At St. Andrew’s Church: take a look in the choir (you may be allowed past the choir stalls) and in front (entrance on the left), in the “treasure room/museum.

(Quote) That is why it seems to me to deal here first with the eminent painter Octavius van Veen (wrote Carel van Mander, 1604).

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This sentence was written more than 400 years ago and today it helps us on our way: in 1604 Carel van Mander wrote the ‘Schilderboek/Book of Painters‘, the very first artists’ biography in the Low Countries. Like Van Mander, we will first treat Rubens’s best teacher, Otto van Veen.

Our great masters of the Baroque may have been an artistic gift from heaven – especially with their religious scenes – but they did not come out of the blue. They ‘d had teachers who were able to pass on a long tradition of craft and techniques, which they in turn transmitted themselves.

Above all, Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens were innovators, depicting new subjects and themes and giving new intellectual content to their works. And with their portrait painting they were able to tap into a new public.

In this church we ‘ll find out two things: how a painting is prepared; and how one work can inspire another.

The patron saint of this church is Andreas, Andy, Dré, Andrew … , and so he should hang here, if you forgive us this gruesome pun on his martyrdom. You ‘d expect a painting with a subject like that to be placed on the main altar. But here it has been relegated to the side wall of the choir.

Martyrs get a lot of credit for their faith or convictions, apart from any religious context. Andrew, who was also the patron saint of the Burgundians, the forefathers of the Habsburg sovereigns, even drew extra attention at the time of the Counter-Reformation.
In 1594 Otto Van Veen received the commission for this painting, which he completed at the latest in 1599; at that time young Rubens worked in his studio. Van Veen had got the contract based on a so-called modello that he had made. This church is very fortunate to have acquired that modello (it hangs in the treasury). You can interpret ‘fortunate’ literally here; the large painting has been glued, painted over and reframed so badly, that it has deteriorated in quality; it is now in the shadow of the modello. Because that work provides a much clearer light, the vivid details and the colours are shown off to better effect.

The foreground is a large-scale scene, the lower part of which is composed as a clear triangle. The massive audience in the background makes it difficult to view; the antique décor is meant to suggest Patras, Greece.

Just imprint this on your memory: the full light on the face of the preaching apostle looking up to heaven, the athletic executioners, the proconsul Ageas on horseback, his wife converted to Christianity with children looking at us – and the little dog. When you come face to face with Rubens’ famous “Raising of the Cross” in the Cathedral of Our Lady, you will notice several similarities!

In the Low Countries, and Antwerp in particular, the exuberant Baroque remained a familiar style for expressing emotion until the middle of the 19th century; the pulpit in this St. Andrew’s Church bears witness to that, depicting ‘The Calling of Andrew and Peter‘.

But this is first the place to look at a masterpiece of Baroque sculpture: the figure of Peter by Artus Quellinus I, the Elder. You can read the inner strength and struggle of the apostle, who denied his master Jesus even before the crowing of the cock, from his body language, the hands around the wood of the cross, the tension on his face. The rendering of the finer fabric of the robe and the thicker fabric of the cloak further enhance the anatomy of the character. In three dimensions, the sculptor has the shaping of his material at his disposal to convince us that here is a human being before us, one lump of contained emotion.

In St. Andrew’s Church: first view the pillar to the left of the choir, if on display, then the pulpit.