New exhibition explores Flemish Renaissance painters who radically changed European art
December 14, 2024–May 4, 2025
SALEM, MA – During the Renaissance, the region known today as Flanders in Belgium was home to visionary artists who developed radically new ways to depict reality, portray humanity and tell stories that continue to resonate with viewers today. Global trade brought immense wealth to the so-called ‘Southern Netherlands’ and fueled a booming commercial art market there, the first in European history. PEM is hosting the exclusive East Coast presentation of Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks, a major exhibition of exquisite paintings, sculpture and decorative arts, on view from December 14, 2024 through May 4, 2025. The exhibition, co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium, features rarely exhibited masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Hans Memling, Jan Gossaert, Jan Brueghel, Clara Peeters, Jacob Jordaens, Frans Francken and Michaelina Wautier, among many others.
Katharina Van Cauteren, Executive Director of The Phoebus Foundation (a Public Benefit Foundation) and curator of the exhibition notes, “we are excited to feature many of The Phoebus Foundation’s Flemish masterpieces at the Peabody Essex Museum. This captivating exhibition is a rollercoaster ride through a rebellious 300 years of Flemish history, guaranteed to captivate a new wave of art enthusiasts!”
With approximately 130 works from The Phoebus Foundation and an additional 60 works from PEM’s collection that reflect the global ambitions and interconnectedness of Europeans at the time, Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools takes visitors on a journey to the Southern Netherlands, setting the scene of this fascinating region and its culture and politics. Antwerp, on the river Scheldt, was the most important port in Northern Europe and a strategic hub for trade and finance. Major cosmopolitan Flemish cities, such as Bruges and Ghent, became home to Europe’s intellectual and business elite.
“Flemish painters from the 15th to 17th centuries created extraordinary works of art amid a period of political turmoil and unprecedented prosperity,” said Karina H. Corrigan, PEM’s Associate Director–Collections and the H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art, who serves as the coordinating curator of the exhibition at PEM. “Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools will transport visitors to this remarkable time in history and consider the many ways Flemish art and culture has shaped the world we live in today.”
God is in the Details
Some of the most expensive Flemish works of art produced in the 1400s and 1500s were religious paintings commissioned for display in Catholic churches. Amidst the wars and plagues that raged during this period, many Europeans turned to the church’s promise of eternal salvation. Catholic churches were major sites for public devotion, but people also prayed in the privacy of their own homes. Many prosperous Flemish people purchased paintings, sculptures, rosaries and manuscripts for this more intimate form of devotion.
New Perspectives
Landscape and still life paintings — first introduced as details within religious works — emerged as new genres in the Southern Netherlands in the 1600s. In a section called “New Perspectives,” visitors will encounter carefully arranged still life compositions that play with balance and depth to enhance the scene’s drama and intimacy. In their depictions of fertile landscapes, Flemish painters emphasized the horizon lines and changing weather conditions, often activating scenes with details of daily life. These painters also developed new techniques and formulas — developing what we know today simply as oil paint — that gave their works a sense of depth, richness and luminosity.
This period’s artistic excellence was not limited to painters. The Southern Netherlands also emerged as a vibrant center of experimentation for ever more curious scientists, engineers, physicians, botanists, cartographers and humanists. In fact, commissioning an elaborate piece of furniture in the 1600s was much more costly than the average painting. Exclusive to PEM’s presentation of this traveling exhibition is an elaborately carved 17th-century Flemish cabinet from Boston area collectors Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo.
Portrait Mode
Prior to the 1600s, royalty and the aristocracy were the only ones who could afford to commission a painting of themselves. As a prosperous middle class emerged in Flanders in the 1600s, successful merchants, powerful politicians and influential scholars also began commissioning portraits. For these new art buyers, portraiture was a means of showing off their social status, constructing a sense of identity and building a legacy for future generations.
Fool in the Mirror
Another section of the exhibition looks at human folly through a variety of works full of jokes and witty double meanings. These amusing paintings also offer a 17th-century cautionary tale: If you act like the fools and sinners portrayed, you might not get into heaven.
Classical Impact
Flemish artists of the Renaissance were also inspired by stories from Greek and Roman mythology. That genre includes the largest painting in the exhibition: a Rubens portrait of a voluptuous goddess Diana Hunting with her Nymphs, commissioned by the Spanish king, Philip IV, for his new hunting lodge near Madrid.
Pursuit of Wonder
Tracking European global exploration and colonization, the exhibition also looks at the wider world of maps and scientific discoveries and the rise in popularity of rooms of wonder, or wünderkammer. Often referred to as cabinets of curiosities, these spaces reflected the owners’ wealth and connections as well as their desire to order and possess a microcosm of the world in miniature. The exhibition concludes with a space evoking one of these Flemish cabinets of wonder from the 1600s, filled with precious porcelain and lacquer, shells, stuffed specimens of animals (including an ostrich) and rare antiquities.
“Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools offers visitors a rare opportunity to view important Flemish works of art from The Phoebus Foundation, both a private collection of art and a public benefit foundation based in Antwerp, Belgium,” adds Corrigan. “Flemish artists working during this period produced paintings that are vibrant and beautiful, funny and horrifying, poignant and wondrous — these diverse works reflect the faith, ambitions and curiosity of the Flemish people. The astonishing immediacy of these compositions continues to resonate with viewers more than 500 years after they were painted.”
PRESS & INFLUENCER RECEPTION
Please join us for a press and influencer preview reception on Thursday, December 12 from 5:30–6:30 pm, featuring remarks and a curator-led tour. Invitation to follow.
EXHIBITION BOOK
The show is accompanied by the 432 page-book From Memling To Rubens: The Golden Age of Flanders by Katharina Van Cauteren, Executive Director of The Phoebus Foundation and the originator of the exhibition. From Memling to Rubens tells the story of Flemish art and cultural history from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries through a series of masterpieces. Works from the collection of The Phoebus Foundation by Hans Memling, Quinten Metsys, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck “plunge you into a world full of folly and sin, fascination and ambition. Along the way you'll bump into dukes and emperors, rich citizens and poor saints…this is a stirring tale about the image and its meaning, and the link between culture and society. Above all, it's about us, and about who we are today – as people.” This book is available in the PEM Shop.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Follow along and share your experience on social media using #SaintsSinnersatPEM
PUBLICITY IMAGES
Publicity images available upon request.
IMAGE CREDITS
- Jacob Jordaens, Serenade (As the Old Folks Pipe, the Young Folks Sing) (detail), about 1640–45. Oil on canvas. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp
- Hans Memling and Workshop, The Nativity, about 1480. Oil on panel. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp
- Artists in Antwerp, Cupboard, 1620–30. Oak and ebony. Collection of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo
- Artist in the Southern Netherlands, Portrait of a Woman, 1613. Oil on panel. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp
- Jan Massijs, Rebus: The World Feeds Many Fools, about 1530. Oil on panel. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp
- Peter Paul Rubens and Paul de Vos, Diana Hunting with Her Nymphs, 1636–37. Oil on canvas. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp
- A selection of natural and man-made wonders in the Saints, Sinners, Lovers, Fools cabinet of wonders at PEM
- Michaelina Wautier, Everyone to His Taste, about 1650. Oil on canvas. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp
SPONSORS
Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks is co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium. This exhibition at PEM is made possible by the Richard C. von Hess Foundation, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation. We thank Jennifer and Andrew Borggaard, James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Chip and Susan Robie, and Timothy T. Hilton as supporters of the Exhibition Innovation Fund. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.
About the Peabody Essex Museum
Founded in 1799, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, is the country’s oldest continuously operating museum. PEM provides thought-provoking experiences of the arts, humanities and sciences to celebrate the creative achievements and potential of people across time, place and culture. By connecting people through inquiry, empathy and dialogue, PEM encourages an understanding of our shared humanity and fosters a sense of belonging in a complex, ever-changing world. We build, steward and share our superlative collection, which includes African, American, Asian Export, Chinese, contemporary, Japanese, Korean, maritime, Native American, Oceanic and South Asian art, as well as architecture, fashion and textiles, photography, natural history and one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts. PEM offers a varied and unique visitor experience, with hands-on creativity zones, interactive opportunities and performance spaces. The museum’s campus, which offers numerous gardens and green spaces, is an accredited arboretum and features more than a dozen noted historic structures, including Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese home that is the only example of Chinese domestic architecture in the United States.
About The Phoebus Foundation
The Phoebus Foundation originated as the private collection of Ferdinand Huts, Chairman and CEO of the logistics engineering company Katoen Natie and the waste-to-energy company Indaver. To protect the collection from family and corporate risks, he established The Phoebus Foundation, later creating a public benefit foundation under the same name.
Under the leadership of Katharina Van Cauteren, The Phoebus Foundation ensures the optimal storage of the collection, as well as its conservation, restoration, and technical and art historical research. The results of this research are shared with the widest possible audience through exhibitions, publications, websites for adults and children, podcasts, and even a fiction series.
The collection includes archaeological textiles from ancient Egypt, Flemish art from the 15th to 17th centuries, and Belgian Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. It also features a remarkable collection of Latin American art from both the viceregal period and the 20th century. Additional sub-collections include topography, regal memorabilia, and lace and fashion, including notable garments worn by Empress Sisi. Finally, the collection celebrates the wonders of nature, crowned by the T. Rex skeleton Trinity, the queen of the collection.
MEDIA CONTACTS
Whitney Van Dyke | Director of Marketing & Communications
whitney_vandyke@pem.org | 978-542-1828
Kristen Levesque | Exhibition Publicist
kristen_levesque@pem.org | 207-329-3090