JAN DE BISSCHOP AND HIS ICONES & PARADIGMATA. Classical Antiquities and Italian Drawings for Artistic Instruction in Seventeenth Century Holland

JAN G. VAN GELDER & INGRID JOST

EDITED BY KEITH ANDREWS

1985. Text Volume: 4to. 320 pp.

Facsimile-volume: ICONES and PARADIGMATA. Engraved title, 4 pp., 50 plates, typogr. title, 4 pp., 50 plates, typogr. title, engraved title, 97 plates. Cloth bound with dustjacket.

ISBN 90 7028 822 2

Reprinted in the facsimile-volume are the first edition of the Signorum veterum icones and the second edition of the Paradigmata graphices variorum artificium, Voor-Beelden der Teken-konst van verscheyde Meesters. Both works consist of text and a series of etchings reproducing works of art. Extensive discussions of all aspects of these are given in the text-volume, including comments on each of the works of art in question.

The texts of the dedications are important inasmuch as they contain the first exposition to appear in print of the classicist theory of art in the Northern Netherlands, which was clearly derived from France. The works of art reproduced in the plates are either antique or Italian, sculpture in the Icones, drawings plus some sculpture in the Paradigmata . De Bisschop does not seem to have copied prints in making his plates and he hardly made any drawings of sculpture while he was in Rome himself, so that his choice of subjects for both works was determined in the first instance by the same criterion, i.e. the material available in the Northern Netherlands, whether actual sculpture or drawings of sculpture, drawings or copies of drawings. Notwithstanding this limitation the plates of the Icones are important in several respects. They belong among the documentary material for the post-antique history of the antique sculptures, some of them showing little known or even unknown sixteenth- and seventeenth-century states of preservation, others being the only or the earliest known reproductions of the works in question. In some instances, including works from the Arundel collection, the etchings may even be said to be of high documentary value. This also holds good for the now lost intermediary drawings which De Bisschop used as the immediate basis for his work, for without his publication we would know nothing of the drawings after the antique made by Jacques de Gheyn III in England and France and we would probably be equally ignorant of the fact that - among others- Poelenburgh, too, made careful drawings of antique sculptures. The Paradigmata is significant in similar ways.

Each work of art reproduced in the Icones and Paradigmata is commented.

No connected study has so far been made of the interest in works of art of the past in the Northern Netherlands or of the history of collecting in the Northern Netherlands.