VAN DYCK, ANTON. - Painter, b. at Antwerp on 22 March 1599, d. at London on 9 Dec. 1641.
He frequented Rubens's workshop at Antwerp, but already in 1616 he opened a studio of his own; three years afterwards he began an effective and highly regarded collaboration with that great master. In 1620-21 he worked in London for James I and the Earl of Arundel; toward the end of 1621 he was in Italy, staying successively in Florence, Rome, Venice, Mantua, Parma, Naples and Palermo; but especially in Genoa (1623-27) where, greatly admired, he portrayed the features of the city's patricians and exerted a beneficial influence on local painters, especially in the field of portraiture. After the years 1628-32, spent in Antwerp, in 1632 he was called to London by Charles I and appointed painter to that Court. There he spent almost all his last years, amid an incessant demand for portraits for the sovereign and for the aristocracy, which were often executed with the assistance of helpers, revealing the replacement of shrewd virtuosity for what had been the prodigious vein of a colorist as personal and refined as could be. It will suffice to mention, among the male portrayals, the superb Charles I of England (Louvre Museum), in hunting dress, with the prancing horse behind him in the shade of an emerald tree; the young Lord Philip Wharton, called "the gentleman of the little spade" (Hermitage, Leningrad), the equestrian duke Thomas of Savoy Carignano (Pinacoteca of Turin); the pensive and candid Marquis Cattaneo (National Gallery, London) and the pale and bald Card. Guido Bentivoglio (Pitti Gallery, Florence). Nor do his wife Maria Ruthven (Gallery of Munich) appear any less perspicuous and evocative among the female portraits; the dark princess Maria Luisa of Thurn and Taxis (Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna); the austere princess Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain, superior of the Poor Clares (Gallery of Parma); the Princess of Orange, Amelia of Solms (Pinacoteca of Brera, Milan).
If the pupil of Rubens does not assume in his sacred production the historical and aesthetic importance of the master of Antwerp, and in the youthful cycle of the Twelve Apostles does not depart too far from his realistic forms and imitates his passionate fervor in several Flagellations, Pietàs, Crucifixions, Ecstasies of saints, absolute originality and a profound elegiac feeling must instead be attributed to the Dead Christ of the Museum of Antwerp, with the dark Nazarene, stretched out on the dazzling white shroud. The influence of the Italian schools, from Titian to Andrea del Sarto, is visible above all in the monumental Madonna del Rosario (oratory of the same name in Palermo); more expressive: the Madonna and Child (National Gallery of Ancient Art in Rome); the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Munich); the Virgin among Adoring Angels (Accademia di S. Luca). The Samson and Delilah (London) reach the summit; the St. Martin Dividing His Cloak (Windsor); finally, the Arrest of Christ (Prado Museum), where one discerns how even the elements derived from Rubens are employed in an emotional order, without the phantasmagoric effect of the torches among the gloomy branches coming to attenuate the radiant serenity of Christ, assailed from every side, in the tumult of outstretched arms and of vociferating demoniacal masks. - See pl. XCII.
Bibliography9 works
Alberto Neppi