Flemish art offers an encounter with a world both remote and familiar | Canada Voices

There are two remarkable male portraits now hanging at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto as part of an exhibition devoted to Flemish art. One man is a tall, haughty type with a long, aristocratic nose and a remote gaze. You feel that you might meet him in a Bay Street executive office or behind the counter at the Lamborghini dealership. The other is more squat, with a sagging face and sorrowful eyes, a sadder type but friendlier, too. Him you could image selling insurance or showing up at your door to address himself to that blocked drain.

These 16th-century oil portraits, recording people who feel completely present and real, date back to an era when only the wealthy had mirrors and paint was the only way of recording a physiognomy or personality. Realistic figure painting would have seemed miraculous, a miracle to which we are now largely blinded thanks to photography.

And yet, this exhibition, drawn from the collection of the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp, Belgium, is not really a celebration of artistic merit but instead offers an encounter with history. These men feel so alive and current; other sections of this exhibition, entitled Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: 300 years of Flemish Masterworks, bring us face to face with a world far removed from our own.

When this exhibition, co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and curated in Canada by Chloé Pelletier of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, showed in the latter city last summer, it was presented in a more formal vein; the ROM takes a didactic approach, as is the habit of the universal museum, with sweeping statements about contemporary relevance and exhortations to consider this theme or that.

The show begins by noting how Antwerp in the 15th and 16th centuries was the New York, Hong Kong or Silicon Valley of its day, a vital centre for trading and finance, and illustrates this with a panoramic view of the port city seen from the opposite bank of the Scheldt river.

That painting is by Jan Wildens, and unless you are a connoisseur of Flemish art you have probably never heard of this friend and collaborator of Peter Paul Rubens. Although the exhibition does include several works by Rubens and also Anthony Van Dyck, the Phoebus collection of historic art of the Southern Netherlands, a Belgian family and corporate collection rolled into a foundation in 2015, is more social document than parade of greatest hits.

The foundation, which collects in several other areas including Belgian art from 1880 to 1930, aims to repatriate Flemish masterworks. The two gentlemen, one haughty, one friendly, were painted by Jan van Scorel, a Dutch painter credited with introducing Italian Renaissance art to the Netherlands but hardly a household name.

The show is divided into themes, one of which is the intense religiosity of the age, a response to the devastation of the Black Death, those mid-14th century outbreaks of bubonic plague, and the Hundred Years’ War of the 14th and 15th centuries. That’s a familiar anxiety although a vision of hell, from a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, full of grotesque half-human demons directing the sinful toward a fiery pit, is more graphic than any contemporary thinking about immorality.

On the gentler side, there is a lovely Nativity, with a Virgin in a pale-blue gown that seems to glow, painted by Hans Memling and his workshop around 1480. Meanwhile, Jan Gossaert’s soft-faced Virgin holds an oddly muscular Christ Child, sculpted in paint under the influence of Italian art.

The section on humour, featuring more light-hearted reflections on sin and folly, is probably the most removed from current sensibilities. It ridicules human behaviour by replacing people with monkeys in one scene (a genre of the period) or showing a market overrun with baskets of tiny fools who infect the life-sized people with such lust and greed they ignore the house fire that has broken out in the background. A small picture of Elisabeth, court jester to Anne of Hungary, is a sympathetic portrait despite her striped costume and fool’s cap, but the woman is believed to have become a subject of fun because of an intellectual disability.

There is also a section about the way, as today, art, science and politics were intertwined, illustrated with various mythological subjects commissioned by royals to celebrate their powers. Thanks to Rubens and many assistants, there is Diana, goddess of the hunt, wearing only sandals and urging on her hounds with one rotund breast falling out of her diaphanous shift. (In contrast, the hunted deer and the vicious dogs don’t look fanciful: Their realism is attributed to Paul de Vos.) Once upon time, this was high art. Today the mythological theme is insufficient covering for the soft-core intent.

On the other hand, curator Pelletier has used the exhibition to recover several female artists of the age. Michaelina Wautier, a busy Brussels painter of the 17th century, illustrates an allegory about sharing with a burnished painting of one child trying to take another’s boiled egg. Of the same period, Clara Peeters is represented by a virtuoso still-life that includes langoustines, a fruit basket and a squirrel eating off the laden table.

That piece is featured in a salon hanging of various genres, including several impressive flower paintings. Nearby, a 17th-century scene shows an elegant couple in a collector’s cabinet, surrounded by landscapes, religious iconography and mythical subjects, while another shows scholars in a similar setting. Alongside is a showcase of actual physical objects from the period – a globe, a skull, books – that also would have graced a collector’s home. The show points out that these private cabinets of curiosities and personal art galleries were the precursor of the public museum; fittingly, we leave the encounter with history to move forward into a contemporary legacy.

Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: 300 years of Flemish Masterworks continues to January at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.