On Patinir’s Trail
The Road
Idling in the parking lot of the Liège Hertz on a cool September morning in 2023, I set my destination: Dinant, the ancient riverside town in the heart of the Meuse River Valley. The city soon fell away, replaced by the emerald hills of the Ardennes, the forested mountain range that begins in Germany and extends westward into Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France. Late summer breezes cast waves across cornstalks and wildflowers, and tickled curtains of needles dripping from dark pines. I was retracing the faint footsteps of a painter whose own impressions of the surrounding landscape changed the course of Netherlandish painting a little over 500 years ago.
In the first decades of the sixteenth century, Joachim Patinir (ca. 1480–1524) emigrated to Antwerp from Dinant-Bouvignes, neighboring cities on either side of the Meuse in what is now the southern Belgian region of Wallonia. Once in Antwerp, the painter distinguished himself in the competitive art market with a novel composition, later termed the ‘world landscape’, or Weltlandschaft, in which devotional subjects are set within a panoramic landscape, allowing the sweeping drama of the background to engulf the biblical figures.
My first stop in Dinant was the Citadel, a fortress atop sheer limestone cliffs carved over the course of millennia. The imposing structure was built in 1815, but the site has served watchful citizens since the eleventh century, when the region fell under the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. From here one almost hovers over the town, so steep is the drop below. The pear-shaped bell tower of the Collegiate Church of Our Lady soars above the narrow strip of city that clings to the Meuse. That day, the elements conspired to render a tableau that could have been in Patinir’s hand: lead and silver clouds bloomed across the sky, and the Meuse meandered out of sight between green hills.
Through an open gate across the street, in a partially shaded clearing, row upon row of pale stone crosses sobered my musings. This is Dinant’s Military Cemetery, home to 1105 graves of French soldiers killed during the First World War, and 47 French casualties from the Second. A third section of slim headstones bear the names of 25 Commonwealth airmen, also from the Second World War.
What I encountered in the Meuse Valley and the surrounding Ardennes, laid over a constellation of late medieval sites — abbeys and monasteries, natural landmarks — was a more recent layer of history: each town had its cemetery, every village its memorial, inscribed with the names of fallen civilians and soldiers. In La Gleize, a village in the municipality of Stoumont, a German Tiger II tank occupies the space in front of the December 1944 Museum, which is dedicated to the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s final offensive. Here were two histories, one in the sixteenth and another in the twentieth, embedded like sedimentary layers in the landscape. At first, they seemed entirely distinct.
The Rock
Still sparsely populated and largely rural, the Meuse Valley today would not be unrecognizable to the late medieval time traveler. What has changed is our experience of it. Unfamiliar roads are demystified with GPS; dramatic rock formations are explained through the science of geology. But in Patinir’s day, the terrain was conceived in part through fantastic explanations. The legends attached to notable features explained the appearance of the landscape, contained valuable lessons, and preserved historic truths, even as they mingled living figures with mythic beings. The landscape and its tales offer insight into the fears and ambitions of a bygone society.
In Dinant, many landmarks bear names dating to the Middle Ages. One of these is the Bayard Rock, a prominent crag on the edge of the Meuse at the city’s southern tip. The Bayard Rock owes its moniker to the most prominent saga of the Ardennes: The Four Sons of Aymon (Les quatre fils Aymon in French, De Vier Heemskinderen in Dutch). Once a medieval chanson-de-geste, The Four Sons relates the adventures of the knight Renaud de Montauban, his three brothers, and their enchanted horse, Bayard.
While the epic is full of tricks, triumphs, and betrayals, it is ultimately a tale of resistance, of rebel outlaws resisting a vengeful ruler. It begins in Paris: Renaud and his brothers are guests at the court of the emperor Charlemagne. All goes well until Renaud accidentally kills the emperor’s nephew in a game of chess gone horribly awry. Forced to flee the palace, Renaud and his brothers escape with the emperor’s horse Bayard. Charlemagne and his troops pursue the brothers and Bayard into the forested Ardennes, where they take refuge for seven years. The feud ends in a truce: in exchange for the brothers’ pardon, Renaud participates in a crusade and surrenders Bayard. Condemned to death, the horse is thrown off a bridge in Liège with a millstone around his neck. Not one to go down easily, Bayard breaks the stone and escapes into the forest.
According to legend, the Bayard Rock owes its shape to a strike from the horse’s hoof as he ferried the brothers over the Meuse, the emperor hot on their heels. The outcropping is an unmistakable feature of Dinant’s topography—and corresponds to a motif found in several of Patinir’s landscapes.
Today, the main road into Dinant parts briefly into separate lanes around the Bayard Rock, the city’s immovable sentinel. Smeared with gray streaks and dappled with faded moss, it appears to be layered vertically, compressed by the weight of geologic time. Looking up at it, one wonders what meaning and memories it stirred in the sixteenth-century beholder.
The Four Sons held a unique status among cities in the Ardennes, whose dwellers identified with the brothers’ evasion of overextended authority. In 1465, Philip the Good tried to incorporate the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, including Dinant, into the Burgundian Netherlands. The following year, Philip and his son Charles the Bold leveled the city to the ground in retribution for their revolt against the dukes. Dinant was set aflame, and 800 burghers were executed and cast off the main bridge, echoing the fate of Bayard. Memories of the infamous sacking would have been fresh in inhabitants’ minds when Patinir was a youth; the city itself was nowhere near recovered.
The City
It is difficult not to see traces of the sacking in one of the eeriest pictures in Patinir’s oeuvre. It is the Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities destroyed by God for their wickedness. The silhouette of a shoreline is bathed in the nuclear glow of annihilation. Staccato strokes of white and yellow paint glitter against charcoal clouds, alluding to the divine judgment that kindled the devastation. A cluster of boulders shields Lot and his daughters as two angels lead them to safety. The family soon fell into disrepute; in the upper right corner, we see a drunken Lot seduced by his daughters, who believed there were no men remaining to give them offspring. Then there is the most unsettling detail: in the near center of the picture, we discern the ghostly figure of Lot’s wife, transformed into a pillar of salt when she turned back to witness the chaos.
Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah unnerves the modern viewer, but it must have been especially disconcerting to anyone knowledgeable of the painter’s home region. The landscape betrays its origin in the Meuse Valley, with its riverside towns and distinctive crags. Windmills line the water’s edge, and a castle burns in the foreground. Patinir’s landscape is no far-flung, imaginary land, but a familiar reality.
Once more, recent history overlays the past. Nearly 450 years after the 1466 sacking, German forces pushed forward the Western Front of the First World War. Over the course of several days in August 1914, Dinant was effectively obliterated. German troops murdered 674 civilians and destroyed two-thirds of the city in one of Belgium’s most appalling massacres. In a photograph taken five years after the attack, the limestone cliffs preside over ruins: the bell tower of the Church of Our Lady gone, windows blown out, the bridge over the Meuse smashed as if by a giant hand.
Germany occupied Dinant again in 1940, and the city was a priority of Hitler’s final assault four years later. The liberated city nearly fell back into German hands on Christmas Eve 1944, before the U.S. 2nd Armored Division stopped troops five kilometers southeast of Dinant. In one image from that year, Dinant looks little less devastated than it did three decades earlier. American engineers stand on a makeshift dock projecting into the Meuse. The buildings behind them are full of missing windowpanes and fallen blinds. Unaltered are the monumental cliffs and the Citadel, witnesses to the human drama unfolding below.
The Return
Weighing these fateful moments side-by-side, it seemed there was a single link between past and recent present: the grim continuity of violence and conquest. As the project progressed, a second, unexpected throughline emerged, inextricable from the first: The Four Sons. In December 1941, the Comédiens routiers (Road actors), an itinerant troupe of amateur actors, performed a dramatization of the epic called Le Jeu des quatre fils Aymon (The Play of the Four Sons of Aymon) in occupied Brussels. Written for the troupe by Herman Closson, the play had a regionalist undertone that celebrated Walloon identity as a function of its unique terrain.
Belgian viewers enthusiastically received the play as an act of insubordination, recognizing their own resistance to German authority in the brothers’ defiance of Charlemagne. The Germans banned the play in Brussels, but the Comédiens routiers continued to perform it in outlying villages under the title Le Cheval Bayard. Like the wandering troubadours who performed the original epic, the itinerant actors provided comic relief and subtle empowerment to audiences.
These two throughlines of landscape and legend converge in an uncanny third: in the provenance of Patinir’s Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. By the 1930s, the painting was owned by Franz Koenigs, a German banker who settled in the Netherlands. Koenigs lent part of his collection to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam when it opened in its current location in 1935. He forfeited much of his collection to pay off a loan in 1940, a year before his death, and the picture fell into the looted collection of Hermann Göring. It was recovered at the war’s end from Veldenstein Castle by the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit and returned to the Netherlands. The painting resides once again in the Boijmans in Rotterdam—a city whose center was destroyed in 1940, the same year Göring acquired the landscape.
The Window
A final excursion brought me to Montaigle, a ruined château eight kilometers northwest of Dinant. Built in the fourteenth century, Montaigle was left to ruin after it was attacked by Henry II of France in 1554. What remains of the château rests on a promontory like the jagged surface of a molar. A low stone wall traces the summit. Within, patches of grass have erased the outlines of courtyards and chambers.
There is a gap in a ruined tower, what was once a window. I stood before it and surveyed the forest below. Turning away, I became conscious of a gesture performed innumerable times in that very spot: lords turning away from their territory, soldiers turning warily from the forest, visitors turning from a daydream.
When I first arrived, rock, trees, and river looked unchanged. Legends seemed preserved in the landmarks that bore their name. Patinir’s landscapes, too, appeared immune to time, even as they switched hands and crossed borders. It was the illusion of endurance, to mistake physical permanence for interpretive stability. The afterlives of each—land, lore, painting—fall on a vertical timeline rather than a horizontal one. One need only look down to see the bottom, to behold the paradox of the unrecognizably familiar. ❖