most beautiful and unique that Savery has made. Broken tree trunks, rickety bridges, raging streams. Here too he occasionally drew himself in a landscape full of growths and formations that sometimes took the shape of faces. Menacing rather than sweet. These are the first truly raw landscape representations in Western art history.
How did the emperor look at those drawings? Did they give him peace, stimulate his imagination as we experience them? Or were the rock formations an echo for his increasingly heavy bouts of melancholy?
We all don't know. We have to make do with our imagination, aided by that of an old artist with his drawing supplies, more than four centuries ago, far from home.
Roelant Savery's Wonderful World, Mauritshuis The Hague, until May 20. info: mauritshuis.nl
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