Jan Miel

Jan Miel (1599 – April 1664) was a Flemish painter and engraver who was active in Italy. He initially formed part of the circle of Dutch and Flemish genre painters in Rome who are referred to as the 'Bamboccianti' and were known for their scenes depicting the lower classes in Rome. He later developed away from the Bamboccianti style and painted history subjects in a classicising style.

He collaborated with many artists in Rome and worked in the latter part of his career in Turin as the court painter of Charles Emanuel II, the Duke of Savoy.

Life

Jan Miel was probably born in Beveren-Waas, but Antwerp and 's-Hertogenbosch have also been suggested as possible birthplaces. There is no information on his training but it is assumed that it took place in Antwerp. The seventeenth century Italian biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri refers to a training by Anthony van Dyck in Flanders but there is no independent evidence for this statement.

Miel's stay in Rome in the period from 1636 to 1658 is documented, but it is possible that he was already there from 1633. In Rome, he became a member of the Bentvueghels, an association of mainly Dutch and Flemish artists working in Rome. It was customary for the Bentvueghels to adopt an appealing nickname, the so-called 'bent name'. For Miel two different bent names are documented: Bieco (which means squint in Italian) and Honingh-Bie (which means honey bee and is derived from the surname 'Miele' by which he was known in Italy and which means 'honey' in Italian). In the 16th-century Jan Sanders van Hemessen's The Surgeon had depicted a quack surgeon pretending to remove with a knife from a patient's open skull the so-called 'stone of madness'. Seventeenth-century genre painting regularly returned to the theme as can be seen in the works of Adriaen Brouwer, Jan Steen and David Teniers the Younger. The main personages in the Hermitage painting are shown dressed as characters of the commedia dell'arte: the quack wears the mask and costume of Il Dottore while the guitar player has the costume of a Zanni (madcap servant). Jan Miel painted other works using characters from the commedia dell'arte such as Carnival in Rome (Prado Museum, 1653) and The Actors' Rehearsal (Zingone collection, Rome).

During the 1640s and 1650s Miel began, just like Michelangelo Cerquozzi, to expand the scope of bambocciate paintings by paying less attention to the surrounding landscape and instead stressing the anecdotal aspects of city and country life. These works were repeatedly used as a model by the Bamboccianti in the second half of the century and by the genre painters working in Rome during the early 18th century.

Collaborations Miel often collaborated with other artists as was the custom at the time. He painted the staffage for the vedute (cityscapes or other views) by Viviano Codazzi and Alessandro Salucci and the landscapes of Gaspard Dughet and Angeluccio. Miel excelled in depicting stories, which filled up the open spaces in Salucci's vedute. Miel often included multiple anecdotal scenes in a single work. This is evident in An architectural capriccio with an ionic portico, a fountain, a two-story loggia, a Gothic palace and figures on a quay (Christie's, Sale 1708, Lot 56). This composition depicts various groups of people acting independently of each other: there are an elegant couple on the lower left on the stairs, figures at the well next to them and card players on the steps in the distance. Miel's figures were typically farmers, beggars, morra players, innkeepers and porters often mixed with elegantly dressed men and women, who provided a rich flavor of Roman daily life to the architectural setting created by Salucci.

There is evidence that in 1641, Jan Miel was documented in the studio of Andrea Sacchi. This collaboration is rather exceptional since Sacchi was an important critic of the Bambocciante style of which Miel was an important representative. This stay in Sacchi's studio may have been instrumental in the artist's evolutions towards the "gran maniera" of painting. Miel worked with Andrea Sacchi on the painting Urban VIII visits the Church of the Gesù (Galleria Barberini, Rome, 1641). It is believed that Sacchi only executed a small portion of the painting himself and that Jan Miel executed the foreground figures after drawings by Sacchi.

Old auction catalogues mentioned that Miel contributed the staffage to the landscapes of Claude Lorrain during his stay in Rome, but it has not been possible to attribute the human figures in Lorrain's works to Miel.

After moving to Turin in 1658, he decorated the royal hunting lodge at Venaria Reale with large-scale hunting scenes (portions of which are now lost). He painted more and more history paintings which demonstrate an intensification of the classical tendencies already present in the religious paintings of the 1650s. Miel also began to study and copy the works of Raphael and Annibale Carracci, just as he had copied the works of Pieter van Laer at the beginning of his career.

Prints Miel was also a skilled engraver. He designed the frontispiece for La povertà contenta (Rome, 1650) of Daniello Bartoli and the illustrations for De bello belgico (Rome, 1647) of Famiano Strada.