Memory and the kinship of writing and picturing in the early seventeenth-century Netherlands

Abstract

In the Schilder-Boeck (Book on Picturing) of 1604, the groundbreaking text that established the canon of Netherlandish painters, draughts men, and engravers, embedding them within a vernacular theory and history of art, Karel van Mander evaluates three masters of visual memory — Michelangelo, Michiel Cocxie, and Hendrick Goltzius — appraising them in order to unfold the operations underlying canon formation. Van Mander offers a critique of Michelangelo and Cocxie, showing how their mnemonic practice fails to reconcile the competing demands of invention and imitation; to them van Mander opposes Goltzius, who uses memory to resolve originality into imitation, demonstrating that it is possible to fashion images uyt zijn selven (out of oneself) even while zijn selven schier verghetende (seeming entirely to forget oneself).¹ In this paper I propose first, to describe briefly van Mander's critique of mnemonic practice; then to suggest how that critique, answered in the life and work of Goltzius, derives from the theory and practice of schilderconst, the art of writing. My larger purpose is to argue the pictorial status of writing, and conversely, to explain how the calligrapher's criteria of penmanship resonate with schilderconst, the ‘art of picturing’, thus giving access to Dutch protocols ofimitation and memory at the turn of the seventeenth century.