While some comments herein are speculative in nature, as we don’t have certain evidence of authorship, the following is support for the idea that the principal painter was Jan Brueghel the Elder and that the painting was completed in the early 1620’s.

Indications pointing to Brueghel:

1) Stylistic: The genre of painting, that of formal “gallery interiors” or “cabinets of collections”, was developed in the second decade of the 17th century in Antwerp and was popularized by Jan Brueghel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens and Franz Francken the Younger. Several scholars and dealers familiar with these and other painters of the period have indicated that the detail within the painting and extraordinary quality of execution point to Jan Brueghel the Elder.

2) Provenance: The Rothschild’s family records indicate that Jan Brueghel the Elder was the painter. When the painting was sold by the Rothschild’s to the family of Mellon-Evans in 1957-58, it was represented as by Brueghel. While certainly not dispositive, there is a reasonable likelihood that these owners from the mid-19th to the mid 20th century had certain provenance and authorship information which led them to this conclusion.

3) Preparatory drawing: The preparatory drawing (in the Windsor collection) appears to contain three identifiable portraits within it. The principal party in the group—looking out at the viewer, a technique often expressing authorship—is essentially identical to self portraits of Peter Paul Rubens. The second likeness, with “wild” hair, is highly suggestive of Jan van Dyck who was a student of Rubens during the couple of years just prior to 1620. Finally, the third party, with elegant dress and formal posture, resembles portraits of Peter Linder, the German merchant living in Milan at that time, whose family crest is clearly identifiable at the top of the window on the left of the finished painting. At the time that Van Dyck was working in Ruben’s studio Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens were completing their extraordinary joint creative effort, sometimes referred to as the “Senses” paintings, now residing in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The close personal relationship between Rubens and Brueghel is well documented.

4) Patron/Milan connection: The family crest in the upper left window of the painting has been identified as that of the German merchant Peter Linder who was resident in Milan in the 1620’s. A letter to Mutio Oddi, a mathematician and scientist from Urbino, dated 1629, makes specific reference to its writer having just been in the Linder home and seeing the painting “conceived” by Mutio Oddi. Peter Linder was a student of Mutio Oddi whose likeness appears on one of the medallions on the center table of the Linder Gallery painting. Peter Linder was a friend of Cardinal Federico Borromeo of Milan, who, during the period from just before 1600 to around 1630, with the assistance of his agent Ercole Bianchi, was collecting and displaying important works by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Jan Brueghel the Elder lived in Borromeo’s house in the mid 1590’s before returning to Antwerp.

Issues to overcome as to Brueghel’s authorship:

1) Jan Brueghel the Elder died in early 1625. One of the books on the center table in the painting, Tabula Rudolfine by Johannes Kepler, was published in 1627, after Brueghel’s death. However, this critical mathematical summary of the observations of Tycho Brahe of the orbit of the planet Mars through the sky was created and finished more than a decade earlier and prominent scientists such as Mutio Oddi could very well have known about it. In the critical reference to the cosmological system of Brahe, included in the planetary drawing on the center table, the inclusion of Kepler’s book would have been very relevant. The book’s official publication date notwithstanding, the painting could very well have been completed in the early 1620’s by Brueghel the Elder informed by Oddi’s knowledge of Kepler’s work

2) A Medallion of Mutio Oddi was apparently cast after Brueghel’s death (see the references by Alexander Marr). However, given Oddi’s apparently central role in conceiving the cosmological and other mathematic representations in the painting, it would have been natural to include his portrait along with those of Michelangelo, Durer, Cardenas, Alciati, and Bramante. A drawing of the Oddi Medallion (no actual copies of which are apparently extant) may be slightly different than the difficult to resolve likeness of Oddi on the coin in the painting.

There may be archival material not yet discovered in Peter Linder’s family papers or in those of Borromeo or Bianchi or Brueghel or Rubens. Until such material is found, unless some other directional clues are discovered, absolutely certain attribution to Jan Brueghel the Elder is difficult to make. However, from the stylistic and relational connections described above his being the principal painter continues to be a reasonable likelihood.

If any reader has comments, related information, and/or educated judgments on these matters please feel free to offer your thoughts by clicking on “CONTACT” in the header of the website and forwarding your observations!

Ron Cordover

Three conversing figures, detail from Windsor drawing

Gorman: I suppose a fundamental question remains: what is the relationship between this drawing and this painting? Because the drawing, I think, clearly is before the painting. You know, these are sketches and so on, and it’s clearly very closely related to the picture — it doesn’t seem to be a completely independent work. But the drawing, as you can see, is more conventional — it has the same octagonal table, it has the globe, but it has the more conventional picture of three connoisseurs conversing around a table, it has a dog — it is more in the traditional genre of gallery interiors.

Cordover: And I would argue that two of those cognoscenti are easily identifiable.

Marr: Yes.

Cordover: I think that the figure on the right is almost identical to a self portrait by Peter Paul Rubens.

Marr: Yes, I would say that.

Cordover: And the figure on the left I think is also identifiable . . . .

Gorman: As Peter Linder?

Marr: Yes I think it is Peter Linder.

Cordover: Do you think so?

Gorman: Yes. And I also have a guess about who the figure in the middle is.

Cordover: That’s extraordinary.

Gorman: I saw it this afternoon. I think it’s Van Dyck, who was working in the Rubens studio from 1618 to 1620.

Cordover: Now that you’ve said it, it conjures up that portrait of Van Dyck that does look just like this.

Gorman: But if it is van Dyck, think about the drawing, — I think the drawing is memorializing a visit.  Perhaps Linder went to Antwerp for business between 1618 and 1620, and this was a visit where he met Rubens and van Dyck, and this is where the idea of him commissioning a gallery painting originated, and then this drawing was developed, possibly brought by Jan Brueghel the Younger to Milan. Then Linder and Oddi developed a more complex version of the composition and brought in the allegory, the deep mathematical content and the Kepler connection and so on and then that led to the painting. It’s just an idea.

Cordover: Van Dyck went to Milan with Jan Brueghel the Younger, his close friend, in 1622.

Weschler: The painting is painted in Antwerp or in Milan?

Gorman: The painting could have been painted in theory in either, but it was definitely painted by an Antwerp painter and they didn’t tend to stick around in Milan for long enough to do much, so it seems more likely that it was painted in Antwerp but commissioned perhaps on the basis of a visit to Milan.

Weschler: How could they have worked from Milan? There are the Alps in between…

Allegorical figures, detail from Linder Gallery

GORMAN: So where does this picture sit in the genre of pictures of galleries?

MARR: Well, it’s interesting in light of the point Ren made about this being a moment when art becomes art, because this genre of gallery interiors is precisely about that. It’s about the moment at which art appreciation becomes a recognized phenomenon, a recognized and accepted thing to do. This particular genre of pictures of collections emerged at exactly the same time that the “liefhebbers van schilderen” — the so called ‘lovers of painting’—were first admitted as a category of member to the Guild of St Luke, the artist’s guild in Antwerp. So it’s a recognition that art isn’t just about making. It’s about appreciating and evaluating and discussing. And that’s really what this genre meant to be about. It’s showing images that cognoscenti could stand in front of discussing differences between style, differences between manner, differences between treatment of themes.

CORDOVER: While I agree completely that this genre of painting—Flemish gallery painting—is precisely as you’ve described it, this work has such striking differences from essentially all the other Flemish gallery paintings that we’ve looked at because it doesn’t have cognoscenti within it and it isn’t principally about a particular collection of either art objects or other kinds of objects—musical instruments or artificialia or naturalia of any sort. It’s about knowledge.

MARR: I think this is essentially a hybrid. Yes, you’re quite right—there are no cognoscenti actually in the picture. I don’t think that that means that this isn’t an image that should be thought about in terms of cognoscenti and appreciation.

WESCHLER: This reminds me of David Hockney, who has recently taken to painting these landscapes which he calls his “figure paintings”. And if you say to him, “But where are the figures?” he replies, “You are the figure.” In the same way, in answer to the question of where are the cognoscenti—you are the cognoscenti.

MARR: And it is also about knowledge—but it’s about lots of different kinds of knowledge. I think there’s no doubt that knowledge of the cosmos and how the world fits together is a key theme. But I think that we shouldn’t forget that this is also about recognition of the styles of different painters. So I think it’s about—going back to arts and sciences and how they’re allmixed up—I think this is an image about different kinds of knowledge.

GORMAN: You could say the picture is a machine to produce cognoscenti

excerpt from A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery (Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi/Alias, 2009)