Les Noces de Pelée et Thétis de Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem: une représentation de l'Âge d'Or?

• Autores: Élinor Myara Kelif
• Localización: Revue de l'art, ISSN 0035-1326, Nº. 177, 2012, págs. 25-36
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • The myth of the Golden Age has often been exploited during the Renaissance in order to elegize princes and their government. However among the Dutch Mannerist artists, it is more generally declined in its strictly Ovidian version, giving place to bucolic imagery. By the intermediary of the evocation of the topoi of the golden age, other themes find legitimacy associated with the myth to the point of becoming "extensions" and thus serving as more political instruments of an evocation of the golden age in the North. This is the case of the Wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem. The golden age with all its associated positive concepts -- peace, harmony, concord, and abundance -- are brought together in the painting. Neither Ovid nor Virgil, the sources most often used for the myth of the golden age, is used here, but rather Catullus and his account of the marriage between a mortal, Peleus, and a goddess, Thetis. The ideality embodied by the golden age is utilized by Catullus to describe this union and Cornelis van Haarlem does the same in his representation of the event. Thus he takes up this association in order to give the myth of the golden age a more political interpretation, put to the service of the Princes of the House of Orange.