Anton Goubau - The Study of Art in Rome - 1662
Anton Goubau or Anton Goebouw (1616, Antwerp – 1698, Antwerp) was a Flemish Baroque painter. He spent time in Rome where he moved in the circle of the Bamboccianti, Dutch and Flemish genre painters who created small cabinet paintings of the everyday life of the lower classes in Rome and its countryside. He is known for his Italianate landscapes and genre paintings in the style of the Bamboccianti and his history paintings with mythological and religious themes.
He is recorded in Paris in 1642 and then travelled on to Italy. He stayed in Rome from 1644 to 1650. Here he became close to the group of genre painters around Pieter van Laar commonly referred to as the “Bamboccianti”.
There is no evidence that he joined the Bentvueghels, the association of mainly Dutch and Flemish artists working in Rome, even though he painted a work entitled The Study of Art in Rome (1662, now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp), which depicts several members of the Bentvueghels making drawings of Antique ruins in a landscape outside Rome. This proves that he moved in the circle of the Bentvueghels.
The Bentvueghels (Dutch for “Birds of a Feather”) were a society of mostly Dutch and Flemish artists active in Rome from about 1620 to 1720. They are also known as the Schildersbent (“painters’ clique”).
The members, which included painters, etchers, sculptors and poets, all lived in different parts of the city (mostly the parishes of Santa Maria del Popolo and San Lorenzo in Lucina in the north of the city) and came together for social and intellectual reasons. The group was well known for its drunken, Bacchic initiation rituals (paid for by the initiate). These celebrations, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours, concluded with group marching to the church of Santa Costanza, known popularly at the time as the Temple of Bacchus. There they made libations to Bacchus before the porphyry sarcophagus of Constantina (now in the Vatican Museums), which was considered to be his tomb because of its Bacchic motifs. A list of its members may still be seen in one of this church’s side chapels. This practice was finally banned by Pope Clement XI in 1720. Although predominantly made up of Flemish and Dutch artists, a few other members were admitted, including Joachim von Sandrart and Valentin de Boulogne.
Despite the rowdy nature of these initiations, an intellectual quality was maintained. Joachim von Sandrart, for example, wrote in his 1675–1679 book, Teutsche Academie der edlen Bau-, Bild und Malereikünste (German Academy of the Noble Arts of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting), that his “baptism” included “reasoned discourses, undertaken by French and Italians, as well as by Germans and Netherlanders, each in his own tongue.” Also Cornelis de Bruijn wrote about the rituals he had to undergo in 1674 and made some engravings, which he published in 1698.
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