Flemish Caravaggism

Eighteen paintings, twelve artists and close to thirty years of Flemish painting, brought together for the first time.

The idea began in Rome. At a conference on Flemish Caravaggism held at the Academia Belgica in 2023, Marie de Limburg Stirum was struck by how nearly thirty years of Flemish painting had slipped out of our collective memory. Three years later, eighteen paintings are gathered in Brussels, most of them from private collections and several never shown in public.

The story begins in Rome as well. Around 1600 Caravaggio overturned painting: men and women of flesh and blood instead of idealised figures, a candle or a single ray instead of an even light. Flemish artists carried that revolution home, and in Antwerp, Ghent, Mechelen, Brussels and Liège they built from it a language of their own. Famous in their own time, they were later eclipsed by Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens.

Three years of research through private collections across Europe have brought these paintings together. The catalogue that accompanies them is written by Hans Vlieghe, Joost Vander Auwera, Anne Delvingt, Pierre-Yves Kairis, Gert Jan van der Sman and Tommaso Borgogelli, each of whom has studied the paintings at first hand. Several are published there for the first time, and a number of attributions are established. Its purpose is the exhibition's own: to bring back into the light the painters who invented it.

Four centuries ago they learned how to paint light. It is time they came out of the shadows.

Read the catalogue

Theodoor Rombouts, A Drinking Scene with Bacchus, 1634 · Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 141 cm