Volume 1, Issue 0, Pages 1-7

^#Author to whom correspondence should be addressed

Abstract

Artistic activity in Antwerp around 1600 is explored in the context of the city’s role in the international copper trade and print publishing. The physical characteristics of copper plates used by Antwerp artists such as Brueghel and his contemporaries are discussed as well as the painting techniques employed.

1. Introduction

The practice of painting in oil on a copper support had its origins in sixteenth-century Italy. Vasari reported that Sebastiano del Piombo made paintings on silver, lead, and copper, presumably around 1530, although no works on copper survive. Around this time Antonio Correggio painted a ‘Penitent Magdalene’ on copper (formerly Dresden); it seems apparent that Parmigianino also did a painting on copper¹. These early experiments seem not to have attracted any followers until the 1560s, when Vasari, Agnolo Bronzino, and Allesandro Allori made such works under the patronage of Francesco I de’ Medici and his court in Florence^{2, 3}.

This practice was soon adopted by northern European artists working in Italy, particularly in Rome and Bologna. Karel van Mander noted that when the German artist Johann Rottenhammer arrived in Rome, "he devoted himself to painting on plates as is customary with the Netherlanders"⁴. Van Mander based his statement on his familiarity with the paintings on copper of a number of his contemporaries, Han von Aachen, Paul Bril, and Adam Elsheimer the most notable among them. Van Mander, too, experimented with painting on copper (e.g., ‘Before the Deluge’, Städelsches Kunstinstitut and Städtsiche Galerie, Frankfurt; and ‘The Continence of Scipio’, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

This phenomenon soon spread. Bartholomeus Spranger, the Antwerp-born artist who worked in Rome in the 1570s, brought his penchant for painting on copper to Vienna, and subsequently to Prague where he joined other northern European artists at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Paul Bril eventually made his way to Utrecht, as did Joachim Wtewael, one of the most prolific and talented painters to have used a copper support. Wtewael’s work typifies the advantages copper offered. Its hard smooth surface allowed artists to create startlingly illusionistic, brilliantly coloured images, filled with minute detail, where brushstrokes could be made nearly invisible.

2. Painting on Copper in Antwerp around 1600

This burgeoning, innovative artistic activity found another venue for its further expansion: Antwerp. Jan Brueghel the Elder returned to his native Antwerp in 1595, eager to practice this new kind of painting that he had learned in Rome. Brueghel’s place and, indeed, that of Antwerp in the development of painting on copper deserve special attention. Between 1593 and his death in 1625, Brueghel made approximately 400 paintings, of which some 165 were on copper; the vast majority of these were done in Antwerp⁵. Brueghel passed on his fascination for copper to many of his contemporaries, particularly through his joint production of paintings with them, collaborating with Bril, van Balen, Rottenhammer and Hendrick van Steenwijk the Younger^{5, 6}. Other artists took up the practice including David Teniers II, Jan van Thielen, Erasmus Quellinus, Adriaen van Stalbemt, and Jan Brueghel II. Typically, one artist would paint the landscape or still life elements, and the other the figures; there are even instances on panel of three artists working together on a single work. This collaborative painting is almost exclusively an Antwerp phenomenon and it is likely that such specialisation could only have been possible in a market environment that valued both the concept as well as the eventual result, with production methods and techniques developed to allow collaboration when working in the same or nearby workshops, or even great distances apart^{3, 7}.

Another indication of Antwerp’s importance as a centre for painting on copper is its pivotal role in providing such works, usually of religious subjects, for export to Spain and her New World colonies, particularly Mexico ^8-10. We know that Willem van Herp, for example, was commissioned by the Antwerp dealer Matthijs Musson to provide works for the Spanish market. Hundreds of paintings on copper by lesser-known or unidentified Flemish artists can be found today in Spanish monasteries and convents*.

3. Copper Supply

The emergence and subsequent popularity of painting on copper in Antwerp can also be examined from economic and technological perspectives. During the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the European copper industry was dominated by the Fugger, the Augsburg family of merchants and entrepreneurs ^11-13. Their mines in Germany, Hungary, and Austria provided copper not only for Europe’s utilitarian and artistic needs, but also for trade outside Europe, and the Fugger had a major trading presence in Antwerp, noted as early as 1521 by Albrecht Dürer during his brief visit there ¹⁴. Antwerp was a centre for an increasingly international copper trade, typified perhaps by the enormous quantity of European copper (and brass) goods Portugal acquired in Antwerp for trade with Africa ¹⁵. In 1527, stockpiles of Fugger copper in Antwerp were estimated at 1850 tons, and in 1635, when painting on copper was at its height of popularity in Europe, it was estimated that 500-700 tons of European copper were shipped annually to West Africa alone. These astounding quantities of European copper should put to rest any notions that copper was a precious or expensive commodity during the period.

To complement the documentary evidence on sources of copper for plates, a programme of metallurgical analysis is in progress. This has so far shown that the copper plates contain a wide variety of impurities that are readily detectable by available analytical methods and that there is also firm reason to believe that the pattern of these impurities is such that they could be characteristic of different sources. For example, samples from two paintings by Georg Platzer were very close in composition while distinct from other samples of different date and geographical origin, which in turn were different from each other. Although limited in number, previously analysed objects containing copper provide some additional comparisons and indicate that similarities quite probably exist.

Antwerp also became a major centre of book and print publishing. We know that in the fifteenth century some 3,000 engravings were made, each requiring a copper plate. The printmaking industry changed dramatically in the late sixteenth century with the emergence of commercial print publishers who engaged artists to make designs for individual prints, series, and book illustrations. Several large publishers established their businesses there: Hieronymous Cock, Philips Galle, Christoph Plantin, and Crispijn de Passe ^16-18. From 1550 to 1600, their print production – and hence the number of copper plates used – numbers in the thousands. Not only were copper sheets affordable, it seems, but they were also readily available. Jørgen Wadum’s study of the Antwerp coppersmiths and research into the relative costs of panels, frames, artists’ materials and paintings on copper from account books and inventories have revealed that prices for copper plates were roughly similar to those for wooden panels ⁹.

4. Copper plates

In this context, it is not surprising that used printing plates were so rarely used for painting on, although there are some interesting examples, such as the Flemish artist Pieter Gysels’ ‘Riverscene’ on the reverse of Rembrandt’s etching plate for ‘Abraham Entertaining the Angels’ (National Gallery of Art, Washington), ‘View of the Zuiderzee’ by an imitator of Jan van Goyen on the reverse of an etching plate by Ter Borch (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Jan Steen’s ‘The Sleeping Couple’ on the reverse of an engraving plate (Harold Samuel Collection, Corporation of London), and ‘Tobias and the Archangel Raphael Returning with the Fish’ attributed to Elsheimer (National Gallery, London) painted over an engraving. Although many paintings were executed on plates of a high enough quality to have been produced for printmaking, the majority of plates were produced to lesser quality of finish. In an examination of 325 paintings on copper from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, 50 had regularly cut, parallel sides, often with rounded corners, and had smooth surfaces, free of deformations from hammer marks, qualities required for printmaking ¹⁹.

Research so far suggests that artists were not consistent in their choice of plate, some using heavily beaten plates with marked distortions, but typical of the Northern artists who painted on copper around 1600 was the use of extremely flat, smooth plates, some of which have Antwerp coppersmiths’ stamps on the reverse²⁰. These plates vary in average thickness from 0.8 to 1.1mm, and tend to be carefully produced, with small regular hammer marks on the reverse. Plates could be made very flat and rigid by hammering, making them suitable for durable painting supports. A few paintings on copper sheets which were produced by rolling have been found from the beginning of the seventeenth century, for example Rubens’ ‘The Death of Hippolytus’ of c.1610 in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Evidence of rolling can be established visually when clearly parallel waves, running horizontally or vertically can be seen in raking light. There may also be variations in edge thickness of the plate which conform to a regular thick/thin pattern consistent with the pressure of rolling, as opposed to variations which are randomly distributed. In fact, rolled plates were usually hammered beforehand, as revealed by the pattern of elongated hammer-marks distorted by the rolling process. This can be seen in the plate measuring 68.5 x 87.5cm used by David Teniers II for ‘The Village Feast’ (Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) (Fig. 1). The distance between the rolls, of 2cm in this case, indicates the diameter of the rollers, their horizontal orientation shows that the length of the rollers would have exceeded the width measurement of the painting, and an average thickness of 0.75mm was achieved⁺.

Some of Teniers’ paintings on copper are large, such as ‘The Archduke Leopold Willem in his Painting Gallery in Brussels’ (Prado, Madrid) which measures 106 x 129cm. Perhaps there was an almost competitive element in using such supports, because at this size sheets of copper may be unable to support their own weight, and bulge alarmingly as in Pieter van Lint’s ‘Rinaldo and Armida’, which measures 105 x 130.5cm. (Konrad Bernheimer, London, 1997). The occurrence of large plates falls into three distinct bands: early - from the 1570s to 1600; middle - from 1640-70; and late - post 1730 (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Sizes (areas) of copper plates used by Antwerp and non-Antwerp artists.

In the early period, in Rome, Spranger painted his ‘Last Judgement’ (Galleria Sabauda, Turin) on a sheet measuring 116 x 148 cm, and Pulzone used large single sheets for a series of portraits of cardinals and in the 1580s copper was employed possibly for the first time for a full-size altarpiece by Veronese’s son Carletto Cagliari in San Giobbe, Venice, though using several joined plates. The use of large plates in Antwerp occurs in the middle period. The majority of paintings on copper however are much smaller; by the mid-eighteenth century Robert Dossie observed that painting on copper was "seldom used but for delicate and elaborate paintings" ²¹. A spectacular exception though is Georg Platzer’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin’, on a single sheet measuring 143.5 x 79.0 cm (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe).

Documentary sources indicate that plates may have been hammered and cut in stacks or batches ²² and standardisation might, for example, have been expected in order to produce paintings to fit standard frames. However, there is no evidence for such standard sizes (which would be seen as clustering of side lengths in Fig. 3) - perhaps the ease of cutting and shaping a thin copper plate allowed it to be used more easily and with more variations in size to fit into cabinets and portable altarpieces, such as Elsheimer’s ‘Kreuzaltar’ (Frankfurt). In fact the thinness of the support and its ease of shaping may have influenced its use in conjunction with elaborate frames, such as ‘The Annunciation’ by the Antwerp artist Louis Cousin, known as Luigi Gentile (Museum of the Order of St. John, London), set in a silver frame designed by Algardi, bearing the arms of Innocent X²³. However it is clear that there was a well-defined format (high correlation in the ratio of smaller to larger dimension) for copper plates from all sources (Fig.3)

Figure 3. Relationship of smaller to larger dimension (format) in copper plates for Antwerp and non-Antwerp artists.

5. Preparation prior to painting

Once the artist had obtained his plate it required roughening prior to painting. The difference between a plate prepared for etching and one prepared for painting is evident in the example of Gysels’ reuse of a Rembrandt etching plate, previously mentioned. On the painted side, surface roughening to provide tooth for the adhesion of the paint film is visible in tiny losses at the edge of the plate, whereas on the etched side, the plate is highly polished. Watin for example, noted the difficulties associated with painting on "copper, iron or other pure materials… which are highly polished… which do not easily accept a paint film: which make paint glide over them…"²⁴.

Although there are some paintings where the copper is allowed to glow through the paint film, most paintings on copper have thin, pale-toned grounds. There is variety in the way in which the grounds are applied, but documentary sources indicate that in general, it was a simpler process than the preparation of a panel¹⁹. Eastlake discusses how garlic may have been used "as a means of assisting the adherence of oil colours on any smooth surface", and recalls De Piles’ advice on the preparation of an oil ground on copper, that "the metal may be painted on at once, without any ground if it be previously rubbed with the juice of garlic" ²⁵. Advice on how to apply the ground was sometimes given, for example by Pacheco: "Metal plates, being smooth and clean, are primed only with one very thin layer of white lead and umber in oil which is put on and spread with the fingers and not the brush" ²⁶. Fingerprints in the ground layer have been found in many paintings on copper: the result is extremely smooth, as in Spranger’s ‘Allegory on Rudolf II’, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and in Rottenhammer’s ‘The Virgin and Child with Saints’ (Johnny van Haeften, 1997), two artists who were influential in spreading the practice and techniques of painting on copper. The ground could also be applied by brush, resulting in a slightly streaked appearance, with the brushstrokes visible in an underlayer, as in ‘The Descent into Limbo’ by Jan Brueghel I and Rottenhammer (Mauritshuis, The Hague). In Brueghel’s ‘Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee’ (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid), there are areas where the paint is thin enough to discern an occasional fingerprint in the ground layer, such as in the boat on the right. In his ‘Landscape with Tobias and the Angel’ (Sammlungen des Fürsten von Liechtenstein), painted in 1598 in Antwerp, the pale ground is so thinly applied that it barely covers the horizontal, fine lines produced in roughening the copper plate, which are visible at high magnification (Fig. 4).

6. Painting technique

Brueghel’s ability to control fine brushwork may appear methodical, but his extraordinary skill and fluency can be judged from the variations in the consistency of the paint which he achieved on such a small scale. For example, in ‘Entering the Ark’, signed and dated 1615 (Apsley House, London), using opaque paint, spiky fur is painted in stiff short brushstrokes, a tiny frog sitting on a water-lily in the left foreground is painted with smoothly blended, barely visible brushstrokes, while minute animals, figures or architecture in the distance are painted fluidly and thinly. These minute details are often given form by just a few perfectly placed highlights. The smoothness of the copper allowed each brushstroke to glide, without dragging on or settling into the grooves of a wood grain or interstices of a canvas weave. In two similar sized paintings both entitled ‘Road Scene with Figures’ (Apsley House, London), a direct comparison may be made: Inv. no. 1639 is on panel, no. 1640 is on copper plate. In the panel, there are ridges from the grain running horizontally. In the plate, there are fine horizontal streaks from brush application of the ground, but the surface quality is noticeably smoother. On the panel the scale of the composition is slightly larger and the colours are bolder, the paint is more thickly applied, the brushwork is more blended in comparable details such as the horse’s mane. On the copper plate the brushstrokes are more clearly defined and there is a more linear quality, with meticulous detailing of architecture in the distance. The non-absorbency of the copper would have helped to create a shiny and fully saturated appearance without the need for much varnish. Perhaps it was this quality of the copper that interested him and his contemporaries and followers, as much as the smoothness which eased the flow of the brush. Brueghel exploited a range of effects which could be produced by different supports: in his ‘Adoration of the Magi’ in body-colour on vellum (National Gallery, London) where the composition is similar to many of his works on copper and on wooden panel and which appears just as fluent in handling, the surface is matt and dry, and the palette is paler.

Many of Brueghel’s paintings have survived in superb, even pristine condition. This restricts sampling, though a thorough examination of his materials and techniques would add significantly to our understanding of why some paintings on copper survive so well while others suffer appalling adhesion problems. Importance of the preparation of the plate, thinness of the ground and paint film, and the use of very finely ground pigments well bound in an oil medium are all relevant factors. That such paintings have been prized by their owners and therefore well cared-for is also important, and Brueghel’s works on copper are not immune to decay from poor environmental conditions and storage.

Rubens rarely painted on copper despite his friendship and collaboration with Brueghel and admiration for Elsheimer. In ‘The Death of Hippolytus’ (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) where the composition is indebted to elements borrowed form Leonardo, Michelangelo and Annibale Carracci, Rubens has also included objects such as shells, typical of Brueghel’s depictions of carefully observed "naturalia". His technique of painting on copper is quite different from Brueghel’s - his shells are sketchy; his interest is less in verisimilitude and detail, more in creating a strong image. The ground has been applied in quite broad strokes forming an essential mid-tone in the contours between forms and also where the paint is applied thinly and transparently, and the intense blue of the sky is created with sweeps of brushwork. He has contrasted thick and thin paint to create relief form in the main elements of the composition, perhaps to vary the surface. Although it is a brilliant example of the fluidity and saturation of paint which can be achieved with the smoothness of copper, Rubens’ technique was suited to a broader more painterly style.

Later Antwerp artists who favoured copper and often collaborated on paintings on this support included David Teniers II, van Kessel, and van Herp. In ‘The Submission of the Sicilian Rebels to Antonio Moncada in 1411’ by Teniers and van Kessel (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid), part of a series painted between 1663-6 depicting the lives of two Sicilian noblemen, van Kessel provided elaborate borders which overlap into the main picture in "reserved" areas. This careful demarcation of the two artists’ work ensures a smooth surface without uneven build-up of paint. Van Kessel’s small scale studies of insects and flowers were often painted on copper sheets. The metallic surface, even when rippled by hammer and rolling marks, helps to make the insects or flowers stand out, although there is no disruption at the surface of the brushstrokes and an absence of surface texture in the background. The accuracy with which these subjects could be depicted on copper was exceptional.

7. Conclusion

While the practice of painting on copper was widespread in Europe during the seventeenth century, Antwerp and its artists played a prominent role in its refinement and diffusion. The city's pivotal role as a trade and print publishing centre provided a ready supply of affordable copper sheets. Jan Brueghel's influence was equally important, inspiring many of his contemporaries to paint on copper, taking advantage of its suitability for highly detailed, illusionistic images, and bringing the art of collaboration to new heights. The popularity of painting on copper would gradually wane after 1650, but even in the eighteenth century artists such as Peeter Snyers continued to produce striking works that reflected Antwerp's Golden Age.

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