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A portrait of the artist as friend

The Portrait of Lambert Lombard of circa 1560 is unique among early modern likenesses in its intimate portrayal of an artist as friend. This essay moves beyond the questions of attribution that have hitherto dominated discussions of the painting and focuses instead on the dialogic encounter the image establishes between sitter and beholder. That encounter, I contend, reflects a novel period concept of friendship as a social ideal and as a model for artistic practice. Working within humanist frameworks, Lombard’s pupils actively constructed an image of their teacher as scholar and affectionate pedagogue. While other images of Lombard emphasized the artist’s erudition at the expense of his personal warmth, this disarmingly nonchalant portrait negotiates a balance between the aloof scholar and engaged friend. Like Dominicus Lampsonius’s biography of the artist, published in 1565, the Portrait of Lambert Lombard envisions the artist as a friend who is both erudite and loving.

Of all the Renaissance likenesses that have survived to the present day, the Portrait of Lambert Lombard ( fig. 1) of circa 1560 is unique in its warm, almost intimate presentation of an artist as subject. 1 Standing before a glowing yellow background with shirt collar open, the scholarly painter and theorist Lambert Lombard (1505/1506-1566) turns his head and his gaze to engage directly with the viewer. He holds a pair of spectacles in his left hand, pinching the bridge of the dark frames between his thumb and index finger. This motif suggests that we encounter Lombard in the act of reading or examining a work of art. He has removed his glasses and looks critically toward us, greeting us with a gesture that asks our purpose in confronting him.
Scholars have interpreted Lombard's probing, direct gaze as evidence that the image is a self-portrait. 2 But there is little reason to believe that Lombard produced this vivid likeness of himself. An avid draftsman and designer of prints, Lombard painted little and openly professed his dislike of working in color and oils. 3 What survives of his painted oeuvre hardly resembles the vigorous brushwork visible in this portrait. 4 Instead, the Portrait of Lambert Lombard appears to have been made by another Netherlandish artist of the mid-sixteenth century. Two of Lombard's successful friends, the portraitist Anthonis Mor and Frans Floris, the Antwerp painter who studied in Lombard's workshop, have recently been suggested as possible makers of this remarkable image. 5 In my view the latter is more probable: many features of the best-preserved version of the Portrait of Lambert Lombard, now in Liège 6 -including the daringly rough brushwork on the collar of the white shirt and the vivid application of patches of tone in the face -conform to the technique of Floris's closely observed portraits of the same period. 7 Yet, the Portrait of Lambert Lombard is also distinct from Floris's other likenesses in its serious yet disarmingly casual presentation of the sitter as an intimate acquaintance.
This essay shifts attention away from questions of attribution. Instead, it explores what light the remarkable Portrait of Lambert Lombard can throw on the roles that the emergence of a complex humanist conception of friendship, grounded in shared experiences and quests for knowledge, came to play in the deep and far-reaching changes in the status of the artist taking place at this critical juncture in the history of Netherlandish art. The insight that this is not a self-portrait but rather a portrait by a friend of Lombard -in all likelihood Floris -provides a critical point of departure for this purpose. It draws attention to the importance of this anomalous image for A portrait of the artist as friend Many Netherlandish painters of this period portrayed themselves in self-portraits, but few other artists were accorded the status of being portrayed by their pupils or friends. A notable exception is Anthonis Mor's dignified portrait of Lombard's contemporary, the learned Utrecht painter Jan van Scorel, signed and dated 1560 ( fig. 2). 10 This work is roughly contemporary with the Portrait of Lambert Lombard and reflects the impulse to elevate Netherlandish artists as subjects worthy of portrayal that had its origins in Lombard's circle. Set against a dark background, the elderly Van Scorel dominates the round picture, wearing a cap as well as a sumptuous fur cloak that bespeaks his wealth and helps to frame his face dramatically. He appears behind a fictive parapet inscribed with his name, the date, and the signature of Mor, prominently identified as painter to the king of Spain. Mor is likely to have painted this image for Van Scorel's funerary monument in the Mariakerk in Utrecht before he left for Spain, uncertain if he would ever see his teacher and friend again. 11 Although the Portrait of Lambert Lombard similarly focuses on the likeness of a highly respected master, there is little to suggest that it had an epitaphic function. The lack of any inscriptions or internal framing devices in the Portrait of Lambert Lombard gives a more timeless appearance to the encounter it pictures while rendering the confrontation between sitter and beholder more direct. No physical barriers stand between the master and the object of his attention. The insight that a Lombard pupil produced this portrait makes it possible to appreciate the extent to which this work belongs to a concerted campaign by Lombard's disciples to construct a public image of their teacher as a means to envision a new ideal Netherlandish artist around the personhood of their charismatic pedagogue. The fact that the portrait exists in multiple versions of lesser quality further suggests that other Lombard pupils and friends may have copied this successful type, thereby constituting a network of beholders able to engage meaningfully with the likeness of their teacher. 12 In what follows, I will examine the Portrait of Lambert Lombard in relation to other visual images of Lombard and in relation to the Life of Lambert Lombard, a contemporary intellectual biography of the artist written by another pupil, the artist and Latin secretary Dominicus Lampsonius. Lampsonius's text, published in 1565 by the numismatist and fellow Lombard-admirer Hubert Goltzius, is widely regarded as the first published biography of a Netherlandish artist. 13 In a series of instructive anecdotes, this written portrait celebrates above all the master's erudition and his loving nature as friend.
The Portrait of Lambert Lombard conveys these two essential qualities in the ways in which it pictures a dialogic encounter between the nearly life-size artist and the viewer as pupil and friend. While an earlier printed portrait of Lombard, engraved by his brother-in-law and occasional collaborator Lambert Suavius, discussed below, stresses the artist's erudition at the expense of capturing a sense of his warmth, the Portrait of Lambert Lombard achieves a new synthesis between intellect and friendship by portraying him as a sitter who appears to be both a learned humanist scholar and an intimately engaged interlocutor. There are likely at least two intersecting cultural models motivating these aspects of the Portrait of Lambert Lombard. One is based on a revival of ancient classical traditions, which understood friendship as a reflection of an alter ego or other self. 14 The other force arises out of the values Lombard's contemporaries invested in the formal and ethical ideals of portraiture. In his famous study of Dutch group portraiture, Alois Riegl describes these ideals in terms of 'attentiveness' , which he attributes to a coordination of psychological individuation that takes account of the beholder. 15 This concept of 'attentiveness' is useful for characterizing what animates the Portrait of Lambert Lombard and links the sitter and viewer in bonds of friendship that are both intimate and demanding. Transfixed before the panel by the focus of Lombard's gaze, the viewer stands in the position of the pupil who produced this image as homage to an equally attentive ideal teacher and friend.

An icon of the Netherlandish artist
One of the most unusual features of the Portrait of Lambert Lombard is its warm ochre background. 16 This effect has been created through the rough application of paint in some areas, interspersed with passages in which some of the ground of the prepared panel has been left visible. In comparison with the somber backgrounds of many contemporary portraits, the glowing field behind Lombard is striking. Its golden appearance recalls the long history of gold backgrounds in earlier Netherlandish art, particularly in icon-like images of Christ, the Virgin, or saints. The practice of painting such backgrounds had largely ceased before Lombard's time. 17 Nevertheless, golden backgrounds still carried powerful associations with the representation of divine light and eternal space, of holy figures facing the viewer across an impenetrable boundary between earth and heaven. 18 The continuing significance of these associations is evidenced by the ways in which images with gold or golden backgrounds continued to provoke powerful emotions. 19 Contemporary responses ranged from reverence and awe to violent revulsion on the part of Protestant critics who were smashing such images with increasing frequency during Lombard's lifetime. 20 While some viewers may have perceived the background of Lombard's portrait as lustrous and even golden, it seems unlikely that Lombard would have wanted to be represented against a field resembling gold. According to Lampsonius, Lombard openly professed distaste for ostentatious displays of wealth in art and apparently renounced the offer of hefty salaries paid in gold. 21 Leon Battista Alberti, one of the Italian theorists Lombard most admired, famously disapproved of painters' over-reliance on gold in their art. 22 He advocated a value system based upon the skill of the artist rather than the quantity of precious materials used. In this respect, the yellow ground in the Portrait of Lambert Lombard might be understood to emphasize intellect and skill, not wealth, as the indices of Lombard's honor and as the virtuous currency he exchanges with his pupils.
For those who knew Lombard and his practice well, however, this warm ground might have registered not as gold-like, but rather as evidence of an unfinished work. 23 From this perspective, the field behind the artist resembles the sort of vivid preparation of the panel's ground that generally preceded the laying in of colors in the Netherlandish workshop. 24 Such an unfinished background might suggest that the portrait is a pupil's work in progress, with Lombard's likeness taking form on a panel revealed to us in a state of perpetual incompletion. 25 This effect implies the setting could be the confines of the studio -the intimate, closed space where the master, comfortable and at ease, greets his pupil with a spontaneous yet attentive address.
The pair of spectacles Lombard holds in his left hand underscores the context of the studio. Such spectacles, when represented so prominently, become a symbol for the intense focus of the artist and devotion to the minutiae of his craft, which he carries out with the assistance of an instrument of magnification that enhances the powers of the attentive eye and permits him to transcend the limitations of his innate faculty of perception. 26 In a self-portrait of 1558, for instance, the miniaturist Simon Bening portrayed himself holding a pair of spectacles that he used to paint intricate, small works like the one resting on the easel before him ( fig. 3). 27 A master engraver wears similar spectacles as he carves lines into a copper plate before two young assistants in Johannes Stradanus's Sculptura in Aes ( fig. 4), an imaginative representation of the process of producing engravings that remains one of the best-known images in his Nova reperta cycle celebrating new discoveries in technology and the arts. 28 In both of these images, the importance of spectacles emphasizes the reduced physical dimensions and minute detail of the artwork being produced.
Lombard does not require spectacles to engage with the beholder of the portrait. With glasses set aside, his direct gaze characterizes his vision as insightful, stressing the intersubjectivity of the portrait over optical precision. In this respect, the spectacles in his hand assume a variety of symbolic functions. 29 Among others, spectacles can act as a sign of learnedness, visual 3 Simon Bening, Self-portrait, 1558, tempera and gold leaf on parchment, 85 x 57 mm, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection (1975.1.2487) (photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art) acuity, and even attentiveness. The spectacles thus become an index of the period concept of 'erudite eyes' , which Lampsonius, drawing on Cicero and more recently Montaigne, developed in his Life of Lambert Lombard to signal Lombard's supreme sense of discernment and to thematize the singular combination of learning and skill in his work. 30 In a letter of 1590, Spanish scholar Benito Arias Montano applied this same epithet to the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, another friend of Lombard and Lampsonius. Following Lampsonius's example, Montano invoked the concept of 'erudite eyes' to refer to Ortelius's supreme sense of judgment in the arts. 31 Ortelius surely would have appreciated receiving from Montano the very compliment Lampsonius had paid to Lombard in his seminal biography decades earlier. Ortelius had played a crucial role in bringing about the publication of Lampsonius's Life of Lambert Lombard, and Hubert Goltzius dedicated that biography to Ortelius in a lengthy preface. In that text, Goltzius vividly describes the publication of the biography as an act of friendship made possible by Ortelius, who first procured Lampsonius's manuscript copy of the Life of Lambert Lombard and believed that its sensitive account of Lombard's humanist approach to art was worthy of dissemination through the press. 32

Lombard as friend
Ortelius's admiration for Lombard is underscored by the fact that he decided to include an engraved portrait of the artist in his album amicorum, or friendship album (fig. 5). 33 As one of only 6 images Ortelius himself contributed to the album's 142 entries -5 of which represented deceased menthe engraved portrait of Lombard clearly held great personal significance. 34 It functioned as both a memorial to a deceased friend and a lynchpin in the network of friendships his album would constitute. 35 Lombard had been dead for five years when Ortelius began to collect inscriptions as well as drawn and printed images of his friends in 1574. 36 At the time, printed portraits of painters were becoming widely available and were helping to stabilize the essential characteristics of Netherlandish artists. 37 Just two years earlier, Volcxken Diericx, widow of the publisher Hieronymus Cock, had issued a portrait of Lombard ( fig. 6)  Lampsonius, author of the Latin inscriptions beneath each image. 38 In that cycle, Lombard resembles the sort of ancient statuary portraying Roman orators that he studied in many of his sketches. 39 The three-quarter portrait permits us to see an important detail that sets Lombard apart from the other painters in this cycle. Most artists in the Effigies hold brushes, palettes, or even books or expensive gloves, but Lombard folds his hands into his robes in a distinguished pose that Aeschines of Macedonia recommended as a sign of modesty in orators. Yet, when compiling his album amicorum Ortelius did not choose to include this image of Lombard as orator that was in wide circulation at the time. Instead, he decided to use the earlier printed portrait by Lambert Suavius, inscribed with the date 1551, which held great personal significance. 41 This round engraving, which resembles a portrait medal, shows Lombard, aged 45, and was probably made from a lost self-portrait -in all likelihood a drawing. 42 As far as we know, it is the earliest surviving likeness of Lombard. Initially it may have been conceived to form part of a small series of three exemplars of German, Italian, and Netherlandish art. 43 That series features Lombard alongside profile portraits of Albrecht Dürer ( fig.  7), based on a medal by Hans Schwarz, and of Michelangelo ( fig. 8), based on a medal by Leone Leoni that appears to be the source for the incorrect indication of the artist's age as 88. 44 But Hubert Goltzius gave the image of Lombard a new purpose when he chose to use this engraving to serve as the frontispiece ( fig. 9) to his biography of Lombard, placing the print immediately before his dedication of the text to Ortelius.
Ortelius was a prolific writer of letters to friends and collected the correspondence he received as a tangible monument to his friendship network. 45 It is significant that in his album amicorum he placed this engraved portrait of Lombard above a fragment of a letter containing the painter's autograph and the concluding salutation, in Dutch, 'u Willigste' (your most willing). 46 This fragment of Lombard's writing -in all likelihood cut from a letter he had sent to Ortelius -compares with the artist's distinctive way of Greek epigram below specifies the prototype as a self-portrait and compares this visual image with the written one it prefaces: The excellent Lombard himself has depicted his own form The pen (γραφίς) of Lampsonius his manners and nature.
Jean Puraye suggests that the initials A.M., centered below the title, refer to Adolf von Meetkercke (or Mekerchus, 1528-1591), a diplomat and Hellenist from Bruges. 48 Like Goltzius and Ortelius, Van Meetkercke would have undoubtedly sensed an allusion in these lines to the humanist topos privileging the written word as a 'better likeness' than the visual portrait. The locus classicus for this topos in the graphic arts was Albrecht Dürer's portrait of Erasmus ( fig. 10). Erasmus himself criticized the print for its failure to capture his features to such a degree that it paradoxically fulfilled the Greek pronouncement Dürer had engraved near the sitter's mouth: 'The better image will his writings show' . 49 In Lombard's case, it was his exemplary lifenow set down by his pupil Lampsonius -that showed a 'better' image of his 'manners and nature' than what Suavius's printed likeness of the artist, as an aloof and distant type, could convey on its own. 50 In this context, perceiving Lombard's 'better likeness' hinges upon an absolute understanding of the meaning of the Life of Lambert Lombard, which only a student and friend is able to penetrate. Ortelius was precisely such a reader. When he added Suavius's portrait to his friendship album and gave voice to Lombard's willing generosity, Ortelius transformed that image into a memorial to Lombard, a monument to their friendship, and a tangible reminder of the artist's fundamental importance to the community now assembled in the album's pages. In this way, Lombard lives on in the collection of dedications made for Ortelius by a network of friends that developed around the artist's example.
Ortelius's album amicorum, compiled in the wake of the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt, provides evidence for the friendships that were forged out of shared experiences and a common pursuit of knowledge. 51 Many of the contributors to the album, including some of the artists and humanists who had studied with Lombard, or with his pupils, had fled violence in the region and gone into exile. Scholars have emphasized how this album and others like it envisioned a new form of friendship that did not depend on religious institutions, princely patronage, or even physical proximity. 52 Ortelius's album amicorum brought together a community dispersed by war and emigration and separated by political and religious conflict. Contributors to the album may have held vastly divergent views on religion and politics, but they set aside their disagreements to participate in what Jason Harris describes as a collaborative project driven by an ethos of 'rational love' , or a friendship among individuals who shared their knowledge and reputations in bonds that transcended sectarian or other ideological differences. 53

For the love of art
This mode of friendship was not new to the scattered relationships held together on the album amicorum's pages. Even before iconoclasm tore through the region, painters were forced to rethink their profession under uncertain circumstances. 54 Hitherto conventional conceptions of patronage in terms of ecclesiastical and princely sponsorship were being displaced. Sacred images had become the focus of religion-based political unrest and violence. A leading contemporary alternative was painting for the expanding art market. But, around Lombard a distinctive, humanist motivation for art began to flourish. For Lampsonius, the ideal that enabled Lombard to work and thrive under these circumstances was love. He elevated love as a force that held together the culture of Lombard's studio, where bonds of affection and friendship drove a collective enterprise of learning that was capable, in his view, of changing the course of Netherlandish art. 55 Joanna Woodall has demonstrated that Lampsonius's description of love as a multifaceted motivation for Lombard's archetypal character connects his biography of the artist to potent rhetorical motifs that were current in his humanist circle on the eve of the Dutch Revolt. 56 Lampsonius repeatedly invokes love as the driving force behind Lombard's exceptional life and work, stressing contrasts between his motivations and the baser attractions of painting for money. According to Lampsonius's text, Lombard was a devoted husband who hastened his return from Rome after his patron died in order to be with his wife in Liège. 57 Lombard preferred to wait for patrons who took a genuine interest in him as a person and in his learned approach to art, instead of producing lower-quality works for sale 11 Anon. engraver after Lambert Lombard, Caritas surrounded by eighteen putti, c. 1550, engraving, 296 x 362 mm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet, RP-P-1953-69 (photo: Rijksmuseum) Downloaded from Brill.com12/12/2020 03:51:59PM via free access on the market. Lampsonius even relates Lombard's unprecedented veneration of antiquity -a central theme of the biography -to what he perceived to be the values of the classical past, when artists practiced their art 'not so much for material gain but for an honest pleasure' . 58 In addition to its role in these biographical tropes, love also emerges as a dominant motif in Lombard's art. Surviving among his graphic work are numerous representations of the iconography of Caritas, including an early print in which the statue-like embodiment of Christian love, dressed in a flowing chiton, appears surrounded by an overabundance of frolicking putti ( fig. 11). 59 As other ennobling justifications for painting were destabilized by religious or political pressures, love and friendship provided a motivation for art that transcended personal differences without succumbing entirely to the forces of commercial interest. But above all else, in Lampsonius's account, the greatest demonstration of Lombard's love was his devotion to teaching and to the establishment of a school that provided instruction to improve both the lives of young painters and the Netherlandish tradition in which they worked. Lampsonius recounts that Lombard, acting as both teacher and friend, selflessly shared designs with pupils to better their art even when some of his pupils abused this generosity or failed to work to his standards. 60 This was one clear manifestation of how the entwined concepts of love and friendship set Lombard's studio apart from earlier Netherlandish workshops, which generally trained young artists to paint by instruction and example, usually in return for a fee. 61 Instead, painters who came to Lombard were for the most part already established masters. They traveled to his studio to learn from his scholarly approach to using a sophisticated treatment of the human body in designing complex compositions that visualized subjects of historical importance. In one of his remarkable drawings, Lombard offers a glimpse into this studio. The family of 'Master' Lambert Lombard ( fig. 12), which exists in an original in London and in at least one drawn copy in Liège, represents an exceptional intermingling of home and studio little known before Rembrandt. 62 Lombard stands before the open hearth, raising his hand in a teaching pose. A seated pupil, identifiable by his hat, contemplates the lesson. He raises his right hand and index finger toward his cheek in a gesture associated with thinking, while he clutches a sketchbook in his left. In addition to this attentive disciple, Lombard's wife and children of various ages surround him. They listen to his teaching while playing with one another and with the family pets. This image conveys Lombard's authority, but its emphasis on context gives a new interpretation to the artist's intellectual stature. The drawing stresses intimacy, love, and friendship even as it delivers a humorous view on how Lombard chose to represent his approach to pedagogy.
All these images provide insights into the remarkable appearance of the Portrait of Lambert Lombard. The painter who produced this exceptional work knew and belonged to the context of Lombard's circle of friends. He is likely to have been one of the accomplished painters who came to Lombard to learn his novel treatment of the body and of composition in painting historical narrative, as well as to gain insight into the vast humanist learning and deep personal love motivating his project. Suavius's print-ed portrait of Lombard, and later the portrait in the Effigies cycle, presents the artist as a disconnected intellectual. Only through contextualizationwhether in Lampsonius's Life of Lambert Lombard or Ortelius's album amicorum -could such a portrait carry the dual ideal of friendship as a reflection of self and an attentive social bond. The painted Portrait of Lambert Lombard reconciles these two facets. It shows an artist who is both scholarly and personable, both erudite and attentive -in other words, an archetype of the ideal of humanist friendship. The portrait conjures up a setting, probably the studio, in which the master moves about freely, with his collar and outer garment unfastened. Lombard appears almost nonchalant, suggesting his comfort with a situation in which he pauses to be portrayed. The Portrait of Lambert Lombard envisions a moment in which the portraitist finds in Lombard a friend who is both intimate and demanding. It pictures an offering of knowledge and friendship and, in turn, makes demands of us, the beholders. This reciprocal exchange of 'attentiveness' hinges on period-relevant conceptions of friendship as a new social ideal and model for artistic practice embodied in the Portrait of Lambert Lombard.