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Joos Van Cleve was active in Antwerp from 1511 to 1540. His winsome figures have a delicacy and elegance which is somewhat in contrast to the earthier figures of Flemish painting. He was also a pioneer in putting large decorative landscapes behind his figures (although, to my eyes his landscapes are much inferior to landscapes by the greatest artists of the previous generation—like Bosch and Patinir). In a way Van Cleve’s great innovation was combining the elegance and color of French art, the ecumenical breadth of Flemish painting, and the verisimilitude of Italian painting. This magnificent picture of the Virgin and Child with Angels rewards close scrutiny. You should blow up the image (for this is a huge file) and enjoy the appealing little details such as the deer woven into the rug, the tart summer cherries which a footman is offering to Mary, and the same footman’s studded jerkin!
Of course Van Cleve was not the peerless master that some of his more well-known contemporaries were and he sometimes overreached. Looking at the less-than-perfect curly-haired angel in the acid-color jerkin gives me hope for my own career as a painter (whereas sometimes the works of Raphael and Perugino leave me in despair about ever picking up a brush).
Cerise is a vibrant pinkish shade of red. The color is uniquely lovely–particularly as a glowing light against a dark backdrop, and the name has a long history (having been used to describe that particular shade of red since the middle of the 19th century). Unfortunately there isn’t as much to write about cerise as about some other colors.
Cerise means cherry in French and I thought it would be appropriate to write about the color as cherry-picking season arrives. When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to an orchard to pick cherries around the end of June every year. I was always aggrieved to be rousted from bed first thing on a Saturday morning and I treated the annual event as an ordeal–but now I miss cherry picking and I particularly miss having cherries. The very beautiful ornamental cherry tree in the back yard of where I live is an ornamental cherry which produces no fruit. Aside from a few tiny plastic containers of pricey bing cherries, I have to be content with the color.
A National Geographic Painting of the Collision
The name “Cerise” has one other claim to fame. In 1995, the French military launched a spy satellite of that name from Centre Spatial Guyanais (the ESA spaceport in French Guiana which now includes the infamous former penal colony of Devil’s Island) in order to monitor high frequency radio transmissions. One year later, Cerise was struck by a fragment of an Ariane rocket. To quote NASA, “The debris appeared to have impacted the stabilization boom, which extended 6 m from the main body of the spacecraft, at over 14 km/s (31,000 miles/hour).” It was the first recorded space collision of a space craft with space junk (although not the last). Incredibly, the satellite remained operational however the boom broke off and joined the tens of thousands of other bits of space debris–lethal low hanging fruit whipping through near-Earth orbit.
ferrebeekeeper 