Alexandra Zvereva
Centre Roland Mousnier, University Paris-Sorbonne, France
The Claeissens family of painters in Bruges is apparently well known and studied, thanks mainly to a few extant paintings signed by Pieter Claeissens the Elder (1499/1500–1576) and his younger sons Antoon (1541/1542–1613) and Pieter the Younger (c. 1542–1623). Nonetheless, despite the fact that name of the eldest son, Gillis, recurs fairly frequently and his career seems to be more successful than those of his brothers, the absence of signed paintings has complicated attributions.
In 2009, Brecht Dewilde found and published a commission by Claeis van de Kerchove in 1576 to Gillis Claeissens for an epitaph triptych, of which the two side panels are conserved in the Budapest Museum under the name of Pieter Claeissens the Elder. Based on these panels, even while noting the similarity in style between Gillis and his brothers, Dewilde attributed a few more paintings to Gillis which until then had been considered to belong to other two. Not until the appearance of a “Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman from the 16th century German School” on the Paris art market it became possible to discover the full extent of Gillis’ talent and stylistic originality as a portraitist.
Study of this painting perfectly illustrates both the necessity of moving out of the narrow framework of pure stylistic analysis and the difficulties in attributing northern Renaissance portraits. An art historian should set aside neither the sitter’s identity nor the dating of attire and materials such as the support and pictorial layers. No matter how fragmental this information may sometimes seem, these are the elements which make it easier to attribute Renaissance portraits with certainty, to reconstitute the corpus of each portraitist’s studio, and to reveal later replicas and fakes.