Hermitary - Gallery - Art

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What accounts for the ubiquitous interest in hermits in the eras we consider: the Northern (Flemish and Netherlandish) Renaissance and Southern (Italian) Renaissance -- and thereafter? Here are hermits depicted without the historical or hagiographical representation of a Paul of Thebes or Jerome or Anthony. These hermits are largely the modest faces of their ethnic regions: the many Dutch, the Italian, occasional German, even a Croat and two Poles! Salomon Konninck, a friend of Rembrandt, easily shifts his titles between the work here, titled "A Hermit Reading," and several portraits that pass with similar titles, such as "An Old Man," "Man at His Desk," "Old Man Thinking," "A Scholar in his Study," and the like.
The thin line between reading, studying, and praying? Perhaps the presence of a skull, a memento mori, the classic "prop." Is this the conjuction of hermits and solitaries? These quiet hermits reading, praying, reflecting, versus the fearsome hermit march depicted by van Eyck? -- hermits descending on the world, their menacing dispositions seeming to threaten all hypocrisy and worldliness. Yet daily life among busy hermits is tranquil routine in Uccello. Finally, too, Zuloaga's well-drawn, classically-styled anchorite shames the worldly ecclesiastics -- though the painter was himself a conforming supporter of fascism in his own modern Spain! Throuhout these centuries, we recall that hermits had become virtually extinct, but this wide and disparate set of painters does not let us forget them.