Ambrosius Benson

Ambrosius Benson: Rest on the flight to Egypt

Ambrosius Benson: The Virgin (Mary) with the Child and St. Barbara and St. Catherine (of Alexandria) , ca.1525

Ambrosius Benson: Reading Mary Magdalene , ca.1525

Ambrosius Benson (* around 1495 in Lombardy , † around 1550 in Bruges ) was a painter who worked in Bruges at the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Life

In 1518, the painter Ambrosius Benson, originally from northern Italy, settled in Bruges , where he acquired citizenship as a prerequisite for exercising his craft. It was not until August 21, 1519 that he was registered as a freelance master of the Bruges painters' guild, in whose register at that time his Lombard origin is recorded.

In the time between moving to Bruges and being registered in the guild register, Benson was apparently employed in Gerard David 's workshop , with whom, however, serious disputes soon arose. So in February 1519 David was legally obliged to hand over two chests Benson had left behind at short notice while he was moving there. The court files give insight into the contents of both chests, which include a sketchbook with head and nude studies, several pattern drawings, several paintings (including a picture of Mary for Benson's father, the depiction of the Lamentation of Christ and an unfinished depiction of Mary Magdalene), Paints and finally several cartridges (cardboard boxes or master drawings) that came from Adriaen Isenbrant's workshop but were actually partly owned by Benson or belonged to the Bruges painter Albert Cornelis . Gerard David was even imprisoned for a few days at Benson's instigation because he had not yet handed over the chests in 1520; on the other hand, Benson, who was substantially indebted to David , was obliged to pay off his debts a few days a week in David's workshop. The court case is one of the most important sources of workshop practice in Bruges and the southern Netherlands around 1500. Regardless of the dispute, Benson turns out to be dependent on the pictorial inventions, the coloring and the painting style of the older painter and, together with Isenbrant, is one of Gerard's most important successors David at the transition from the late Gothic to the Renaissance .

Even before he joined the Bruges painters' guild and ran his own workshop, the painter married Anna Ghyselin from Bruges, who died in 1548. Ambrosius Benson had two sons with her: Willem (Guilleaume) Benson was born in 1521, and Jan Benson was born shortly afterwards. In addition, Benson was responsible for two illegitimate daughters from his numerous affairs, three of whom are legal experts. After the death of Anna Ghyselin, the widower Joyselin married Michiels, with whom he had another daughter, but before whose birth he died.

Benson's sons both learned the painting trade in their father's workshop. He trained two further apprentices: in 1541 Joachim Spaers and in 1549 Jakob Finson, the father of the Carravagist Louis Finson * (c.1574-1617), apprenticed with him.

Ambrosius Benson was a particularly prolific painter whose workshop produced paintings both for the Flemish market and for export to Spain and Portugal. At the beginning of his career in Bruges, Benson offered works not only in his workshop, but also on his own stand in the Pandt of the Bruges Franciscan Monastery - the local market for paintings - which he rented regularly between 1522 and 1530. Economically successful, Benson managed to acquire land and several houses in Bruges in the course of his career, half of which he paid for with eight paintings.

Ambrosius Benson took on various administrative tasks for the Bruges painters' guild and held the office of vinder (assessor) three times , served as dean of the guild in 1537/8 and 1543/4 and acted as treasurer in 1540/1. He was also a member of the Bruges Council on several occasions. Ambrosius Benson died in his adopted home Bruges in 1550 and was buried in the churchyard of the Church of Our Lady there.

Monogrammist AB from 1527 - Master of the Antwerp Deipara Virgo - Master of Segovia

The Belgian art historian Georges Hulin de Loo first wrote two works with the monogram AB in 1902 - a triptych with Saint Anthony of Padua (now Brussels , Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium ) and a Holy Family dated 1527 (now Bruges , Groeninge Museum ) - to Ambrosius Benson and on this basis was able to assign further panel paintings to the Bruges painter known by name from documents. The works that Hulin de Loo also used for Ambrosius Benson for stylistic considerations at that time also included a monumental Deipara Virgo with prophets and sibyls ( Antwerp , Royal Museum of Fine Arts ), as well as one originally from the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz la Real (Segovia ) from Annen's reredos ( Madrid , Museo Nactional del Prado ). The triptych with the Descent from the Cross , preserved in the St. Andrew's Chapel of Segovia Cathedral , which was given the emergency name Master of Segovia by the German art historian Carl Justi in 1886 , was attributed to Benson by Hulin de Loo.

Based on the style-critical basis created by Hulin de Loo, Eberhard von Bodenhausen (1905) and Max J. Friedländer (1934) ascribed further paintings to Ambrosius Benson . The last detailed catalog raisonné comes from the Belgian art critic Georges Marlier, who published a monograph on Ambrosius Benson in 1965: if Friedländer ascribed 65 paintings to Benson, Marlier's catalog raisonné contained almost two hundred entries from the master’s own work. Since then, other works have become known, so that one can assume that workshop production will be particularly lively.

Style and school

Although he comes from northern Italy, Ambrosius Benson - whose original surname was probably Benzone or Bensoni - adapts almost entirely to the taste of his Flemish adopted home in his painting in Bruges. His knowledge and the use of Italian compositions - in particular the Holy Family ( Bruges , Groeningemuseum ), dated and programmed in 1527, goes back to a pictorial invention by Andrea del Sarto - plays a subordinate role in his oeuvre compared to the dependence on the compositions of Gerard David and older Bruges masters Role. Like Adriaen Isenbrant , with whom Benson worked closely, his production is often characterized by repetitions and his devotional pictures in particular have a serial character. A large part of his oeuvre was apparently intended for the Spanish market, whereby Benson adapts himself painterly to Spanish tastes in the paintings intended for export, which appear clumsier. In Spain there is a successor to Benson in Spain, the master of the Gallo retable by Castrojeriz, who was active around 1540-1560. It is unusual that he gave some works his monogram, but with Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christ and Hans Memling there was a tradition in Bruges of signing paintings, which testifies to the emergence of artistic self-confidence.

While Benson seems particularly conventional in his religious representations, his secular paintings - such as the Musical Society in the Basel Art Museum - are significant milestones in the development of Flemish genre painting; In his portraits, too, Benson is more progressive than his Bruges contemporaries and of great importance for the development of the Renaissance portrait in the Netherlands. As a portraitist and with regard to secular scenes, Benson found a worthy successor in Bruges in Pieter Pourbus .

Reading woman and Sibylle

One of Benson's motifs is not only interested in specialist circles, the portrayal of reading women such as the holy women who surround a Madonna or his reading Mary Magdalene . Like his portrayals of the visionary Sibyl in the image of the Glorification of Mary, it can be interpreted as a rather uncommonly open recognition of the erudition of women in the context of the time.

Paintings (selection)

Examples of religious works

• Glorification of Mariae (Deipeira Virgo), Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten
• The Virgin (Mary) with the Child and St. Barbara and St. Catherine (of Alexandria) , Paris, Louvre
• Maria with the child Berlin , State Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage, Picture Gallery, inventory no. 1787
• Adoration of the Magi , Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Gemäldegalerie Inv.-Nr. GG_925
• Rest on the flight to Egypt , Bruges, Groeninge Museum
• The Holy Family , Bruges, Groeninge Museum
• Lamentation of Christ , San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, inv. No. 1956.90.
• Reading Mary Magdalene , London, National Gallery Inv. No. NG655
• St. Anne with the Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary ( Anna Selbdritt ), Madrid, Prado Inv. No. PO1933
• Annen reredos , Madrid, Prado ( see here )

Examples of secular works

• Music evening , Berlin, German Historical Museum, Art 1, inventory no. 1992/1466
• Musical Society , Kunstmuseum Basel.

Examples of portrait art

• Portrait of Margaret of Austria - The Sibylle (Portrait de Marguerite d'Autriche - La Sibylle), Paris Louvre RF2821
• Portrait of Otho Stochoven , Bruges, Groeninge Museum
• Double portrait Cornelis de Schepper and Elisabeth Donche , Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales Inv. No. 301.1994. From
• Sibilla Persica , London, Victoria & Albert Museum CAI.106 (possibly work of a successor)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles Vanden Haute, La corporation des Printers de Bruges, Van Caffel-Missiaen, Kortrijk o. J. (1913), p. 62
2. ^ RA Parmentier: Modest omtrent de Burgsche schilders van de 16de eeuw: I. Ambrosius Benson . In: Handelingen van het genootschap voor geschiedenis sticht on the benaming Société d'Émulation . tape 80 , 1937, pp. 87-129 .
3. ^ Jean C. Wilson: Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages. Studies in Society and Visual Culture . Penn State University Press, University Park PA 1998, ISBN 0-271-01653-1 , pp. 155-157 .
4. ↑ D. Arens: DuMont Art Guide Flanders . 6th edition 2009 pp. 60-61
5. ↑ Georges Malier, Ambrosius Benson et la peinture à Bruge au temps de Charles-Quint , Editions du Musée de Maerlant, Damme, 1957, pp. 35-36; Parmentier, op. Cit. , Pp. 95-97 and 117-118.
6. ↑ Marlier, op.cit. , Pp. 27-28; Parmentier, op.cit. , P. 90.
7. ^ Jean C. Wilson: The Participation of painters in the Bruges 'pandt' market, 1512-1550 . In: Burlington Magazine . tape 125 , 1983, pp. 476-479 .
8. ↑ Parmentier, op.cit. , Pp. 107-108.
9. ↑ Parmentier, op.cit. , Pp. 1116-120.
10. ↑ George Hulin de Loo,  Bruges 1902 Exposition de Tableaux Flamands des XIVe, VXe et XVIe siècles. Cataloque Critique , Sifer, Gent 1902, pp. XXVII-XXX.
11. ↑ Carl Justi, "Altfrandrische pictures in Spain and Portugal, 3: Gerard David", in: Journal of Art History 21 (1886), pp 139-140.
12. ↑ Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen, Gerard David and his school, Munich, F. Bruckmann & Co., 1905, pp. 201–207.
13. ↑ Max J. Friedländer, The Old Dutch Painting. Vol. XI: The Antwerp Manners. Adrian Ysenbrant, Leiden, AW Sijthoff's uitgeversmij nv, 1934, pp. 103–107, 141–147,
14. ↑ George Marlier, op. Cit.
15. ↑ Didier Martens, P Peinture Flamande et goût ibérique aux xvème et XVIème siècles, Brussels, Le Livre Timperman, 2010, pp. 263-297.
16. ↑ T. Burg: The signature: forms and functions from the Middle Ages to the 17th century . Art history vol. 80. Lit-Verlag 2007 p. 398
17. ↑ Till-Holger Borchert and Koenraad Jonckheere (eds.), Faces Then: Renaissanceportretten uit de Lage Landen , Brussels, Hannibal & BozarBooks, 2015, pp. 100-105.
18. ↑ such as BG Marlier: Ambrosius Benson et le thème des Sibylles. In: Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie, 4.1963, p. 51-60

literature

• George Hulin de Loo,  Bruges 1902 Exposition de Tableaux Flamands des XIVe, VXe et XVIe siècles. Cataloque Critique , Sifer, Gent 1902, pp. XXVII-XXX.
• Eberhard von Bodenhausen, Gerard David and his school , Brinkmann, Munich 1905, pp. 201–207.
• MJ Friedländer: Ambrosius Benson as a portrait painter . In: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collections, 31.1910, pp. 139–148.
• Max Jakob Friedländer: '' The Old Dutch Painting. '' The Antwerp Mannerists - Adriaen Ysenbrant, Vol. XI, Berlin 1933
• RA Parmentier, "Modest omtrent de Burgsche schilders van de 16de eeuw: I Ambrosius Benson", in:  Handelingen van het genootschap voor geschiedenis sticht onder de benaming Société d'Émulation  80 (1937), pp. 87–129 
• G. Marlier: Ambrosius Benson et la peinture à Bruges au temps de Charles Quint . Editions du Musée van Maerlant, Damme, 1957
• G. Marlier: Ambrosius Benson et le thème des Sibylles . In: Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie, 4.1963, pp. 51–6.
• Maximiliaan Martens et al. Paul Huvenne (Ed.), Memling and his time: Bruges and the Renaissance , Belser, Stuttgart 1998, pp. 142–157.

Web links

Commons : Ambrosius Benson  - collection of images, videos and audio files