The Utrecht canons Cornelius van Horn and Anthonis Taets van Ameronghen

Anthonis Mor, who produced only a small number of religious pictures, was a portrait painter almost exclusively. The most powerful personalities of his time sought to commission portraits from him, among them Philip II of Spain, Cardinal Granvella, Margaret of Parma, the Duke of Alba, William of Orange, and Mary Tudor. Anthonis Mor came from Utrecht, where he launched his career as an artist as a student of Jan van Scorel (1495–1562). In 1547, he settled in Antwerp as an independent
master. Slightly later, he appeared in Brussels in the service of Antoine Perrenot de Granvella (1517–86), Bishop of Arras, and later a Cardinal and Minister under Charles V, Philip II, and Margaret of Parma. Anthonis Mor owed his patronage to numerous commissions from leading personalities who occupied the highest circles of the nobility. In 1548, he travelled with Granvella’s entourage to Augsburg, where he may have met Titian. In any event, Titian’s portraiture influenced his own conception of portrait painting in decisive ways, as underscored by his likeness of the Duchess Margaret of Parma, which dates from 1562. In 1550, Anthonis Mor travelled to Spain and Portugal, stopping at the courts in Valladolid, Lisbon, and Madrid. He returned to the Netherlands in 1553. The following year, he journeyed from Spain to London as the court painter of Philip II of Spain on the occasion of Philip’s marriage to Mary Tudor, Queen of England. Following another trip to Spain,
he lived and worked in Utrecht and Antwerp. Frans Pourbus (circa 1540–81) and Adriaen Thomasz Key (circa 1544–84), both active in Antwerp, were influenced by Mor, as were the Spanish court painter Alonso Sánchez Coëllo (1531/32–88) and Juan Pantoja de la Cruz (1553–1608).
The double portrait of the Utrecht canons, which dates from 1544, is the earliest dated work by Anthonis Mor to have survived. In this painting, he remains under the influence of the art of his teacher Jan van Scorel, whose series of Jerusalem pilgrims in Utrecht and Haarlem it recalls. Remarkable here is the sculptural appearance of the two men, who are set off strikingly against the dark grey background. The bright, white surplices worn by the two sitters, their drapery folds and painstakingly graduated modelling, reveal much about this artist’s sensibility. The emphasis, however,
is on the faces of the two men, which also serve as colouristic accents within the otherwise extremely restrained, almost monochromatic tonal scale of this image. The individual elements of the faces – whether exposed to strong illumination or submerged in shadow – are elaborated in an extremely unusual manner by means of short, fine brushstrokes. This lively play of light and shadow accounts for a sense of immediacy that remains effective even with the face that is turned into pure profile.
In this respect, Anthonis Mor goes far beyond Jan van Scorel. This picture’s striking distance from the later portraits of Anthonis Mor was doubtless also a function of the demands of clients, which did not allow the artist a great deal of latitude. The form of the half-figure image, the procession-style sequencing of the sitters, as well as the precise information about the sitters as individuals which had to be accommodated in the picture: all were stipulated by the commission. Situated below the two men for this reason is a painted panel with inscriptions, which bears the family crests of the men along with two four-line poems, which transmit to posterity their names, social ranks, and the dates of their journeys to Jerusalem. Set at the middle of the white field is the red Jerusalem Cross. The depicted individuals are the Utrecht canons Cornelis van Horn and Anthonis Taets van Ameronghen, both
of whom undertook pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to Jerusalem as members of the Utrecht Brotherhood of Jerusalem. Beyond this, Anthonis Taets also visited Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and other places, which could of course not be named individually. The date of van Horn’s journey is given as 1520, which is to say, far earlier than the date of this portrait, which was intended to keep memories of the pilgrimage alive. The hands, folded devoutly in prayer, the palm fronds carried on the shoulders, as well as inscription testify to the pious hopes for salvation and everlasting peace that would be effected, it was hoped, by the pilgrimage.
Like the group portraits of Jan van Scorel, this double portrait by Anthonis Mors represents an important step in the development of the Dutch portrait, which would experience its highpoint during the 17th century with the group portraits of regents and militia members by Frans Hals and Rembrandt. Rainald Grosshans | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting – Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019