Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Joachim Anthonisz Wtewal
Dutch; 16th-century, 17th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
45%
Cephalus and Procris. c1600. Oil on canvas
One can tell why the name we use for the style in which Wtewael painted — Mannerism — is also, with a lowercase “m,” one of criticism’s key pejoratives. Though certain Italians had elaborated Michelangelo’s distortions and subjectivity into the first great decadent style of the modern period, their copycats to the north largely lost themselves in either complicatedness or (as here) folkish melodrama. Cephalus’ and Procris’ cloaks are manneristically yellow and pink, but unlike the jarring high colors of Wtewael’s southern inspirators they’re dulled almost to the point of seeming earthen. The central knot that the characters make is awkwardly in between stately posture and lifelike motion. Like the inverse of Procris herself, Wtewael seems to have had a heart for the simple relations of the natural world but a head for transcending them. His painting, all artifice, registers the difficulty of being so disposed. (2023)