The period of the great struggle of the Netherlands for religious and
political independence from the yoke of Spain and the Inquisition
was not propitious for the fostering of the Fine Arts. Not only did
the troubled provinces, as was quite natural, slacken in artistic
production, but a vast portion of the treasures owned by churches
and monastic establishments were destroyed by the fanaticism of
Protestant iconoclasts. The separation of the Protestant North from
the Catholic South by the Utrecht Union in 1579 became in a way the
determining factor for the future course of painting in Holland and
in the Belgic provinces. The Dutchmen practically had no further use
for religious painting, and devoted themselves more exclusively to the
domestic genre, portraiture, and landscape; whilst the Flemings applied
themselves largely to infusing new vitality into the representation
of Scriptural characters and incidents which, through constant
mechanical repetition, had become mere allegorical hieroglyphics, or
generalised ideas without the all-important sense of pulsating life.
This regeneration was the great deed of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640),
who, whilst still benefiting from the example of the great Italians,
remained the very embodiment of Flemish character and thought, and
became the founder of the second important period of Flemish national
art. He was a man of exuberant vitality and boundless energy, endowed
with a creative force unequalled in the whole history of art. He must
rank for all time among the very giants of the brush, with Rembrandt,
Titian, and Velazquez, his contribution to the progress in pictorial
art being the use of pigment and sweeping brushwork as a constructive
element—an advance as significant as the Venetians’ admission of
light into the pictorial scheme, which with the Florentines was based
entirely on linear design.