Anthony Van Dyck

4 Pages 901 Words

Anthony Van Dyck’s “Andromeda Chained to the Rock”

Anthony Van Dyck is a brilliant and tremendously influential portrait painter who

was also a religious and narrative artist, a consummate draughtsman and etcher and a

charming occasional landscape watercolorist. The seventh of twelve children born to a

wealthy silk merchant in Belgium, Anthony van Dyck began to paint at an early age. By

the age of nineteen, he had become a teacher in Antwerp. In his early twenties, van Dyck

went to Italy, where he studied the paintings of Titian and Paolo Veronese and worked as

a successful portrait painter for the Italian nobility. In 1621 Anthony van Dyck left

Antwerp and his position as chief assistant to Peter Paul Rubens. He spent the next six

years in Italy, conceiving a obsessive admiration for Titian and developing a mature

painting style. He lived in England from 1632 to his death, becoming a fashionable

portrait artist and court painter to King Charles I.

The piece that really stands out of all Van Dyck’s work is Andromeda Chained to

the Rock. Van Dyck's cultural environment and pictorial style come forward in this

painting of Andromeda, the beautiful Ethiopian princess whose sacrifice was required to

calm a sea monster ravaging the kingdom. Van Dyck depicts her chained in a rocky cave

awaiting her fate, while the monster approaches through the waves. Perseus, her rescuer,

moves quickly along through the skies on Pegasus.

Andromeda stands firmly, full-length, and life-sized, looking up in anguish.

Andromeda has a solid physical presence, which may also come from the fact that Van

Dyck used his mistress Margaret Lemon for the model of this painting. The woman’s

lively eyes, detailed facial features, and fine modeling of flesh tones show the Van

Dyck’s concern for texture and pattern. His brush strokes vary to soften the background

and...