Theodor Rombouts. Virtuoso of Flemish Caravaggism (Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 21 January–23 April 2023. Catalogue edited by Frederica Van Dam). Ghent: Snoeck, MSK, 2023, 272 pp., 300 colour illustrations, €50, ISBN: 978‐94‐6161‐813‐9.

Abstract

The impact of Caravaggio’s new realism on his contemporaries and followers (many of them novice artists from northern countries who had travelled to Italy and suddenly succumbed to his influence) was already gigantic in about 1600, even before the artist’s death in 1610, and especially for several decades thereafter. The inspiration for European painting in the seventeenth century is unequivocal, and its arthistorical reappraisal has continuously grown in importance since Roberto Longhi’s epochal 1951 exhibition in Milan, Mostra del Caravaggio e dei caravaggeschi, in which Rombouts, the subject of the exhibition reviewed here, was represented with two paintings (cat. 27, 35). This vindication continues to the present day and – as the example at hand makes evident – increasingly focuses on northern painters who succumbed to his influence. The first monographic exhibition ever dedicated to the work of the Caravaggesque Flemish painter Theodor Rombouts from Antwerp (1597– 1637) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent has to be seen within this context. Rombouts and his Flemish colleagues who followed the Roman master have long been at a disadvantage compared to their Dutch and French counterparts; and so far, many of them only had the honour to be included in collective exhibitions on the Caravaggesque movement. Fortunately,