Flemish Painter Of The First Half Of The 17th Century, Nascendo Morimur

Flemish painter of the first half of the 17th century

Nascendo morimur

Oil on canvas, 55 x 45 cm

With the frame, 64 x 53 cm

The allegorical painting commonly identified with the title Nascendo morimur is the work of a Flemish painter active in the first half of the 17th century, deeply indebted to the figurative tradition developed in Antwerp in the previous century and, in particular, to the models developed by Frans Floris. The work is part of a line of iconographic and conceptual continuity that, through the circulation of prototypes and the mediation of his workshop, reaches up to the Nordic Baroque sensibility. The painting shows a naked young boy, sitting on a stone base. The body, solid and plastic, is rendered with a strong attention to anatomical modeling, while the pose introduces a complex symbolic system: the right foot rests on a skull, a clear allusion to death, while the right arm rests on a spent hourglass, an emblem of the time that has passed and the transience of existence. These elements clearly lead back to the Vanitas repertoire, a central theme in moral reflection between the 16th and 17th centuries. The gesture of the right arm, stretched towards the back, invites the viewer to observe the scene behind, where the Resurrection of Christ can be glimpsed, the only possible response to the human finitude evoked in the foreground. From an iconographic point of view, the work reworks a precise model: the Allegory of Frans Floris, now in a private collection, which was later reformulated, by Floris himself or by an artist from his circle, in a painting already entitled Nascendo morimur, which is now in the collections of the National Museum in Stockholm. The meaning of the motto, “we are born to die”, is expanded here in a Christological key, contrasting physical death with the promise of resurrection. This dialectic between mors and salus constitutes the conceptual core of the image. Frans Floris, born Frans de Vriendt in Antwerp in 1516, son of the stonemason Cornelis I de Vriendt, initially trained as a sculptor, before turning to painting. After his apprenticeship with Lambert Lombard in Liège, he made a decisive trip to Italy, staying in Florence and Rome, where he assimilated in depth the lesson of Italian art. He felt above all the influence of Michelangelo and the Mannerists, in particular Giorgio Vasari and Parmigianino. Back in Antwerp, Floris founded a workshop of extraordinary breadth, with over one hundred students, becoming the main mediator of Italian models in the Netherlands. In the specific case of Nascendo morimur, the connection with Parmigianino is particularly evident: the boy's face and torso refer to the child of Our Lady of the Rose today at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, as well as to the Baby Jesus of the Holy Family with Angels in the Prado Museum. The work is therefore a significant example of the persistence and transformation of Frans Floris's legacy in seventeenth-century Flemish art, demonstrating how his prototypes continued to be current and fruitful well beyond his death in Antwerp in 1570.