The Low Countries. Jaargang 11

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Behind the Icon Curtain
Dutch and Flemish Art in Central and Eastern Europe

One of several Russian postage stamp series featuring work of Rembrandt.

When in 1998 the Pushkin Museum in Moscow celebrated its hundredth birthday, it did so in an unexpected way. The museum undertook a complete cataloguing and exhibition project of its paintings and drawings from Flanders and the Netherlands. Under difficult financial circumstances, the museum managed in the course of four years to publish and display these precious holdings in three monumental, fully illustrated volumes, accompanying three large exhibitions. The series began with the late Xenia Egorova's catalogue of 66 fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings from the Northern and Southern Netherlands, 194 Flemish paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and 40 Belgian paintings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to works by the well-known masters, these included such obscure masterpieces, to take a striking example, as an Allegory of Patience - one sees only after a long look that this evening landscape is an allegory at all - by the extremely rare artist Engelbert Ergo.

400 Dutch paintings of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries followed in the year 2000, catalogued by Marina Senenko. (One of the images looks more Russian than Dutch: Vincent van Gogh's Prison Courtyard matches to perfection the popular conception of the Lubyanka, the infamous kgb prison not a mile from the Pushkin museum. Actually, the painting is a copy of a Doré engraving of Newgate Prison in London.) Finally, in 2002 came the exhibition of Low Countries drawings of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries and Belgian and Dutch drawings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The curator who compiled the catalogue of the 627 sheets from the

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Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Prison Courtyard. Canvas, 80 × 64 cm. State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Low Countries is Vadim Sadkov, former head of the department of prints and drawings and now head of the department of European and American paintings. The catalogue is full of discoveries. Such as the coincidental juxtaposition of two unrelated drawings of young ladies, next to each in the catalogue: La Mère des Satyrions by Félicien Rops and the nearly identically posed Girl Knitting by Hobbe Smith.

With this campaign successfully completed, the Pushkin Museum has become the only major museum to have brought out complete new scholarly catalogues of all its paintings and drawings from the Low Countries.

West winds from Holland

How did 1,327 Dutch and Flemish paintings and drawings end up in the Pushkin Museum, and why should the museum have given them pride of place in its own celebrations? The story begins in the seventeenth century,

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at the very beginning of the Europeanisation of Russia. This phrase is not to be taken lightly. Until the late seventeenth century, at a time when Dutch and Flemish art was thoroughly international, Russian artists worked very much from their own books. They were trained in the Armory School in Moscow and worked in a closed, Byzantine-inspired iconographic and stylistic system that was controlled by the church and the court. When a twowave Westernisation occurred, first in the later part of the seventeenth and then in the early eighteenth centuries, both sources came from Holland. As Igor Grabar discovered in the 1920s, the new narrative formulas of the 1670s in icon and mural painting were based on a single source: the illustrated Theatrum Biblicum of Claes Jansz. Visscher, also known as Nicolaus Johannes Piscator. This album of prints with captions was first published in Amsterdam in 1639 and was reprinted several times in the course of the seventeenth century. The engravings are based on compositions by sixteenthcentury masters such as Maarten de Vos and Maarten van Heemskerck. A typical adaptation of one of these prints for Russian monumental art is a painting of the Prophet Elisha and the son of the Shunamite woman (2 Kings 4:8-37) in the Church of the Prophet Elijah in Yaroslavl. All the main

The juxtapostion of Rops and Smith in the Low Countries catalogue of the Pushkin Museum.

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Engraving of an Old Testament scene (2 Kings 4:18-20) by C.J. Visscher after a painting by Martin de Vos (c.1531-1603), with Latin inscription, in Theatrum Biblicum (Amsterdam, 1643).

Fragment of a mural depicting the same scene, with Slavonic inscription. Church of the Prophet Elisha, Yaroslavl.

elements of the composition are taken over, but flattened and stylised in native modes. For the artists who painted this work, a 40-year-old Dutch engraving after a 120-year-old Dutch model was the marker of the Russian future.

Even if this is not what we mean in the first place when we speak of Dutch art in Russia, it does indicate that Dutch art meant more to the Russians than just an interesting novelty. It was the first European school that penetrated the artistic awareness of Russian artists, at a time when they were still train-

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ing in the Moscow Armory. It also shows that Dutch art did not necessarily have the connotations that it later acquired: an art of the everyday, distinguished for its secularism and realism. The first use to which it was put in Russia, as we see, was not secular at all.

Nor was the second, more famous wave of Dutch art in Russia primarily secular. In the revolution of Russian imagery engineered quite deliberately by Tsar Peter the Great (who reigned from 1682 on) after his Grand Embassy to North-Western Europe in 1697-98, religious paintings were just as important as portraits and genre scenes. The first known reference in a Russian source to a European painter mentioned by name occurs in the journal of Peter's ambassador to the Netherlands, A.A. Matveev. Visiting the Jesuit church in Antwerp in 1705 - as late as that! - he wrote that it was hung with works ‘by the most glorious painters of the past century, especially the worthy Robens and Vandeik’. In undermining the authority of the Armory School, Peter's intention was not to do away with religious art for Russia but to reform it in a western mode.

The earliest direct purchase of art in Europe for the Russian court - 121 not very distinguished paintings, including Rembrandt's presently disputed David and Jonathan - was also carried out in the Low Countries, by Peter's emissary Boris Kurakin in 1716 in Brussels and Antwerp. However, it would be a mistake to think that Peter's Occidentalisation toward the Low Countries represented an artistic, let alone aesthetic choice for Netherlandish art as such. It was part of a grand importation of Western science, scholarship, education and technique via the Netherlands, not unlike the way the Japanese acquired their knowledge of the West through the Dutch connection. For Peter, who imported into Russia not only art but artists, the documentary and instructive value of his collections was paramount. Maria Sibylla Merian was collected as a naturalist, and Adam Silo as a maritime expert. This specialist artist, who is now known only to specialist art historians, was Peter's favourite Dutch painter. His canvases occupied pride of place in Peter's palace Monplaisir - ‘the ancestor of all other art galleries in Russia’ - even above his one Rembrandt. (Which goes to show that the standard canon should not be taken as a guide in judging the choices of collectors with priorities of their own.)

Warfare by other means

In terms of sheer collection-building nothing in Russian history can compare to the campaign of Peter's most dynamic successor, the German princess Sophie August Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst who in 1762 became Empress Catherine the Great. In fact, the qualification is misplaced. There is nothing in world history that can compare to Catherine's art buying. Art collecting for Catherine was not only a matter of acquisition; it was an extension of warfare by other means. Catherine derived immense satisfaction from taking out of France and England collections that were considered national treasures. The consternation left behind in Paris and London by her legal marauding of the art market must have given her at least as much pleasure as unpacking the crates when they arrived. The sheer mass and sheer overwhelmingness of the display has made the Hermitage in St Petersburg

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one of the great world symbols of artistic possession. The collections she assembled have never been properly catalogued, from her day to ours. The present-day Hermitage, even after several major depletions to which we will return in a moment, requires the services of hundreds of specialist curators to keep track of its treasures. They work with hand-written inventories that are passed on from one generation of functionaries to the next.

At the scale at which Catherine built and filled the Hermitage, there could be no question of fine distinctions between European schools. Masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish art came with the territory that she conquered. While the paintings and drawings are reasonably well known to foreign specialists, they nonetheless do not figure in Western art history at the level they deserve. The value in nineteenth-century terms of Catherine's Rembrandt paintings, bought not individually but as part of her package purchases, exceeds that of any other royal or imperial collection of its kind. To single out a work or two is foolish in historical terms, but it allows us to indulge in the superior pleasure that is our inheritance from Catherine's phenomenal extravagance. Two of the rarest paintings in the Hermitage are group portraits by Dirck Jacobsz. of Amsterdam musketeers, which Catherine acquired in Dresden in 1769 as part of the Heinrich Brühl collection from Berlin. How he acquired them the Lord knows. All the other known 57 surviving Amsterdam civic guard portraits are still in that city, where they belong.

Following Catherine's death only one pre-Revolutionary addition of Dutch and Flemish art to the Russian state collections can be called more than marginal. However, this exception is worthy of notice. The only Russian who can be mentioned in one breath with Catherine the Great as a collector of art from the Netherlands was (I quote from the indispensable Dutch Paintings in Soviet Museums of 1982 by Yuri Kuznetsov and his wife Irina Linnik) the ‘famous Russian scholar and explorer, Piotr Semionov-Tien-Shansky, [who] began collecting pictures by Dutch masters in 1861. Aided by his extensive knowledge of painting, he set out with an amazing perseverance to gather works by minor Dutch and Flemish masters largely or totally unrepresented in the Hermitage. By 1910 he had acquired 719 works by 340 artists of whom 190 had not formerly been exhibited there’. His collections entered the Imperial Hermitage in 1915. In the 1981 catalogue of paintings of the Hermitage I counted 1773 pieces by Dutch and Flemish Masters.

Antidotes and new icons

The nationalisations and forced donations that took place from 1918 on added significantly to the state holdings. Collections of aristocratic families dating from the eighteenth century on, as well as the nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections assembled by merchants and bankers, found their way into public museums. The Communist regime also depleted the nation's holdings in the 1930s by selling off large parts of the Hermitage to raise cash. Some world treasures - think only of Jan van Eyck's Madonna in a Church now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington - were de-accessioned in connection with oil deals with Western capitalists.

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Rembrandt H. van Rijn (1606-1669), The Return of the Prodigal Son. Canvas, 262 × 206 cm. Hermitage, St Petersburg.

However, the greatest impact of the Revolution on Russian collections of Dutch and Flemish art was to spread them out over the country. In January 1918 the Third Congress of Soviets adopted wide-ranging resolutions to improve education and preserve the national heritage. As part of this programme, museums were set up all over the vast territories of the country. Some of the new institutions were stocked with works from local public or nationalised private collections, but much art was also transferred from the main repository in the country, the Hermitage. Good samples of seventeenth-century art from the Netherlands found their way to public museums in provincial capitals deep into the immense Soviet Union. Of course this great migration was not limited to art from the Netherlands, but Dutch art had a particular place in the project. Kuznetsov and Linnik report that a special fund was set up to facilitate the study of Dutch art, a fund that was used to train Soviet art historians.

‘The same period,’ they wrote, ‘saw the inauguration of museums in

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Jan van Scorel (1495-1562), Madonna and Child. Canvas, 66 × 44 cm. Regional Picture Gallery, Tambov.

Ulyanovsk, Gorky, Tambov, and Perm. The Soviet government's prime achievement in the museum field, though, was the organisation of art galleries in the outlying areas of the former Russian Empire - the cities of Central Asia and Transcaucasia, Siberia and the Far East’. The rediscovery of these dispersed works, which does not seem to have been accounted for with published lists of the transferred objects, is still in progress. It was an exciting moment when one of the most famous of them, a Madonna and Child by Jan van Scorel from the Tambov museum, was displayed in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht in 2000 in the company of other, better-known paintings by the Utrecht master. It was during this period that the Pushkin

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Museum acquired many of the objects that went into those three catalogues in 1998-2001.

The Leninist project resembles a continuation in an easterly direction of Peter the Great's didactic import into St Petersburg of paintings from the Low Countries. It too can be seen as a secularising mission civilisatrice, a challenge to the powerful tradition of sacred imagery of the Russian Orthodox Church, which occasionally borders on the idolatrous. The Communist propagation of Dutch art in particular had a stronger ideological component than that of Peter the Great. The themes of Dutch art were seen to be closer to the people, to workers and peasants, than those of other schools. In manner of production as well it was interpreted as a revolutionary breakaway from a culture dominated by the church and the aristocracy. The ‘realism’ of Dutch art was claimed by Soviet art history as a benign bourgeois foreshadowing of socialist realism.

Insofar as they brought Dutch art into play as an antidote to idolatry, the projects of Peter and Lenin fell short of their full aim. In a forthcoming essay on Rembrandt in Russia, Irina Sokolova, chief curator of Dutch painting at the Hermitage, shows that the reception of the artist in her country betrays a strong tendency toward iconicisation. His old men and women are seen as mirrors of the Russian soul, serving for semi-lapsed believers the role that the faces of Christ and the Madonna and the saints might do for the Orthodox. The painting of his that has made the greatest impact in Russia, The Return of the Prodigal Son, has functioned in ways that defied Tsarist and later Stalinist authority, offering a promise of reconciliation with a heavenly father placed above the lords of the land. Sokolova: ‘In the eternal duality of Russian artistic culture, of which Dostoevsky wrote “We have two native lands. One is Russia, the other Europe,” [Rembrandt] occupies a unique and perhaps even now not fully comprehended role.’

From Transylvania to Bucharest

Russia was not the only country where collections of Netherlandish art were brought in by the government to push back Orthodoxy. Similar motives lay behind the import of Western art in Romania. An effort of this kind that deserves more attention than it has received was the establishment in the 1780s in the German-speaking capital of Transylvania of a full-fledged gallery of Western painting. The owner of the collection was the newly appointed governor of the Habsburg province of Transylvania, Samuel von Brukenthal. Appointed in 1777 by the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa to usher Transylvania into the modern world, Brukenthal brought to Hermannstadt (today the Romanian-speaking city of Sibiu) his acclaimed collection of no fewer than 1300 Western European paintings, including some 450 from the Northern and Southern Netherlands. In the years 1778-1786 he built a palatial residence and gallery on the main square of the city. In 1817 it became a public museum, making it one of the oldest continuously functioning institutions of this kind in Europe. Because Transylvania is no longer a focus of general interest, the Brukenthal Museum has escaped the attention not only of tourists but even of specialists. The first visit of a major delegation of museum curators to the museum took place as late as March 2000, when

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25 members of codart, a worldwide network of curators of Dutch and Flemish art, came to the city and were amazed at what they found there. A checklist of the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the museum, with images of 77 of them, can be seen on the codart website, www.codart.nl. One painting that stands out for its idiosyncratic characterisations is a small panel by Jan van der Venne of the story of the satyr and the peasant (see p. 249).

One reason that Sibiu is so little known to the art world is that 19 of the most important paintings in the collection were removed after the Second World War. In a reverse impulse to that which led the Russian Communists to disperse art treasures throughout the country, the Romanian Communists brought the most important objects from the hinterland to the capital, Bucharest. Among them is the portrait of a man in a hat by Jan van Eyck that adorned the cover of the catalogue of the exhibition in Bruges in 2002, Jan van Eyck, Early Netherlandish Painting and the South. The group also includes pendant portraits by Hans Memling. The Brukenthal Museum is awaiting the right opportunity to lay claim once more to these works.

The National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest is the repository of a second major group of Dutch and Flemish paintings as well, from the former royal collection. Like the Brukenthal holdings, these works too entered Romania through a Germanic imperial connection, in this case not the Habsburgs but the Hohenzollerns. In 1866 the government of the United Romanian Principalities, in an act of nation-forming, invited Karl Eitel Friedrich von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen to become prince and in 1881 king of Romania as Carol i. Carol, who had studied art history in Berlin under Anton Springer, brought to his task a belief in the value of artistic culture in getting his new subjects up to European speed. In 1875-83 he built a legendary German Renaissance Revival palace in the resort village of Sinaia, Peleş Castle. Many of the rooms in this vast pile are furnished with objects from and recreations of a different period or centre of world art. It goes without saying that among the treasures put into place in this still-impressive ensemble were paintings and objets d'art from Holland and Flanders. In the same post-World War Two centralisation campaign that saw the removal to Bucharest of Sibiu's 19 top paintings, the royal collections too were moved to the new National Museum of Art of Romania, in the former royal palace of Bucharest. The building and its collections were so badly damaged in the revolution of 1989 that put an end to the reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu that the Foreign Art Galleries remained closed until May 2000, when they were reopened with the partial help of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and other Dutch and Flemish institutions, among others.

Ur-Netherlandish art in Prague

Russia and Romania are exceptional cases in our perspective. They are both countries in which the tension between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Western churches finds significant expression - conscious, programmatic expression - in art collections and their implementation. The other culturally developed countries of Eastern Europe, the nations of the Caucasus, Greece and Bulgaria, never even began to import Western European art. With all due reservation, one can hypothesise that the icon tradition and the easel-painting tradition,

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Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), Portrait of a Man with Blue Hat. Muzeul National de Arta al României, Bucharest.

exemplified par excellence in Dutch and Flemish art, are mutually antagonistic. Another fascinating shared characteristic of the Russian and Romanian collections is that once they were in place, they remained. Many fewer of the paintings imported by the Romanovs, Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns into Russia and Romania were later lost than in the Catholic countries to be discussed below. That this too might reflect a form of iconicisation is a more speculative suggestion, but it is worth keeping in mind.

Seen in this light, Dutch and Flemish art in the Catholic territories of Central and Eastern Europe - the Baltic lands, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - have long been more closely integrated into local society and culture than in Russia and Romania. The import of art and artists from the Netherlands into these territories required no special ideological justification, nor did it obtain one. The integration of Netherlandish art into the local culture could not go much further than it did in the Prague of Emperor Rudolf ii (emperor from 1576 to 1661). During the formative period of

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Golden Age art Prague was in fact one of the great centres of Dutch and Flemish art. Alongside the Italian and French masters that Rudolf brought to his court, he also became a major patron of such influential Dutch and Flemish artists as Joris Hoefnagel, Pieter Isaacsz., Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn, Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries and Adriaen de Vries.

The art of these masters is usually seen in a certain light. They are thought of as Mannerists, over-refined creatures of the court, creators of an un-Netherlandish art of exaggeration and decadence. The Allegory of the Court of Rudolf II by the Hague artist Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn in Prague goes quite a way to support that thesis. That is however not the whole story. According to one of the leading experts in Rudolfine art, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, the court in Prague was also the crucible in which the ur-Netherlandish specialties of landscape, still life and genre matured or were invented. The interests of the emperor and his court were not exclusively sophisticated. The court also cultivated a sense of wonder before simple plants, animals and people, a taste that was shared and cultivated by his artists. When their terms at court came to an end, and they returned to Western Europe (not all of them did), they brought with them new specialties that later came to be identified with their home countries. Roelant Savery's flower still lifes, a genre that originated in Prague though all the world thinks of it as Dutch, is a case in point.

One reason this demonstrable truth is no longer apparent to the world is that so little work from the Rudolfine period has remained in Prague. Had it done so, the castle, museums, churches and palaces of Prague would have formed an ensemble of great international art of about 1600 on a par with Rome for the art of 1500. Of the 422 items in DaCosta Kaufmann's catalogue of all surviving paintings by Rudolfine court artists done during their period of imperial service, only 45 are still in Prague today. The dispersal began in Rudolf's time, as art was taken away by artists or sent abroad by patrons, spreading the reputation and impact of his artistic policies. However, it is after Rudolf's death that Prague was emptied. The largest single group of Rudolfine art is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where it was taken by Rudolf's imperial Habsburg successors. The rest is spread over more than 130 collections in Europe and America. The big bang that initiated this dispersal took place in 1648, when Swedish troops looted Prague and took its treasures home. From there they were sold off over the course of time.

The poignancy of this diaspora came across to me two years ago, on a study trip to Spain with codart. One of the participants was Eliška Fučíková, curator of the present-day collections of the former imperial castle in Prague, the great Hrad. At the Cloister of the Descalzas Reales she recognised some sixteenth-century paintings as having come from the collection of Rudolf. They were probably brought to Madrid, she surmised, by Habsburg patrons of the cloister, which was founded by Joanna of Austria, the daughter of Charles v. Wherever Fučíková travels, she encounters and notes the dispersed remnants of the fabled Habsburg holdings in Prague, which in its time was probably the greatest single collection of Dutch and Flemish art in existence. The Netherlandish paintings in Czech museums today come more often from private collections than from the court.

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Dirk de Quade van Ravesteyn (1589-1619), Allegory of the Court of Rudolf II. Canvas, 213 × 142 cm. Strahov, Prague.

Lost art

Like the Czech story, that of Dutch and Flemish art in Poland is largely a tale of past glory. In the mid-sixteenth century the Jagellonians ruled over a kingdom that stretched from Western Prussia to the Black Sea, and maintained a capital in Kraków and a power base at Wawel Castle that was far more sophisticated than any court further east. The Flemish tapestries in Wawel form to this day one of the greatest ensembles of its kind in the world. Concerning the collecting of paintings by the Jagellonians there is a contradiction in the secondary sources. Jan Białostocki and Michal Walicki remark with regret in their 1957 overview of the history of painting col-

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lecting in Poland that the powerful late Jagellonians, who spent fortunes on palaces and jewellery and tapestries, showed no detectable interest in painting. A different tone was struck in 1988, in the exhibition catalogue Europäische Malerei des Barock, which travelled to Braunschweig, Utrecht, Munich and Cologne. In her introduction, Janina Michalkowa reports that the sixteenth-century palace was adorned with paintings, mainly Italian paintings, which however were destroyed in the fires of 1595 and 1702. Be that as it may, not a single painting can today be traced to that legendary house.

That the succeeding dynasty of the Wasas did collect on a lavish scale is no cause for lasting joy in Poland. The holdings they accumulated were lost in even more annoying ways than fires. In 1655 Swedish armies occupied Poland, dragging off, as Michalkowa puts it, anything that was draggable: furniture, sculptures, paintings, marble. When the last Wasa abdicated in 1672, he took his collection with him to France, where 150 paintings were sold for a song and dispersed. The collections of the Sobieski kings ended up in Rome, those of the Saxons in Dresden, and of the Poniatowskis, including 2000 paintings, in miscellaneous sales.

It took patricians and patriots rather than potentates to help Poland build national art collections. Michalkowa described the quite manic collecting behaviour of wealthy Polish burgers and aristocrats. The Czartoryskis and Ossolinskis, in the nineteenth century, founded museums based on nationalistic premises. The art historian and diplomat Atanazy Raczynski built a splendid collection during his missions as legate of the King of Prussia. The palace in Berlin where it was preserved was demolished in 1884 to make way for the Reichstag. The paintings were then moved to five rooms of their own in the Nationalgalerie, but in 1903 the citizens of Posen held a campaign to build a museum at their own expense and succeeded in luring the collection back to Poland, in a rare reversal of a long and sad trend.

The founding in 1862 of the immense National Museum in Warsaw (until 1916 the Museum of Fine Arts) was a direct expression of Polish nationalism on the eve of the 1863 insurrection against Russia. The late date of founding did not prevent the museum from acquiring an important collection of Dutch and Flemish painting. Nearly symbolic of this is the oil sketch by the Fleming Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) for The Apotheosis of Frederick Henry, the painting itself still in the Oranjezaal in Huis ten Bosch, for which it was painted in 1652. The Jordaens was purchased by the Warsaw museum in 1871.

The final great collection of art from the Low Countries in Central and Eastern Europe is in Hungary. The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest boasts a gallery of 755 Dutch and Flemish paintings. Most of them are from the remnants of the Esterházy collection, purchased by the Hungarian state in 1871. The Esterházys were an ancient family of Hungarian aristocrats who, in the words of the Dictionary of Art, ‘rose to prominence during the Turkish wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to become one of the leading, most influential and richest families of eastern Europe. Their absolute loyalty to the Habsburgs secured for them great power and wealth’. Although they had lost much of their wealth and belongings by the latter nineteenth century, what was left by the time of the purchase was enough to assure Budapest of a perpetual major role in the international circuit of museums

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Jan van der Venne (1616-1650), Satyr and Peasant in a Tavern. Panel, 38 × 54 cm. Bruckenthal Museum, Sibiu.

of fine arts. Jan Miense Molenaer's jolly Tavern of the Crescent Moon from the Esterházy collection is a vivid evocation of the European family having the kind of fun that even an Esterházy could share with their peasant dependents.

A corrective conclusion

This quick look at Dutch and Flemish art in Central and Eastern Europe is fragmentary and arbitrary in any number of ways. For one thing, it is limited mainly to paintings. The collections of drawings and prints would multiply the numbers of objects and collections considerably. An augmentation of another order altogether would be obtained were we to look at the arts of sculpture, architecture and tapestry. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ateliers in or from the Low Countries were the leading purveyors of these monumental arts to courts and cities to the north and east of their mother country. One reason this has not penetrated the consciousness of the Western art world is that Dutch and Flemish sculptors, masons and architects did not work in recognisably Netherlandish styles but in the current international idioms, especially classicism. For entire provinces not only of Eastern Europe but also Scandinavia and the British Isles, nearly all art was Dutch and Flemish art.

In another sense as well, this bird's-eye view is insufficient. In keeping with present-day usage, it is restricted to the countries behind the late, unlamented Iron Curtain. Before the 1940s no European would have understood

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a discussion of Central Europe that dealt with Prague and Budapest and not Vienna. Or for that matter with Berlin and Dresden, Leipzig and Munich as well. With that corrective in mind, we can only end by concluding that Central and Eastern Europe are inseparable not only from our continent but most emphatically from the part of European cultural heritage that we call Dutch and Flemish art.

gary schwartz

Bibliography

Catalogues of the museums discussed in the article

cracraft, james, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery. Chicago / London, 1997.

folga-januszewska, dorota and katarzyna murawska-muthesius, National Museum in Warsaw: Guide. Warsaw, 2001.

kauffmann, thomas dacosta, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago / London, 1988.

kuznetsov, yury and irene linnik, Dutch Painting in Soviet Museums. Amsterdam and Leningrad, 1982.