page_title: Bernard van Orley
section_title: Paintings
hierarchical_section_title: Bernard van Orley / Paintings
context_page_description: Bernard van Orley, also called Barend or Barent van Orley, Bernaert van Orley or Barend van Brussel, was a versatile Flemish artist and representative of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, who was equally active as a designer of tapestries and, at the end of his life, stained glass. Although he never visited Italy, he belongs to the group of Italianizing Flemish painters called the Romanists, who were influenced by Italian Renaissance painting, in his case especially by Raphael.
  He was born and died in Brussels and "served as a sort of commissioner of the arts for the Brussels town council". He was the court artist of the Habsburg rulers. He was extremely productive, concentrating on the design of his works, and leaving their execution largely to others, in the case of painting, and entirely so, in the case of the tapestries and stained glass. This he may have learned from Raphael, whose workshop in Rome was unprecedentedly large.
  Due to his reliance on workshop execution, his many surviving works vary considerably in quality. Many drawings, mostly studies for designs for tapestries and stained glass, also survive.
context_section_description: One of his earliest signed works dates from 1512: the "Triptych of the Carpenters and Masons Corporation of Brussels", also called the Apostle Altar. The central panel is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the side panels in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. It recounts the lives of two apostles Thomas and Matthew. It was originally commissioned for a chapel in the Our Blessed Lady of Zavel Church in Brussels.
  In his early works he continued the traditions of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and their followers, but then he gradually began integrating the Italianate motifs of the Renaissance, representing figure types and the spatial relationship such as found in the works of Raphael.
  In 1515 he was asked to take over the commission of a triptych for the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross in a chapel in the Sint-Walburga church in Veurne. He finished and delivered it in 1522. The left panel is on display in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium. The front shows Saint Helena  meeting the pope in an architectural setting of Renaissance buildings and Italianate motifs. The back is a grisaille painting of Christ falling under the Cross. The right panel is on display in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, showing Charlemagne receiving the relics of the Passion.
  From 1515 on, he and his workshop received many orders for portraits, including from the royal family and from people connected to the court. In 1516 he painted seven portraits of Charles, who had just become King of Spain, and portraits of his brother Ferdinand, the later King of Hungary, and his four sisters (destined for the King of Denmark).
  The 1516 painted copy of the Shroud of Turin, commonly attributed to Albrecht Dürer, is also sometimes attributed to Bernard van Orley.  By 1517 he was recognized as a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke.
  On 23 May 1518 he was appointed as the official court painter to the Regent of the Netherlands Margaret of Austria, replacing Jacopo de' Barbari.
  In this position, he became the head of an important workshop, making him one of the first entrepreneurial artists in Northern Europe. With this workshop he produced paintings and, especially after 1525, became a leading designer of tapestry cartoons and stained glass windows. He held  this position until 1527 when he, his family and several other artists,  fell into disgrace because of their Protestant sympathies. The family fled Brussels and settled in Antwerp. Five years later, he returned to Brussels when he was reinstated  by the new Regent of the Netherlands, Maria of Austria. After his death in 1541, he was succeeded as court painter by his pupil Michael Coxcie.
  Among his most important paintings is the Triptych of the Virtue of Patience (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels), also called the Job altarpiece, commissioned in 1521 by Margaret of Austria to illustrate a poem she wrote about the virtue of patience. The interior panels represent the trials of Job, while the outer panels recount the parable of Lazarus and Dives (instead of the usual grisaille paintings of saints). This triptych is completely by the hand of Bernard van Orley. He must have been especially proud of his work as he signed it twice and added his coat of arms as well as his monogram BVO and the motto  'ELX SYNE TYT' ("each his own time"). This relates to his artistic opinion that an artist should be a man fully integrated in his time.
  The same museum houses another triptych by the same painter: The Haneton Triptych. This triptych was commissioned by Philippe Haneton, first secretary in the Secret Counsel of Charles V. The middle panel depicts a poignant pietà against an archaic golden background, painted in a very personal style with influences of the Flemish Primitives and Albrecht Dürer. Bernard van Orley was, together with Jan Gossaert, among the first to introduce strong musculature in Flemish paintings. The left panel shows Philippe Haneton and his sons, and the right panel his wife and her daughters.
  The triptych The Last Judgment (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone
caption: The Haneton Triptych.
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D90", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2011:03:08 16:34:34", "Image ExifOffset": "216", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "994", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4781", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/50", "EXIF FNumber": "19/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "1600", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Unknown", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2011:02:25 12:10:56", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2011:02:25 12:10:56", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "352741/62500", "EXIF ApertureValue": "3851999/1000000", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "2", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "39/10", "EXIF SubjectDistance": "211/50", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "24", "EXIF SubSecTime": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3744", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1572", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Manual Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "36", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "High gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0", "EXIF BodySerialNumber": "6095410", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[18, 105, 7/2, 28/5]", "EXIF LensModel": "18.0-105.0 mm f/3.5-5.6"}