| Though not quite as celebrated as his fellow painters of Italian street scenes (including Pieter van Laer), Johannes Lingelbach is nonetheless gaining renewed appreciation for his vignettes of Roman streets and harbors teeming with characters of every description. He was also one of the few painters of Italianate subjects who turned to Dutch landscape upon his return to Holland. Born in Frankfurt am Main on 10 October 1622, Lingelbach moved to Amsterdam at age fifteen (1637). By then he must have apprenticed himself with a master, but who that was is unknown. Houbraken* mentions that Lingelbach was in France in 1642 and that from there he undertook his trip to Rome, arriving in 1644 (other estimates place him there in 1647). The three to six years he spent there are only sparsely and inconclusively documented. The parish archives of San Lorenzo in Lucina note a "Giovanni Lingba, pittore comunicato" living with Abraham Jansen of Antwerp in Strada Paolina in 1647 and 1648 and with "Filippo" Lcitens at the Horto di Napoli in 1649. After 1650 Lingelbach no longer appears in Roman documents, indicating that he returned to Holland in that year. Houbraken also states that Lingelbach left on 8 May 1650. On 23 April 1653 Lingelbach married in Amsterdam and in October of the same year he gained his citizenship there. It is speculated that he may have returned briefly to Italy prior to his marriage, but the evidence is circumstantial as well as unreliable. It is more likely that Lingelbach remained settled in Amsterdam until his death in 1674. By the time Lingelbach arrived in Rome, van Laer had already returned to Amsterdam, but Jan Miel and Michelangelo Cerquozzi* were still active there, along with an important group of Italianate painters also in Rome at about the same time. Jan Baptist Weenix* was there from 1643 to 1647, Michiel Sweerts* from 1646 to 1652, and Carel Dujardin* during much of the 1640s. Lingelbach's oeuvre and development are still problematic owing to the absence of documentation before his return to Holland. Moreover, scholars disagree as to which pictures can be attributed to Lingelbach's Roman period. Nonetheless, a body of work has been generally accepted, which helps us understand Lingelbach's artistic personality after 1650. That work shows him to have absorbed the lessons of van Laer and to have responded to the subject matter popularized by Thomas Wijck and Jan Baptist Weenix. One of his earliest surviving dated pictures is The Tooth Puller (signed and dated 1651, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), Here Lingelbach has conjured up an imaginary view of Rome, replete with ancient ruins and various kinds of buildings lining the streets and piazza. A diverse assembly of tradesmen and vendors conduct their business, offering the viewer a rather large slice of Roman street life. Most dramatic is the dentist extracting a tooth at the picture's left. Owing a debt to van Laer and Cerquozzi, the painting still shows us Lingelbach's own manner, with its crowds and expansive view. Much of Lingelbach's later painting continues to employ many of the same devices: complicated arrangements of figures set before a variety of known (and imaginary) Roman monuments. Among the sites he portrayed were the Piazza del Popolo, the Campo Vaccino, and the Piazza Navona. After 1660 his palette grew cooler, his style more contrived and precious, as well as decorative. We also know that he occasionally collaborated with other artists, providing staffage figures for landscapes by Jan Hackaert, Frederick de Moucheron, and Jan Wijnants. Eagerly collected during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lingelbach serves as an important link to the work of that late-eighteenthcentury master of genre, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. |
