THE NEW YORK TIMESBy Arthur Lubow
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Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s “The Massacre of the Innocents” (1590) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum |
On a visit last winter to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, I encountered three Cornelis pictures (the largest holding by an American museum) and remembered my intention to learn more about this Dutch painter. I obtained the massive catalogue raisonné. I talked to academic experts. I studied his work, and also that of his colleagues — Hendrick Goltzius being the most renowned — and his predecessors. I came away with the conviction that in a flare of lusty creativity, from the late 1580s until the early 1590s, this underappreciated Haarlem Mannerist produced some of the greatest — and strangest — homoerotic paintings of all time. And that this glaringly obvious fact had been studiously ignored in almost all the art historical commentary on his work. [
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Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s “The Fall of Lucifer” (1588-90), also known as “The Fall of the Titans,” at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen. |