Phoebus Focus XXXV: The Holy Family in Nazareth

Phoebus Focus XXXV

The date: 16 September 2016. The place: Peru, where, in the church of San Sebastián in a suburb of Cuzco, one electrical wire touches another. When the fire is finally extinguished around midday, some eighty per cent of the church interior has been reduced to cinders. In just a few hours, a huge part of the oeuvre of Quispe Tito (c.1611-1681) perished.

This edition of Phoebus Focus turns the spotlight on Quispe Tito’s Holy Family in Nazareth and the motley mix of connections between a painting produced in a brand-new world and a print made in a much older one. Holy Family bridges Jesuit thought and Inca heritage. It tells a tale of artistic and cultural legacies and idiosyncratic interpretations.

Katharina Van Cauteren (1981) is head of the Chancellery of The Phoebus Foundation. A passionate art historian and exhibition maker, she has showcased artists from Flanders and the Low Countries around the world. She took Rubens to India for the first time, introduced the Dutch to Jacob Jordaens, and brought Emile Claus and Rik Wouters to the UK. She has sent Memling, Metsys, Rubens and Van Dyck from Tallinn (Estonia) to Denver (USA) and points beyond. In Belgium she has spotlighted the Flemish masters of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a variety of new ways and masterminded exhibitions on such diverse themes as the Antwerp Academy, lace, and portraiture. She also collaborates with other creatives – fashion designers, contemporary artists, production houses and radio makers. Invariably the result is a total experience, a roller-coaster ride through art history.

With Politics as Painting. Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630) and the Archducal Enterprise of Empire, Van Cauteren has written the standard work on the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck and the political ambitions of Archdukes Albert and Isabella. She has also published extensively on the art of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the more recent artists of Sint-Martens-Latem, and James Ensor, Edgard Tytgat and Rik Wouters. In the Phoebus Focus series she has brought the exotic Mere-Monster of Lake Tagua Tagua to intriguing life and uncovered Hendrick De Clerck’s Susanna and the Elders layer by layer. For where there are pictures, there are stories waiting to be told…