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Men at work in Dutch art, or keeping one's nose to the grindstone
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2007 by Alison M. Kettering
For reconstructing the early modern discourse of work, we find few written sources as concentrated in their focus as van Nyenborgh's book. Most Dutch textual information must be sought in markedly heterogeneous places, including the odd aphorism, poem, emblem, or inscription. (16) The oeuvre of the earlier writer-illustrator Adriaen van de Venne presents some prime examples. Van de Venne's 1635 book-length poem Tafereel van de Belacchende Wereld (Tableau of the Laughable World) includes an aphorism that nicely encapsulates one aspect of the traditional view--the protection labor offers against the vice of sloth and the intrinsically moral rather than economic purpose of work: "It's still better to work in vain than to lose oneself in idleness." (17) Van de Venne's interest in the trades was more fully expressed in his "Sinnighe Slijpers Liedt" (roughly translated, Wise or Sensible Grinder's Song, 1623) (Fig. 5), the first of a set of occasional poems dedicated to his fellow artist Magdalena van de Passe, which yields further indications about the normative conception of work for the Dutch. (18) His title print features a portable grinding machine run by an itinerant grinder clearly lower in status than Ter Borch's tradesman grinder (Fig. 1) or even the apprentice boy employed in Metsu's smithy (Fig. 3). Still, van de Venne's protagonist is a cheerful fellow who furnishes services to every occupation and rank, many of them named. Representatives of these stations, from blacksmiths and tailors to the ladies and gentlemen with whom van de Passe would have identified, wait their turn in a deliberately ordered semicircle. (19) Delivering a sort of paradoxical encomium to his trade and status, the "Sinnighe Slijpers Liedt" gives the upper hand to the lowly grinder, despite--or, rather, because of-his outsider, itinerant status. (20) Although it contains none of the explicit moralizing and conventional piety of van Nyenborgh's Tooneel, van de Venne's poem makes readers reflect on the ideal components of artisanal labor: honesty, honor, and effort, ideals with validity for the whole society. One of the values of the poem for us lies in the implications of its list of occupational titles. Like van Nyenborgh, van de Venne has fabricated a unified social order, a veritable theater of occupations, each easily labeled and widely understood in terms of its economic function and corporate identity.
[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
Decades before the publications of van Nyenborgh and van de Venne, printed books had appeared illustrating the traditional trades. Their images had roots deep in history, extending as far back as antiquity and revived in the later Middle Ages. Late medieval representations of artisans abounded, in sculpted reliefs, stained glass, and manuscript illumination. Almost always organized into cycles, such as the Labors of the Months, these medieval images accentuated the relation of the worldly social order to a divinely ordered cosmos. (21) With the invention of woodcut and engraving in the fifteenth century, artisanal images could reach far beyond the cathedral or the local nobleman's library. By the mid-sixteenth century, trade books established a rhetoric about work--visual, socioeconomic, and moral--that fixed itself firmly in the European imagination.
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