.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Saint John shelters underneath a tree on what the Flemish might have imagined the island Patmos to have looked like. The Aegean island close to the mainland of Asia Minor was where the Evangelist was exiled by Miletius, governor of Rome under Emperor Domitian, and it is there that he is believed to have had and written his revelations. The quill in one hand, papers in the other, Saint John looks up at the dark clouds. The copper panel depicts the moment of his vision of the Virgin as Woman of the Apocalypse, which inspired him when writing the Book of Revelation. Quite prominently in the lower centre of the composition, the eagle flies low over the sea. Besides being Saint John’s attribute, the eagle is also one of the four ‘apocalyptic beasts’.
(Rev. 8:13) And I saw, and I heard an eagle, flying in mid heaven, saying with a great voice, Woe woe, woe, for them that dwell on the earth, by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, who are yet to sound.
Jan Brueghel the Younger went to Italy in 1624, travelling with his childhood friend Anthony van Dyck. When his father died unexpectedly in a cholera epidemic in 1625, he returned to Antwerp and took over his busy Antwerp studio. The son is known to have completed some of his unfinished works, as well as copying and reworking his successful compositions. The present lot is based on Jan Brueghel the Elder’s copper of the same subject, now in the Galleria Doria Paphilj, Rome (see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere, II, Lingen, 2008-10, pp. 640-2, no. 306), which the Elder is thought to have painted it when in Rome in 1593, probably in Paul Bril’s studio, who in turn was a friend of his father Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Klaus Ertz believes the present lot to have been painted soon after the Younger Jan’s return from Italy in 1625, and dates it to circa 1630 (Ertz, 1984, op. cit., p. 335). While in the Elder’s love for secondary elements is evident in the sea filled with figures in little boats and even a whale, the Younger’s interpretation is much more serene and devotional.
(Rev. 8:13) And I saw, and I heard an eagle, flying in mid heaven, saying with a great voice, Woe woe, woe, for them that dwell on the earth, by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, who are yet to sound.
Jan Brueghel the Younger went to Italy in 1624, travelling with his childhood friend Anthony van Dyck. When his father died unexpectedly in a cholera epidemic in 1625, he returned to Antwerp and took over his busy Antwerp studio. The son is known to have completed some of his unfinished works, as well as copying and reworking his successful compositions. The present lot is based on Jan Brueghel the Elder’s copper of the same subject, now in the Galleria Doria Paphilj, Rome (see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere, II, Lingen, 2008-10, pp. 640-2, no. 306), which the Elder is thought to have painted it when in Rome in 1593, probably in Paul Bril’s studio, who in turn was a friend of his father Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Klaus Ertz believes the present lot to have been painted soon after the Younger Jan’s return from Italy in 1625, and dates it to circa 1630 (Ertz, 1984, op. cit., p. 335). While in the Elder’s love for secondary elements is evident in the sea filled with figures in little boats and even a whale, the Younger’s interpretation is much more serene and devotional.