[Attribué à Matthäus MERIAN].

Lot 64
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Estimation :
15000 - 20000 EUR
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Result : 19 000EUR
[Attribué à Matthäus MERIAN].
Anthropomorphic landscape. 17th century. Oil on wood (30 x 43.8 cm). A landscape "surrealist in spite of itself". In the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism that he organized in New York in 1936, Alfred H. Barr Jr. exhibited a "Head-Landscape in the Arcimboldesque Tradition" that he had acquired from an antique dealer in Bad Gastein, Austria. In the exhibition The Arcimboldo Effect in 1987, this painting was attributed to Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650). The same reversible composition can be found in an Anthropomorphic Landscape attributed to Matthäus Merian the Elder with two different readings. From a distance, a hilly landscape and tilted by 90°, it transforms into a horizontal reclining face that disarticulates into independent motifs. Seen more closely, a world of tiny figures transforms the land into a ploughed and "cultivated" place that seems to ignore the giant. Merian created a prototype for this painting, which was widely distributed thanks to its engraving in Athanasius Kircher's (1602-1680) Ars Magna lucis et umbrae, a reference book for scholars of the time. Merian began as an engraver and is known for his topographical views, such as the one of the fortress of Ambras in the Tyrol, which was one of the first prestigious cabinets of curiosities of the Habsburg dynasty. He worked with the bookseller Theodore de Bry in Frankfurt, whose daughter he married. De Bry produced the engravings for the Atalanta Fugiens, a treatise on alchemy by Michel Maier (1568-1622), who was also Rudolf II's personal physician, in 1617. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium owns two paintings (oil on panel, 50.5 x 65.5 cm) by the Southern Dutch School: a Woman's Head and a Man's Head from the second half of the 16th century. Here the heads are surrounded by picturesque scenes, tiny figures transforming the land into a "cultivated" place. The Garden of Eden of paradisiacal times has given way to a ploughed land, a tended earthly garden. Man becomes the gardener, imitating God in whose image he is himself. The Ciceronian pun "cultus", the soul as well as the field that is cultivated, was well known to humanists. Another version is by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677), after his master Matthäus Merian. Exhibition: L'Homme-Paysage, Visions artistiques du paysage anthropomorphe entre le XVIe et le XXIe siècle, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, 15.10.2006- 14.1.2007, Jeanette Zwingenberger curator and director of the catalogue, éd. Somogy, Paris, p. 55.
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