Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Herri met de Bles
Netherlandish; 16th-century
Antwerp, Belgium: Museum Mayer van den Bergh
88%
Landscape with Christ and his Disciples on the Road to Emmaus. Before 1550. Oil on panel
If it's true that Patinir invented landscape painting, then this thing by met de Bles shows the genre in only its second generation — teeming with depictive possibilities, constrained by few conventions, fervid and restless, a little bit self-aware, a little unmoored. What's amazing is the amount of unreality which landscape was able to abide at this very early stage in its development. The intense backlighting cuts a senseless outline out of everything towards the front of the picture; the atmospheric perspective is so unwieldy in its severity as to almost entirely dissolve everything towards the back; the blank bow of river reaches into the insides of the blank sky above it and so nearly negates any distinction between background and fore-; the vertical reflection of the building at bottom right is less a reflection than a blocked passage into some dreamworld. (I say this last part melodramatically because it took me a minute of looking just to figure out what that variegating mass of darkness in the painting's low corner even was.) There's much more latitude for invention in this picture than there is in those of this tradition's inheritors from a few decades on. Brueghel, for instance, is constrained by the artiness of his constructions; he never would have painted his sun as a drop of blood like met de Bles did here. It's as if the very possibility of seeing the natural world as something outside of you — beyond man, limiting him — is in a state of violent emergence here. That's why the buildings are all so "drawn" but the earth itself is voluptuously "painted." (TFS, 2026)