Erasmus De Bie

Originally from Antwerp, the painter Erasmus De Bie often depicted his hometown. *View of the Meir or Carnival in Antwerp* takes its name from the small group of six figures in the foreground, dressed in the style of the characters from the *Commedia dell’arte*. Bustling about in all directions, they brandish incongruous objects: sticks topped with pig’s bladders, a grill, a broom, and a string of sausages, which can already be seen in the carnival genre scenes of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The crowd, paying little attention to their antics (perhaps due to the decline of this custom between 1550 and 1650?), seems captivated by the popular play being performed in the middle of the square. The work bears witness to the different social classes of the century: between nobles and bourgeois on horseback or in carriages, and common folk fighting as in the lower left corner, or climbing up to windows to get a better view of the play. The Meir, Antwerp’s main shopping street, serves here as the setting for these small scenes of everyday life. Erasmus De Bie pays perfect homage to the architectural richness of the urban setting of this mid-17th-century square. The gabled facades of the houses are meticulously detailed in shades of grey, pink and ochre. In the background, Antwerp Cathedral and the pagaddertoren of the Den Spieghel house—a tower typical of Flemish port cities during the Spanish era—rise against a sky of luminous clouds. In Flanders, genre scenes, particularly those depicting rural life, predominate in the artistic landscape, unlike in their northern neighbours, where landscapes constitute the most widespread and popular genre. Here, Erasmus De Bie achieves a kind of synthesis between the various dominant trends in Flemish painting of his time: the tradition of cityscapes, the anecdotal genre painting for which his master, David Ryckaert III, was famous, and the celebration of village fairs by David Teniers II. The Ixelles Museum also holds a scene of a village fair painted by David Ryckaert III, Family Celebration.

This translation has been automatically generated by DeepL.