Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (1589-1662), Fishing for Souls: Allegory of the Jealousy between the Various Religious Denominations during the Twelve Years’ Truce between the Dutch Republic and Spain, 1614, Oil on panel, 97 × 186.7 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
In January 1614, the States of Holland adopted a placard known as the ‘Resolution for the Peace of the Church’, an attempt by Land’s Advocate Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547–1619) and the jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) to impose what amounted to forced toleration on the quarrelling factions within the Dutch Reformed Church. The theological dispute between the followers of Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), who argued for conditional election and the possibility of human free will within God’s grace, and the strict Calvinists loyal to Franciscus Gomarus (1563–1641), who insisted on unconditional predestination and irresistible grace, had been tearing congregations apart since the Remonstrance of 1610. In town after town, communities split between Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants, and dismissed preachers simply moved to neighbouring parishes where they drew large, sympathetic crowds. Far from averting the feared schism, the placard seemed to deepen it: Amsterdam, a bastion of Contra-Remonstrant feeling, opposed the measure outright, and popular unrest spilled into church seizures and street-level violence. Within four years, Oldenbarnevelt would be arrested. Within five, he would be beheaded in the Binnenhof. In 1614, though, all of that remained latent. The Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain, agreed at Antwerp in April 1609, held, and the Republic’s energies turned inward, toward questions that proved at least as dangerous as any Habsburg army: who owns the conscience of a citizen, and who has the right to say what God means?
It was in this charged atmosphere that Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne, a young and still largely unknown painter working in Middelburg, produced the most ambitious panel of his career. He was around twenty-five. He had married Elisabeth de Pours, the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, that same year. His earliest known dated paintings, Fishing for Souls among them, belong to 1614, alongside a pair of summer and winter pendants now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Nothing before that date survives with any certainty. According to the Antwerp biographer Cornelis de Bie (1627–c. 1715), writing in 1661, Van de Venne came from a southern Netherlandish immigrant family that had settled in Delft. His parents had fled Protestant persecution in the Spanish Netherlands during the 1580s, a fact that gives the painting’s confessional allegiance an autobiographical edge. De Bie further records that Van de Venne trained first with Simon de Valck, a Leiden goldsmith and painter, and then with Jeronymus van Diest, a grisaille specialist, both figures otherwise lost to the historical record. His brother Jan (d. 1625) had arrived in Middelburg by 1608 and would later open a shop selling paintings and a publishing business through which Adriaen became a prolific designer of prints, a poet, and an illustrator of books by the moralist Jacob Cats (1577–1660), among others. Starting in 1618 he would produce several propaganda prints in support of the House of Orange and Frederick V, Elector Palatine (1596–1632), the ill-fated ‘Winter King’ of Bohemia. Van de Venne was, in short, a man steeped in the visual rhetoric of persuasion well before his brush touched this particular panel.
Fishing for Souls presents, across almost two metres of oak, a river landscape divided between the Protestant United Provinces on the left and the Catholic-governed Southern Netherlands on the right. On the water, competing groups of fishermen haul souls from the river, enacting a literal illustration of Christ’s words in Matthew 4:19: ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ The same passage is inscribed in the open book on the left side of the leading boat, along with references to Mark 1:17 and Luke 5:10, a combination of word and image that is unique in Van de Venne’s polychrome Middelburg paintings and would reappear only in the very different context of his later grisailles. The inscriptions on the Protestant boat are precise: the nets bear banderoles reading FIDES, SPES, and CHARITAS (Faith, Hope, Charity), a panel of the Ten Commandments sits in the net, and the tiller reads IEHOVAE IVDICIVM (Jehovah’s Judgement). Their Catholic counterparts fish under PAP. IVDICIVM (the Pope’s Judgement) and lure souls with music and incense. The distinction is clear enough. But what makes the picture more than a broadsheet is the care with which Van de Venne distributes his sympathies, and the subtlety with which he conceals how much of the image was reworked long after 1614.
One of the most striking features, visible only under close examination, is that the Catholic boats originally caught nothing at all. The figures now visible in the Catholic net were added later, almost certainly by Van de Venne himself, in the rapid, sketchy manner characteristic of his work in the 1640s or 1650s. These later additions were executed so transparently that the objects originally painted beneath them remain partially visible. Two children and an old man near the Protestant boat also appear to have been painted at a later date. Why would Van de Venne soften his own polemic decades after the fact? A change of owner, perhaps, or a recognition that the painting had outlived the specific moment of its making. Either way, the alteration invites a question about how allegorical paintings live in time: is the ‘original’ meaning the one the artist first intended, or the one he chose to leave behind?
The ideological tilt of the panel operates on several levels simultaneously. Every Reformed fisherman is an individualised portrait; their Catholic counterparts are caricatures without distinguishable features. On the Protestant bank, the trees are in full leaf, the sky is bright and blue; on the Catholic side, the trees are bare, the clouds threatening. The symbolic landscape follows the compositional logic of traditional Last Judgement scenes, in which the saved are placed on the left and the damned on the right. As Yvette Bruijnen has observed in her 2007 catalogue entry for the Rijksmuseum, the connection to Psalm 1 is explicit: ‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water (…) his leaf also shall not wither’, with ‘Psalm I’ inscribed on a tree trunk on the left bank. This compositional echo reaches as far back as the ninth-century Utrecht Psalter, where an illustration accompanying Psalm 1 places the righteous on the left and the ungodly on the right.
The painting is thronged with identifiable figures. In the middle ground, Prince Maurits of Orange (1567–1625) appears in precisely the same pose as in Van de Venne’s Allegory of the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1616, now in the Louvre. His half-brother Frederik Hendrik (1584–1647) stands nearby, accompanied by Frederick V of the Palatinate and his wife Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), her father James I of England (1566–1625), and King Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648). Maurits’s importance to the Reformed cause is underlined by a small orange tree bearing his motto, with the inscription TANDEM FIT SVRCVLVS ARBOR (At last the sprig becomes a tree). On the Catholic bank, Archduke Albert of Austria (1559–1621) and his wife the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain (1566–1633) stand with their commander-in-chief, Ambrogio Spinola (1569–1630). In the foreground groups, Van de Venne himself can be identified on the Reformed side, his self-portrait substituting for a conventional signature. The Middelburg preacher Willem Teelinck (1579–1629), a key figure in the Dutch Further Reformation (Nadere Reformatie), appears in the guise of a fisherman in the leading boat. On the Catholic side, Father Johannes Neyen (c. 1570–1612) is recognisable, a figure whose biography is itself a parable of the Truce’s tangled allegiances: born into an ardently Calvinist Antwerp family, Neyen converted to Catholicism in his twenties, joined the Franciscan Recollects, rose to become commissioner general of the order in Spain, and was sent by the Archdukes to The Hague in 1607 to open the negotiations that would produce the Truce itself. That his portrait appears on the Catholic bank, opposite the very political settlement he helped broker, is one of the painting’s quieter ironies.
Among the less remarked details is the sumptuously dressed court dwarf in the foreground, whom scholars have tentatively identified as Theodore Rodenburgh (c. 1574–1644), a figure rumoured to have converted to Catholicism. Whether the identification holds or not, the presence of a dwarf in such a charged political composition raises its own questions about ridicule, spectacle, and the unstable boundary between entertainment and polemic. Equally easy to miss is the trompe l’oeil fly painted in the water on the left, a virtuosic flourish that Laurens J. Bol suggested might carry a deeper meaning. And two prominent male figures in the foreground, hands joined in prayer, wearing striking yellow and red cloaks, occupy such a central and individualised position that Edwin Buijsen has suggested they might be the painting’s patrons. If so, the picture’s partisan character was shaped as much by those who paid for it as by the artist who conceived it.
The rainbow arching over the scene has been read variously as a reference to Genesis 9:16, where it signifies the covenant between God and all living creatures, and as a general emblem of peace. If the latter, the painting mirrors the Truce in proclaiming a politics of reconciliation, though reconciliation offered on decidedly unequal terms. What does it mean to paint a rainbow of divine unity over a scene in which one side’s catch is a triumph and the other’s is, at least originally, an empty net?
The painting’s reception history enacts its own small drama of misidentification. Sold in 1735 at the Marinus de Jeude sale in The Hague as a work by ‘the Velvet Brueghel’ (Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1568–1625) for 760 guilders, it entered the collection of Prince Willem IV and was later recorded in the estate inventory of Paleis Het Loo. By 1801, the museum catalogue attributed the figures to Hendrik van Balen (1575–1632), with Brueghel’s hand retained for the landscape. It was the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger (1807–1869) who first attributed the figures to Van de Venne in 1858, though he still saw Brueghel in the landscape details. Daniël Franken (1838–1898) rightly gave the entire painting to Van de Venne in 1878, and his view has not been challenged since. De Bie himself had called it Van de Venne’s proefstuck, literally a proof-piece, a word normally reserved for the masterwork submitted to a guild for admission. A close reading of De Bie’s text, however, reveals that he used the term to mean evidence ‘of his great intellect’, not a guild submission piece. As Bruijnen notes, the painting’s overtly partisan character would have been a poor calling card for a young artist who might hope to attract Catholic patrons from the Southern Netherlands.
Dendrochronological analysis by Peter Klein in 1995 established that the youngest heartwood ring of the oak panel was formed in 1598. The panel could have been ready for use by 1609, though a date of 1615 or later is statistically more probable. The date 1614, inscribed on the open book in the leading boat rather than signed in a conventional manner, has encouraged various topical readings. Some scholars have linked it to the ‘Resolution for the Peace of the Church’, others to the renewed threat of war with Spain that year, connected to the Jülich succession crisis and the Treaty of Xanten, which partitioned the disputed duchies between Brandenburg and Palatinate-Neuburg while permitting Dutch garrisons in strategic enclaves. The painting itself, however, contains no unambiguous references to any single event, and for the present it must be understood as an intellectual satire produced from the Protestant standpoint during the uneasy equilibrium of the Truce years.
The painting was appropriated for the national art collection in September 1798 during the French occupation, a tactical move to secure particular works from the collections of Prince Willem V before they could be seized and transported to Paris, as had already happened to a large portion of the prince’s gallery in 1795. It has been included in every Rijksmuseum highlights catalogue since its acquisition.
What remains odd about Fishing for Souls, for all its ambition and detail, is its peculiar instability as a document. It was painted in 1614 but reworked decades later. It presents itself as a snapshot of the Truce’s religious landscape but borrows its compositional grammar from medieval Judgement scenes. It was attributed to three different artists before its author was established. And the very partisanship that makes it vivid also limits it: Van de Venne sees only one side of the river clearly. The other bank is populated with types, not people. Whether that makes the painting a record of conviction or a failure of imagination depends, perhaps, on which bank the viewer is standing on.
References
Bol, L.J. (1989) Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne: Painter and Draughtsman. Doornspijk: Davaco
Bruijnen, Y. (2007) ‘Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne, Fishing for Souls‘, in Bikker, J. (ed.) Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. Available at: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200108516 (Accessed: 20 March 2024)
Lesaffer, R. (ed.) (2014) The Twelve Years Truce (1609): Peace, Truce, War and Law in the Low Countries at the Turn of the 17th Century. Leiden and Boston: Brill
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, De zielenvisserij, 1614. RKDimages, image no. 219482. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/219482 (Accessed: 19 March 2024).
Royalton-Kisch, M. (1988) Adriaen van de Venne’s Album in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. London: British Museum Publications, pp. 42–48
Scribner, R.W. (1981) For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 111.
Van Suchtelen, A. (1993) ‘Cat. no. 216’, in Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580–1620 [exhibition catalogue]. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, pp. 536–37.
Van Thiel, P.J.J. (1981) ‘De inrichting van de Nationale Konst-Gallery in het openingsjaar 1800’, Oud Holland, 95(4), p. 190, no. 42. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42711068 (Accessed: 18 March 2024).
