LINGELBACH, Johannes

It is thought that the painting represents the battle of Lepanto between Turks and Europeans.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 12 minutes):

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber: The Battle, suite

Dutch artists of a younger generation continued working in Bamboccio’s (Pieter van Laer’s) style in Rome after he left. The most intriguing member of them is Lingelbach who is said to have arrived in Rome via France in 1644. He was certainly there by 1647, reported to have left in 1650, and is documented in Amsterdam in 1653. No work assigned to his Roman years is signed or documented. Nevertheless, more than a dozen have been ascribed to this phase of his activity on the basis of their style.

After his return to the Netherlands Lingelbach adds new motifs to his repertoire: equestrian scenes in sunny landscapes reminiscent of Wouverman, bright views of imaginary Italianate seaports, and ‘piazzi’ crowded with narrative detail.

Many Dutch, Flemish, French, and Italian artists of the seventeenth century painted pictures of battles on land, often with cavalry. Lingelbach’s subject, a generic battle of Turks and Christians is found in the works by Aniello Falcone, and his Italian followers, including Salvator Rosa. Falcone’s genre pieces influenced Pieter van Laer and Michelangelo Cerquozzi, two of Lingelbach’s predecessors in Rome. Jacques Courtois, who was friendly with Van Laer and Cerquozzi, painted battle scenes for noble patrons in Rome during the 1640s, when Lingelbach was there.

This painting represents a scene of the Battle of Lepanto, 1571, with a crowded rowing boat and men struggling to shore in the foreground.

In the background of this painting a topographically accurate depiction of the Piazza del Popolo can be seen as it was before 1655 when Bernini transformed the architecture into the Baroque style. It should be noted that the painting is dated 1664, which means that the painting was executed after the architecture of piazza had been transformed. However, the main subject of the painting is not the architecture but the picturesque scene of everyday life in the foreground.

This early canvas by Lingelbach is one of the first painted by the artist after he settled in Amsterdam in 1650 after six years in Rome. His debts to other painters who had been active in Rome, in particular Pieter van Laer, Jan Miel, and Michelangelo Cerquozzi are well illustrated in the painting.

The painter here depicted three peasants recuperating and refreshing themselves by an inn. These figures sit, eating and drinking, around a low table covered with a white cloth, on which a bowl and a chunk of bread have been placed. The dramatic contrasts in the painting are reflective of the time Lingelbach spent in Rome, where he was influenced by the fashion for precise but intense chiaroscuro.

Although this painting was formely believed to be an Italian landscape, it was identified as a view of Lyon with a distant view of Fort Saint-Jean and the Chateau de Pierre-Seize. Lyon was probably the French city most frequently painted by Netherlandish artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the earliest of these may have been Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

This painting confronts the spectator with a curious, if not bizarre combination of more or less identifiable topographical elements. A broad, seemingly rural, crowded market square reminiscent of the Campo Vaccino in Rome is bordered on the left by a dark row of large ruins and buildings, which enclose the scene like the wings of a stage set. On the far left is the corner of a classical temple, modelled on the nearby Temple of Saturn. Between the ruin and the tall, sturdy houses further towards the centre of the image is a narrow view of the stairway leading up to the Capitoline, depicted on a noticeably reduced scale.

A prominent place on the market square has been cleared for a powerful sculptural group. In reality, this classical sculpture of a lion attacking a horse was housed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline in the seventeenth century. Further to the right, the square gradually gives way to a plain with the fountain from the Campo Vaccino at the far end. The plain is demarcated by the ruins of an imaginary city or palace, beyond which we discern hills reminiscent of the Latian landscape. Both square and plain are crowded with a rich variety of figures, including bird and fruit vendors, a storyteller, beggars, farmers, a horsedrawn carriage and a conspicuously large number of well-dressed Dutch burghers.

It is not known whether Lingelbach’s later work reached Rome and Venice as early as the seventeenth century. Still it seems probable that Luca Carlevaris must have known Lingelbach’s paintings, for compositional formulae characteristic of the Dutch artist recur in many of Carlevaris’s paintings, whether these are topographically correct or not.

This painting depicts a Roman street scene with the feeding of the poor.

The Battle of Lepanto, the famous naval battle against the Turks, took place in 1571 and concluded with the victory of the Venetians and its allies over the enemies of Christianity, who seemed by now invincible in the eyes of all the European nations. The Ottoman Turks were defeated by the combined forces of Spain, Venice and the Papacy under the command of Don John of Austria. This decisive victory by the Holy League permanently destroyed Ottoman naval power in the Mediterranean.

The intensity of the battle is palpable in the present depiction. The composition is dominated in the centre by a dramatically sinking galley - its stern receding into the murky green water as the helpless oars point skywards.