Fishing for Souls: Allegory of the Jealousy between the Various Religious Denominations during the Twelve Years’ Truce between the Dutch Republic and Spain

Entry

One of Adriaen van de Venne’s earliest dated and at the same time most ambitious and celebrated paintings, Fishing for Souls was described during his lifetime by Cornelis de Bie as ‘a depiction of the spiritual fishery of human souls, replete with detail’.⁸

The lack of a signature, and the stylistic affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, led to the painting being sold as a Brueghel in 1735.⁹ From the beginning of the 19th century the figures were ascribed to Hendrik van Balen,¹⁰ until Thoré-Bürger attributed them to Van de Venne and saw Brueghel’s hand solely in the landscape details.¹¹ Franken rightly regarded the entire painting as the work of Van de Venne, a view that has never been questioned since,¹² not only because De Bie called it Van de Venne’s ‘master piece’ in 1661, but also because the meticulous style of painting is entirely consistent with the artist’s other early work. In addition, Van de Venne added his self-portrait prominently in the left foreground, perhaps as an alternative signature.

Fishing for Souls is an allegory of the contemporary struggle between the Reformed and Catholic Churches in the form of a literal illustration of Christ’s words: ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men’.¹³ There are references to these Bible passages in the open book on the left in the leading boat. This combination of word and image is unique in Van de Venne’s polychrome paintings from his Middelburg period, and he would only employ it again in his grisailles after 1625, albeit in a very different context.¹⁴ On the water, Reformed fishermen on the left vie with the Catholics on the right to harvest the most souls. The inscriptions state that the Reformed fishermen catch their souls with faith, hope and charity, the Ten Commandments and the true gospel. They are guided by God himself, as indicated by the words ‘IEHOVAE IVDICIVM’ on the tiller of the boat. The Catholics, led by the pope,¹⁵ lure the souls with music and incense.¹⁶ Initially they did so in vain, because they had caught not a single one in the original version of the painting. The figures in their net may have been added later by Van de Venne himself in his characteristic rapid, sketchy style of the 1640s or 1650s, toning down the hostility towards the Catholics,¹⁷ possibly because of the altered times or a change of owner. The sympathy for the Reformed Church in Fishing for Souls is evident not only from the fact that they have the biggest catch, but also that all of their fishermen are portraits, while their Catholic counterparts are depicted as caricatures without individualized features.

There are great crowds of people on both banks, dozens of them portraits. Most of those at the front are dignitaries, while in the middleground are the political leaders on each side. Although attempts have been made to identify the portraits, most of them are speculative.¹⁸ In the foreground groups, Adriaen van de Venne can be picked out on the Reformed side and Father Johannes Neyen on the Catholic, while the sumptuously clad court dwarf may be Theodore Rodenburgh, of whom calumny had it that he had converted to Catholicism. The Middelburg preacher Willem Teelinck appears in the guise of a fisherman in the leading boat.¹⁹ In the middleground, Prince Maurits is recognizable on the left, in exactly the same pose as in Van de Venne’s Allegory of the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1616.²⁰ Other leading figures of the day include Frederik Hendrik, Frederick V with Elizabeth Stuart, her father James I, and the Danish king, Christian IV. Recognizable on the Catholic side are Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella, with their commander-in-chief Ambrogio Spinola. The important part played by Maurits in the Reformed camp is underlined by the small orange-tree with his motto. The inscription ‘Psalm I’ on the tree on the bank undoubtedly refers to his righteous authority or to the justice of the Reformed cause.²¹ That psalm deals with ‘the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. (...) And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, (...) his leaf also shall not wither’. Whereas the tree on the Reformed side is in full leaf, the one by the Catholics is bare. Although the old woman by the withered tree with the words ‘VERVS CATOLICA’ written on her skirt is sometimes seen as an allusion to the sectarian Rosicrucians,²² she could also symbolize the Catholic Church as an old, ramshackle institution. That concept is also represented by the sunken church in the net of the fishermen in the last Catholic boat.

The contrast between the righteous and the ungodly in Psalm 1, and the reference to the Last Judgement (‘Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment’), may explain the archaic composition of Fishing for Souls, which recalls traditional scenes of the Last Judgement, in which the saved souls are on the left and the damned on the right.²³ The symbolic landscape elements like the green tree on the left and the withered one on the right, the bright blue sky on the left and the menacing clouds on the right, and the overarching rainbow are also allusions to early Last Judgement scenes.²⁴ Van de Venne followed those examples by placing the Reformed camp on the preferential side. The rainbow might also be a reference to Genesis 9:16, where it stands for the covenant between God and all living creatures,²⁵ or it can be regarded as a general symbol of peace. If the latter is the case, Fishing for Souls would mirror the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-21) in proclaiming a politics of peace.

Although the date 1614 on the open book in the leading boat is an unusual way of dating, the meticulous style is fully in accord with that of Van de Venne’s earliest works. There are also one or two compositional peculiarities that reveal that this was a young painter at work. Knuttel, for example, drew attention to the inconsistent perspective, with that of the group portraits in the foreground being viewed from a higher viewpoint than those in the middleground.²⁶ Finally, the date is not contradicted by the panel’s dendrochronology, which gives an earliest possible date of 1609.

The unusual manner of dating this painting has persuaded some authors to see it as a reference to a topical political event, such as the ‘Resolution for the peace of the church’ adopted by the States of Holland in 1614, which could explain the harmony reigning within the Reformed group in the painting.²⁷ The renewed threat of war in that year has also been proposed.²⁸ These hypotheses will have been prompted in part by the polemical nature of the painting, analogous to contemporary pamphlets in which the subject of fishing for souls is also found.²⁹ In the painting itself, though, there are no specific references to these events, so for the time being the painting must be regarded as an intellectual satire from the Protestant standpoint during the Twelve Years’ Truce.

It has been suggested that the young Van de Venne painted Fishing for Souls in order to show off his talents to potential patrons.³⁰ The fact that De Bie called this a ‘proefstuck’, a word normally applied to a work submitted to the guild in order to be recognized as a master-painter, supposedly supports this.³¹ However, a close reading reveals that De Bie used the word ‘proefstuck’ in the sense of evidence ‘of his great intellect’, and as a second example he cites a work ‘painted in black and white’.³² Moreover, the political tenor of Fishing for Souls would not have made it the most suitable calling card in his oeuvre, since it could have cost him potential Catholic patrons in the southern Netherlands. Fishing for Souls is, however, Van de Venne’s most ambitious painting, in which he not only managed to combine portraits, landscape and genre in a convincing way, but also demonstrated his virtuosity with artifices like the trompe l’oeil fly in the water on the left.³³ Reference should be made in this context to the two prominent male figures in the foreground with their hands joined in prayer. Their central position, individualized features, and striking yellow and red cloaks suggest that they might be the patrons.³⁴

Yvette Bruijnen, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 290.