Entre Luces y Sombras

After almost a hundred years under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty, in 1579, seven provinces in the northern Netherlands, what we know today as Holland, revolted against Spanish imperialism and the imposition of the Catholic faith. As a result, what was once a united region, with a common history, culture, and language, was divided into two: the Protestant Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands or Flanders, a territory equivalent to what is now Belgium.

This event was momentous in the history of Western art in the seventeenth century. Artistic production flourished in both regions but it was motivated by different circumstances. In Flanders, now a stronghold of the Catholic Church, religious works destroyed by iconoclasts during the revolution were replaced. At the same time, the art market prospered. Religious and mythological paintings and portraits made by internationally renowned artists abounded. In the Dutch Republic, religious art lost preeminence after churches were stripped of all religious images. From that moment on, most of the artistic commissions came from a bourgeoisie with high purchasing power. The absence of religious patronage fostered artistic production for a free market where small-format paintings with genre scenes, still lifes, and landscapes imbued with national consciousness prevailed.

Nevertheless, due to the multiplicity of shared traditions, both Flemish and Dutch Baroque painting showed a particular interest in the representation of light: in the effect of light on different surfaces, the use of light and shadow in the modeling of forms, and an intellectual awareness of atmospheric effects that generate the region’s ever-changing light. This resemblance is highlighted in Between Lights and Shadows: Baroque Painting in Northern Europe, an exhibition that presents a sample of the magnificent Flemish and Dutch art collection that Don Luis A. Ferré began to amass in 1956 for the Museo de Arte de Ponce. Of utmost importance in the development of this collection was the advice he received for more than forty years from renowned art historian, Julius S. Held, a specialist in the work of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, the most important artist in the history of Northern Baroque art.