Crown of the Alps: Masterworks from the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein
Special Exhibition in Taipei 2015
Marking the 90th anniversary of the founding of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Princely Collections are showing 118 major works in an exhibition entitled CROWN OF THE ALPS. The exhibition focuses on the subject of ‘fine painting’ and offers the Taiwanese general public the opportunity to examine these works, which are on display in Taiwan for the first time, at close hand.
The Collections of the Prince von und zu Liechtenstein have on several occasions presented selections of masterpieces from their extensive holdings, curated according to various aspects. On one occasion the focus was on the world of Biedermeier, while the next time it was the magnificence and splendour of a collection defined during the High Baroque age, featuring ceiling paintings, tapestries, Kunstkammer pieces and furniture. Several times the focus has been exclusively on Flemish painting, in particular on the works of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, which represent one of the core areas of the collection.
The exhibition at the National Palace Museum in Taipei focuses on the refinement and elegance of ‘fine painting’, in a selection that concentrated on paintings, engravings and drawings from several centuries. Constrained by the spatial limitations of the museum’s exhibition rooms, the show of 118 masterpieces from the Princely Collections concentrates primarily on the subtle, small-scale format, focusing not on large works designed to make an impact from a distance but the intricate painterly framing of a motif in smaller dimensions. The viewer can trace subjects such as landscape painting, the portrait or still life from the Renaissance to the Viennese Biedermeier era, thus covering almost the whole spectrum of European art history.
Fine painting as a term
In the history of art the term fine painting is used (invariably in the original Dutch as ‘fijnschilderei’) to refer particularly to the Leiden school, which was noted for its meticulously detailed bravura pieces, including still lifes, portraits and genre scenes, often in the smallest of formats. In order to achieve the high degree of detail and the resulting illusionistic effects, these painters made almost exclusive use of panels of wood or copper as supports, which gave them a smooth surface that did not, like canvas and its grounding, affect the appearance of the painting with its structure.
Such supports accompany the history of painting throughout the epochs; wooden panels were used as supports in early Italian gold-ground painting as well as in the Renaissance, when many major works by Raphael, Leonardo or Titian were executed on this medium. They were also used by Flemish and Dutch painters: there are many examples of a precious first version being painted on a wooden or hammered copper panel followed by second versions executed on canvas.
The heyday of fijnschilderei
It was without doubt during the Golden Age of Dutch painting that this fijnschilderei reached its apogee in the Leiden school, particularly in the works of Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), of which the Princely Collections possess many fine examples. Throughout the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century artists continued to appreciate fine-surfaced supports for painting, and Viennese Biedermeier painting is represented in the exhibition with major works by its great masters Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and Joseph Danhauser that can be classified as belonging to this tradition of fine painting.
The panels and canvases of Rubens or van Dyck, who developed their monumental painting on the basis of small-scale oil sketches on wooden panels, attest to the fact that even works of larger dimensions are more than capable of conveying sensuous details as well as the appeal of surface structures and material qualities in a whole range of different light conditions. When Rubens makes an oil sketch, the way he goes about it is quite different to the Leiden fijnschilder, but even here it is the quality of the wooden panel, the technique that subtly incorporates the grounding into the end result, that allows us to discuss this painting – sketch-like though it is – in the context of ‘fine painting’ in this exhibition. In his large-scale compositions Rubens retains the technique he develops in the sketch, aligning himself wholly with the traditions of Flemish painting despite all the breaks with tradition in the way he depicts his subjects. When comparing his painting with the works of the Brueghel dynasty or those of Frans Pourbus (1545–1581), we can see that his technique with its thin, transparent glazes of colour is very much in keeping with the tradition of the Flemish school.
Refinement and painterly perfection
It is not the great names – although these are richly represented here with works by Raphael, Cranach, Rubens and van Dyck, to name only a few – but the subtlety of the rendering and the painterly quality that constitute the focus of this exhibition. The decorative aspect is deliberately pushed into the background in favour of the highest painterly perfection. Thus the works on display here demand from the viewers in Taipei a similar concentration and intensity of involvement that they will be familiar with from their engagement with works of Chinese painting, in which the atmospheric, fleeting rendering in landscape painting and portraiture together with the realism in the rendering of an object has always been highly valued throughout the ages.
The Princely Collections have a policy of showing works like these behind glass in exhibitions, thus enabling the visitor to examine them from close up. These bravura pieces were intended to be pored over in the small parlours of Flemish and Dutch homes of the middling sort, where the connoisseur could pick them up and examine them at close hand. This is a wholly different kind of painting to the kind that was created to make an impact from a distance such as an altarpiece or a ceiling painting, commissioned with other considerations in mind, including how such a work was to be viewed.
Catalogue: The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in English and Chinese