Kulturforum, Berlin, 26th April–4th August 

Few sixteenth-century Netherlandish artists have received more sustained scholarly attention in recent decades than Maarten van Heemskerck (1498– 1574). Ilja Veldman’s pioneering research from the 1970s and the 1980s has elucidated the complex iconographies that Heemskerck created for his prints, while Rainald Grosshans and Jefferson Cabell Harrison have surveyed the artist’s extensive painted oeuvre.[1] The drawings made by the artist during his stay in Rome, between 1532 and 1536/37, have been broadly known and studied, especially in the context of Roman archaeology and architectural history, since Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger’s monumental publication of 1913–16.[2] More recently, an in-depth assessment of the works’ artistic merit has been carried out by Arthur J. DiFuria and Tatjana Bartsch.[3] 

Despite these efforts, no major retrospective has been dedicated to Heemskerck until now, and the artist has remained largely unknown to the general public. Marking the 450th anniversary of Heemskerck’s death, this exhibition, organised by the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, is the first of a number that aim to boost his visibility. Later this year, three concurrent shows will open in Alkmaar and Haarlem, offering a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career.[4] This exhibition, however, opens the season with a more focused exploration of Heemskerck’s Roman sojourn, which is more than appropriate given the impact of this period on the artist’s later production. The five years Heemskerck spent in Rome were fundamental to his development and provided the basis upon which his long and successful career in the Low Countries was constructed. 

Expertly curated by Christien Melzer, Tatjana Bartsch and Hans- Ulrich Kessler, the exhibition divides the narrative into three chronological chapters – before Rome, in Rome and after Rome – an arrangement that has also been adopted for the accompanying catalogue.[5] The first section is the most succinct in its scope. On display are a handful of paintings produced in the Haarlem workshop of Jan van Scorel (1495–1562). Heemskerck spent about three years, between 1527 and 1530, in the studio of his more established contemporary, who himself had lived and worked in Rome in 1522– 24. The paintings are shown alongside a number of contemporary engravings of ancient statues (all Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; cat. nos.10–14), illustrating how knowledge of antiquities circulated beyond the Italian peninsula. Unfortunately, the absence of any surviving Roman drawings by Scorel makes it difficult to assess how the Haarlem master shaped Heemskerck’s idea of Rome before the latter embarked on his sojourn. Nonetheless, paintings such as the Baptism of Christ (c.1532; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; no.9) demonstrate that he had absorbed such Italian artistic trends as the use of multiple vantage points to study the human figure. Considering the richness of this stage in the artist’s development, it might have been instructive to include some paintings that display his pre-Rome interest in ancient sculptures, such as the Man of sorrows (1532; Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent) or Adam and Eve (c.1527–30; Hatfield House, Hertfordshire), both of which include direct quotations of antique sources. On the whole, however, the first section effectively conveys that, by the time he departed for Rome in the summer of 1532, Heemskerck, already a member of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke, was a fully formed artist, versed in both the Netherlandish and the Italianate visual traditions and equipped with an incipient base of antiquarian knowledge. 

Whatever he had learned from Scorel, once he reached Rome, Heemskerck was transformed by what he saw. Surviving from his time in the city are 116 mostly double-sided sheets; sixty-seven of them were originally part of a small sketchbook (no.26), which was disassembled as early as the seventeenth century. They all have the same oblong octave format (13.5 by 21.5 cm.). The others, of inconsistent dimensions, were probably loose sheets of paper kept in portfolios. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of these sheets have been preserved in two so-called Heemskerck Albums in the Kupferstichkabinett. The sketchbook sheets were in the first of the two volumes, the so-called Album I. Following a major conservation and research project preceding the exhibition, this volume has been disbound and the sheets have been removed from their supports. This has allowed for the sketchbook to be reconstructed. As explained in a catalogue article by Georg Josef Dietz, Antje Penz and Carsten Wintermann, it is now possible to identify the original sequence of the pages and the composition of the gatherings. A facsimile of the reconstructed sketchbook has been published as a complement to the catalogue, allowing viewers to experience Heemskerck’s original volume as a physical, three-dimensional object and as a functional artist’s tool.[6] 

The fact that the sheets from Album I have been removed from their supports means that these drawings can be shown together. The display, designed by Bach Dolder KatzKaiser, is nothing short of a revelation. Within a colosseum-like glass structure erected in the centre of the gallery, fifty-one sheets from Heemskerck’s Roman sketchbook are grouped into small thematic clusters. Eschewing the use of mounts, the drawings are suspended between sheets of plexiglass. This innovative display not only enhances the legibility of the works on view but, crucially, highlights the materiality of the sheets and the intricacy of the sketches, enabling an intimate encounter between the visitors and the drawings on display. In this section the holdings in the Kupferstichkabinett are complemented by loans from Amsterdam, Paris, Prague, Rome and New York and by a newly discovered addition to the artist’s small corpus of Roman paintings in a private collection (1536; no.45). These provide, for the first time, a near-complete picture of the creativity, technical prowess and sheer productivity that characterised Heemskerck’s time in Rome. 

Particularly notable are Heemskerck’s Roman city views. As Bartsch highlights, ‘they are among the earliest of their kind and powerfully shape our modern-day image of Renaissance Rome’ (p.78). The artist drew temples, triumphal arches, city squares, baths, aqueducts and the Colosseum, and there are a number of vedute on double-page spreads (no.25; Fig.8). Heemskerck was equally concerned with the study of antique statuary, ranging from views of sculpture collections to detailed renderings of parts of statues, such as limbs, heads or torsos (no.26.68; Fig.9). 

The exhibition’s approach to Heemskerck’s Roman works is guided by the methodology developed by Bartsch in her 2019 study and a number of earlier publications.[7] The organisers acknowledge the ‘tremendous documentary value’ (p.18) of the drawings, which constitute, in the words of the architectural historian James S. Ackerman, ‘a volume of evidence that leaves a minimal margin of error’ for reconstructing the built environment of cinquecento Rome.[8] Nonetheless, the greatest emphasis rightly lies on the originality and boldness of Heemskerck’s compositions, the technical and stylistic variety of his work, his creative juxtapositions of different motifs, often observed from unusual angles (no.26.3; Fig.10) and, above all, his proclivity for experimentation and considerable talents as a draughtsman. 

The exhibition concludes with an in-depth consideration of the role the Roman drawings played in the artist’s career after his return to the Low Countries, as well as their afterlife in Haarlem, following Heemskerck’s death. The juxtaposition of select sheets with related later paintings and prints encourages viewers to search for one-to-one correspondences and reoccurring motifs, but this section is at its most compelling when the great freedom and flexibility with which Heemskerck approached Roman antiquities in his later work is at the forefront of the argument. Clearly inspired by sketches of the Colosseum – the building he drew most often – the circular structures in Bullfight in an antique arena (1552; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille; no.62) and Bullfight in the ruins of an amphitheatre (1554–75; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; no.63) are depicted in an even greater state of ruination, thus emphasising the inexorable decay of the ancient civilisation. Heemskerck was able, in the words of Melzer, to imbue antique sources ‘with new meanings through combination, variation and recontextualisation’ (p.181). This in turn resonates with the exhibition as a whole, which, nearly five centuries after the artist’s Roman sojourn, manages to capture the enthusiasm, freshness and sense of discovery at the core of Heemskerck’s creative practice. 

[1] I.M. Veldman: Maarten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century, Maarssen 1977; idem: exh. cat. Leerrijke reeksen van Maarten van Heemskerck, Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum), 1986; R. Grosshans: Maerten van Heemskerck: Die Gemälde, Berlin 1980; and J.C. Harrison: The Paintings of Maerten van Heemskerck: A Catalogue Raisonné, Charlottesville 1987. 

[2] C. Hülsen and H. Egger: Die römischen Skizzenbücher von Marten van Heemskerck im Königlichen Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, Berlin 1913–1916. 

[3] A.J. DiFuria: Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Cult of Ruins, Boston and Leiden 2019; and T. Bartsch: Maarten van Heemskerck: Römische Studien zwischen Sachlichkeit und Imagination, Munich 2019. 

[4] The exhibitions will be shown at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, the Stedelijk Museum, Alkmaar, and the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, from 28th September 2024–19th January 2025. 

[5] Catalogue: German version: Faszination Rom: Maarten van Heemskerck zeichnet die Stadt. Edited by Tatjana Bartsch and Christien Melzer. 352 pp. incl. 300 col. ills. (Hirmer, Munich, 2024), €49.90. ISBN 978–3–7774– 4343–0. English edition: The Allure of Rome: Maarten van Heemskerck Draws the City. (Hirmer, Munich, 2024), £45. ISBN 978–3– 7774–4344–7. 

[6] T. Bartsch and C. Melzer, eds: Maarten van Heemskerck: Das Römische Zeichnungsbuch, Berlin 2024. 

[7] Bartsch, op. cit. (note 3). 

[8] J.S. Ackerman: The Cortile del Belvedere, Vatican 1954, p.19.