There are exhibitions that work as a decoy or as the chirping of birds.
The starting point is individual, but the route is choral.
It happens with the exhibition of
Marinus: Reymerswale Painter
at the Prado Museum, the first monograph dedicated to this artist, which will be open until June 13, and of which the museum has the largest collection in the world.
It is small, with barely 10 works by the painter accompanied by as many of his contemporaries, but it becomes a kind of magnifying glass that amplifies the readings of this author, who is habitual in textbooks, but about whom little is known.
He is one of the most enigmatic artists in the history of art
Marinus is one of the most enigmatic artists in the history of art and, surely, of the Prado.
It is estimated that he was born around 1489 and was active until 1546, and there are only 26 works in the public collections.
He did not enroll in any school and began to sign when he was already fluent with the brush, so surely there is much more work yet to be cataloged.
For a long time he had a reputation as a reclusive artist and iconoclast and was even confused with another person with the same name who participated in the destruction of works of art and who was condemned in 1567. With a style similar to that of Dürer, he always stood out for his precision in the drawing and the meticulousness of their faces and hands, molded with fine brushstrokes and dark shading.
It is possible that he worked as a copyist or supplier with Quentin Massys' workshop and, not being registered as a teacher, was one of those painters who were not registered with the Antwerp guild.
To date there is only one record of the time that can provide tangible information about the professional commissions of the painter.
We must go back to 1531 and to a note attesting to the payment of the municipal treasurer Gillis van Borre for a map of Zuid-Beveland, a region of Zeeland, where the artist lived.
This was precisely the great theme of his painting: money, merchants and tax collectors, the so-called “moneychangers”, apart from some loose scene from
The vocation of San Mateo
(1530), owned by the Thyssen Museum, or
The Virgin of Milk
(1530), the oldest paintings by Marinus Reymerswale in the exhibition.
The emerging capitalist bourgeois society was pushing hard and that world between rich and poor jumped onto the canvas as a novelty.
The expansion of trade was on the rise and capital markets, which made Antwerp a wealthy city in the 16th century.
The greatest value of this artist is surely there, in his anticipatory eye of that greed that would reign in the world so many centuries later.
A look at the money that he garnished with a good dose of satire and mocking gesture.
It was a free verse within Flemish painting, of which there is still much to study
Marinus Reymerswale was, in reality, a free verse within Flemish painting, of which there is still much to study.
This is the focus of the Prado, with the same idea of thesis shared in the exhibitions
Guests
and
Mythological Passions
, a thematic thread to draw from.
By redoing that ball, some ends have been tied.
His name was rediscovered in 1863, thanks to the correct reading of his signature in
The municipal treasurer and his wife
, known as
El cambista y su mujer
(1538), an icon of the Prado that became the representation of the activities of the banking and commerce and on which, in fact, the entire exhibition is organized.
In addition, there are versions of versions, such as
Saint Jerome in his cell
(1533), along with the homonymous that Dürer painted in 1514, and two jewels that come, respectively, from the Louvre Museum and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg:
The Tax Collectors
(1535) and
The municipal treasurer
(1530).