The catalogue under review appeared on the occasion of the astonishing exhibition Bernard van Orley: Brussels and the Renaissance, held at BOZAR in Brussels and co-organized by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the Art & History Museum. While it was published in Dutch and French editions only, it deserves an international audience. Its point of departure is Alexandre Galand's thorough study of the paintings by Bernard van Orley (ca. 1488–1541) in Brussels (The Flemish Primitives VI: The Bernard van Orley Group, 2013), but the scope of the present catalogue goes beyond this foundation in terms of both media and collections.
In total, eleven authors shine their lights on the life and work of the Brussels artist through a handful of essays and nearly seventy entries. In the essay section, Galand briefly summarizes Van Orley's biography. Cecilia Paredes and Stéphane Demeter paint a picture of the city of Brussels in the early sixteenth century and discuss the social and cultural fabric of which Van Orley was part. Véronique Bücken explores how Van Orley's Brussels artistic environment, the influence of artists such as Raphael (1483–1520) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), and the Habsburg court context shaped his career. Maryan W. Ainsworth focuses on Van Orley as a draughtsman. She proposes and applies a new methodology for the study of his drawings by comparing them with infrared reflectography of the underdrawings in his paintings. Ingrid De Meûter provides a chronological overview of the tapestry series after Van Orley and describes how he pushed the medium forward. Cécile Scailliérez deals with the limited corpus of portrait paintings, and Isabelle Lecocq zooms in on the monumental stained-glass windows modeled after his designs, especially those preserved at the St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral in Brussels.
Objects in the catalogue section are divided into six thematic groups with brief introductions. The entries comprise ninety-seven numbered paintings, drawings, tapestries, and stained-glass windows from European and American collections, although more works are discussed. Additional curators and scholars contributed to this section, including Stefaan Hautekeete on several groups of drawings. Nearly all entries focus on works by Bernard van Orley and his followers, with a few exceptions, such as Dürer's drawing of the Lamentation in Bremen. Throughout the catalogue, the authors demonstrate how Van Orley was firmly rooted in the Netherlandish painting tradition of the fifteenth century but was profoundly influenced by models of the Italian Renaissance and the work of Dürer, especially from 1520 onward. His two most accomplished paintings are included: the overwhelming Job and Lazarus Polyptych and the intimate Haneton Triptych, both in Brussels. Drawings are also well represented, such as the series on Romulus and Remus in Munich, the core of Van Orley's drawn oeuvre.
As his career progressed, Van Orley increasingly devoted his energy to the design of ambitious tapestry series and monumental stained-glass windows. His keen talent for balanced compositions, dynamic and expressive figures, and remarkable details is demonstrated in the tapestry series entitled Battle of Pavia, in Naples, while his attention to tapestry borders and topographic landscapes is evident from the Hunts of Charles V, in Paris.
The entries are enlightening, but they sometimes lack a full bibliography and contain little information about the condition and provenance of the works. It should also be noted that the thematic groups do not directly correspond with the organization of the exhibition and that some catalogued works were only exhibited in part (90–93, 188–93, 240–45), exhibited at the Art & History Museum (226–27) or the Brussels Cathedral (270–71), or were not on display at all (106–07, 158–59, 176–77). Several key works lack a dedicated entry, and are instead illustrated and discussed throughout the book (62, 82–83, 121, 151). All of these omissions, together with the absence of an index, mean that this is not the final monograph on Van Orley. Nonetheless, this catalogue, with more than 350 color illustrations, presents refreshing insights and provides a great overview of his artistic activities. It gives much-deserved attention to an excellent Renaissance artist, and it is a solid foundation for the work ahead.
