On the Wall: Michel Sittow and the soul of portrait painting

VINCENT TEETSOV

Back in January 2018 and continuing until May of that year, a succession of artistic, musical, academic, and cinematic events took place around the facilities of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., falling in line with the 100th anniversary of the Estonian Republic.

One of these events was an exhibition based around the art of court painter Michel Sittow, who is known for his portraits of European royalty in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. After three and a half months in the United States, the paintings were shown at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, having been brought back to the painter’s place of origin.

Michel Sittow is thought to have been born in 1469 in what was then the city of Reval. His mother, Margarethe Mölnare, was from a rich merchant family of Swedish-speaking Finns; and his father, Clawes van der Sittow, was Dutch. As his father was an artist whose painting and woodworking handiwork could be seen around the city, young Michel was first given a glimpse of his future profession early on.

At age 15, Sittow moved to Bruges, in modern-day Belgium, then part of the Hanseatic League, where he studied under the tutelage of Hans Memling for the next four years. It’s often expressed that this period of learning made him the painter that the world knows him as today. In these years, he was absorbing the stylistic approaches of early Netherlandish artists.

The point at which he began painting his most famous works was in the year 1492, when Queen Isabella I of Castile hired him and several other artists to work in her and King Ferdinand II’s court in Spain. In this position, he was employed for 10 years, becoming a favourite of the monarchy there.

Between the end of this tenure and his death in 1525, Sittow completed projects across Europe, for royalty (including members of the House of Habsburg) and churches in the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, and then back in Spain.

Like most men of his time, Sittow followed in his father’s footsteps and took up the livelihood and skills that were most feasible to attain. He had a secure springboard into getting the education he needed, which then opened up the most lucrative form of artistic patronage around. Thematically, on this steady path, there wasn’t room for experimentation. Thus, in the artwork of Michel Sittow, we see an emphasis on portraits and religious imagery.

It’s within these guidelines and in finer details that we find the artist behind the paintings. In The Virgin with Child and Apple, a painting attributed to Sittow, and also Catherine of Aragón as the Magdalene, the way he paints makes it such that features like hair have palpable weight and a responsiveness to light. Curls have a delicacy that settles beautifully against weathered faces. In Portrait of a Man with the Pearl, the beard he paints is wiry, and shimmers in strands between muted tones. Portrait of a Man with a Book also stands out among the many faces seen in Sittow’s work, for the way he captures the man’s hopeful eyes looking up high to the left. Otherwise, the faces of royalty are vulnerable and downcast, as if they are aware of a deeper root of melancholy not known to the viewer. Is this intended to be relatable, or pious?

Maryan W. Ainsworth from The Met in New York City writes, “...Early Netherlandish paintings reveal the pursuit of a common goal – to make the painted image vividly present and to render the unseen palpable... Artists attempted to engage the viewer by depicting figures that serve as metaphors for ourselves in the way they pose, gesture, or directly address us...”

When oil paint was applied to wood panels, of which the Baltic region was a common source incidentally, Sittow allowed us, to an extent, to determine the motive for thoughts portrayed. For all of these stylistic points, we can survey Sittow’s oeuvre of paintings, side by side with his contemporaries, and appraise it as a faithful extension of the early Netherlandish style further across Europe.

The J. Paul Getty Museum describes how manuscript illumination also made its way into the style of Sittow and his peers. As pointed out by curator John Hand in the introductory lecture to the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, we see the influence of illumination in the work of Sittow’s colleague in Spain, Juan de Flandes. In de Flandes’ painting The Temptation of Christ, the Devil appears as a man in monastic robes, with webbed feet and horns, for which a similar scene interpretation appears in a manuscript that Queen Isabella I would have had in her possession. The style of these artists was permeable to other art around them.

Because Sittow was not accustomed to signing his creations, detective work has been required to determine which paintings are his. Based on this sleuthing, it can be said that within the royal courts of Renaissance-era Europe, Michel Sittow’s hand guided the way we now see quite a few well-known monarchs and other figures of the period. Yes, these images he made solidified the visibility of each subject’s power, but also their connection to humanity.

After moving around so much, Sittow eventually returned to Reval, where he had family property and was a member of the Guild of Kanut. In the wake of his career, the walls of palaces and churches were adorned with his creations, and then in museums and private collections.

Artists have a different kind of social influence than queens, kings, dukes, or duchesses, but within their artistic efforts, portrait artists assemble a highlight reel of all the divergent, noteworthy personalities they have gotten to know, and perhaps influenced themselves, in their lifetime. This is the soul of the art of painting portraits.

Michel Sittow’s painting Portrait of a Man with the Pearl (1515–1517), from the Palacio Real de Madrid.