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Ainsworth Shares her Multi-dimensional View of Netherlandish Art

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Met’s Maryan Ainsworth to share her multi-dimensional view of Netherlandish art

One can only imagine what it would be like to spend your working days being surrounded by great art for over four decades as Dr. Maryan Ainsworth of Old Greenwich has at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is their curator of European Paintings, and a specialist in those Early Netherlandish painters, like van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel.

It is a thrill that Maryan has offered to speak on her art next Wednesday evening at Christ Church Greenwich on a subject she happens to be writing about in a new book,” The Arts of Discovery – Early Netherlandish Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” She is addressing, appropriate to place, how those 15th and 16th century painters read religion into their works, hence her talk title, “Seeing is Believing – Landscape and Religion.”

In the ten years I have followed Maryan’s work with my pen, she’s introduced me to some fascinating chapters in her work, such as her first assignment in the Met’s Painting Conservation department. “I was learning about autoradiography and going out to the Brookhaven Laboratory to investigate Rembrandt paintings.” She moved on to head up the infrared reflectography of those early Netherlandish paintings. She learned that “having a scientific view enhances your connoisseurship skills.”

She became fascinated by how these 15th and 16th century artists painted “what they saw in the real world – their observation of nature, how suddenly, with the [new] use of oil paint they were recreating on a piece of wood the world they saw around them. It was a kind of early realism. It was so revolutionary at the time, a change from the medieval tradition.”

Fast forward to a recent teatime with Maryan in the Met’s Balcony Lounge. Maryan was abuzz about her new book-in-progress that evolved from her work to document on the Met’s online website the Met’s 240 Netherlandish paintings, the largest collection in the U.S. She wanted to flesh out how that art developed during a time of scientific discovery. “There was the development of glass lenses that allowed magnification at that time.” But add the development of oil painting – “the medium of oil, what the pigments swim in basically, you can do all kinds of shading and manipulation of the oil paint in order to get very fine gradations of modeling and that’s very realistic. So, it’s a combination of new ways of seeing and also the paint itself that allows you to actually reproduce the visual worlds.”

What Maryan intends in her show and tell in the Christ Church Chapel is how those artists incorporated devotional aids “at a time wherein worshippers were advised to find God in the smallest details, in plants, flowers, the beauty of the earth…So, there’s meaning in the plants that are chosen by the artist to place within the painting.”

Thus the first chapter in Maryan’s book is, “Seeing is Believing – Landscape and Religion,” her lecture title. “I’m going to be talking about the development of landscape painting in this period, which had a very spiritual meaning,” she describes, such as telling us what that famous painting by Peter Bruegel, “The Harvesters” is all about.

She’ll also explain that curious term of Netherlandish, but here’s an advance. It was created she says by a couple of art historians to identify art works from the fifteenth and sixteenth century “of the Burgundian lowlands, which encompassed at the time (depending on who the Duke of Burgundy was at the time) present day Holland, Belgium, France, and even snippets of Germany.” She adds a footnote. “I can tell you when I took Philippe, King of the Belgians through the collection, he looked at the labels that said Early Netherlandish and he said, ‘No, no, no this is Belgian art!’ So, I had to explain the term. I don’t think I won him over.”

On Wednesday, January 22, at 5:30 p.m., the Christ Church Greenwich Arts & the Spirit Committee is hosting Dr. Maryan Ainsworth and her talk, “Seeing is Believing – Landscape and Religion,” in the Christ Church Chapel, followed by a wine and cheese reception. For more information visit christchurchgreenwich.org or call 203-869-6600.

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