The captatio benevolentiae that prefaces Karel van Mander's great theoretical poem on painting, Grondt der edel vry Schilder-const (Groundwork of the noble, free art of painting), concludes with a call to arms: aspiring painters should strive above all to master two complementary specialties of art—beelden en historien—human figures, nude or clothed, and storied subjects, historical or mythological. Published in 1604, decades before Jacob van Loo achieved fame and fortune as one of the foremost figure- and history-painters in Amsterdam, Van Mander's rallying cry appears to have resounded no less loudly for him than it had for the generation that preceded him.
Based on meticulous archival research, Noorman's excellent monograph demonstrates with admirable precision the sort of figure-painter Van Loo was, the rules of art he endeavored to fulfill, the elite clients he cultivated, and the pictorial genres he mastered as well as those he pioneered. She succeeds in making clear what Arnold Houbraken meant when, in his biographical treatise on art, De groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (The great theater of Dutch painters and paintresses, 1718–21), he celebrated Van Loo for “being excellent at painting nude figures, especially vrouwtjes” (small pictures of women) (172). And last but not least, Noorman explains how and why Van Loo managed to maintain his reputation as a man of honor, a painter worthy of high patronage, even after his banishment from Holland for the crime of murder. As she reveals, after moving to Paris in 1661, he proved capable of marshaling his network of high-placed Dutch clients, and, having been licensed in 1663 by the Academie royale de peinture et sculpture, became a very successful portraitist, counting Dutch ambassadors and Parisian echevins amongst his new clients. Just as his beelden en historien had formerly appealed to the cultivated tastes of persons such as Gabriel Marselis of Elswout, Nicolaes van Suchtelen, mayor of Hoorn, and Samuel van Huls, mayor of The Hague, so now his studio became a favored gathering place where precepts of welstant (decorum, concinnity, both in word and deed) could be seen to prevail ad vivum and in imagine.
Welstant, a term that applies to art no less than to artful behavior, has a rich theoretical lineage extending from Leon Battista Alberti to Van Mander and beyond, but for Van Loo, it was bound up with a specific pictorial practice—the academie. Whereas in Italy and France, the word academy was associated with institutional norms and systematic pedagogy, in Amsterdam, where Van Loo was active as an independent master in the 1640s and 1660s, the term had a very specific purchase and in fact referred to drawing after the live model, specifically the female nude, in pen, ink, and wash or black, red, and white chalk on white or blue-colored paper. Of the two communities that made a practice of working naer ‘t leven (after the life) in this way, one group, led by Rembrandt, aimed to capture the appearance of life charged with affect and unmediated by artifice; the other group, of which Van Loo was a leading exponent, instead aimed to produce an effect of welstant, bodied forth by figures finely modeled and proportioned, tempered in their affective range and, often, understatedly erotic, whose attitudes reconcile complexity and nonchalance. One of Noorman's chief accomplishments in Art, Honor, and Success is to have formulated a working definition of these dual paradigms of the Amsterdam academie. Thanks to her, we can now see how crucial welstant was to the latter group's distinctive version of academic practice.
But more than this, her compelling argument that many of Van Loo's most ambitious paintings of the 1650s reflect upon this practice constitutes the book's signal accomplishment: explicitly based on these academies, the Cimon and Iphigenia, to cite one example, portrays the joint power of female beauty and beautiful painting to civilize even the most boorish beholder, seducing and converting him into an epitome of welstant, and, to cite another example, the utterly original Study of a Woman (ca. 1650) features a female subject who enacts or, better, performs the pose of an academie, at once introspective and disengaged.
Noorman has laid the foundations for future work on the poetics of Van Loo's academic beelden en historien, the erotic and aesthetic pleasures they offered viewers familiar with pastoral topoi and the elegiac imagery of love epitomized by poems such as Catullus's bacchanalian epyllion, Carmen 64, and its Dutch epigones.
