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MAY 20, 2015 \ newsweeklY - € 0,75 \ rEad morE at www.flandErstoday.Eu currEnt affairs \ P2
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Police Pension agreed
Unions and the government have finally come to agreement on pensions for police officers, after nearly a year of strikes and protests \2
Royal Ballet Flanders’ latest production brings four poignant war stories to the stage \ 13
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the Future’s so bright
Leuven’s Materialise has revolutionised 3D printing, from serious medical applications to new designs by Hoet eyewear \7
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flemish painters depict changing relationship with the sea in 16th and 17th centuries georgio valentino More articles by Georgio \ flanderstoday.eu
An exhibition in France looks at how Flemish artists set Europe on a new course of maritime painting, and how depictions of the sea show shifting views of our place in the world.
L
ong before the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, the sea was our final frontier. Its vast expanse, unfathomable depth and exotic ends fascinated our forebears in the same way that outer space fascinates us now. Contemporary science fiction has done little but adapt old mariners’ odysseys filled with discoveries, shipwrecks, leviathans and alien cultures. The sea itself, where all these marvellous mysteries were
born millennia ago, has lost its mystique. We domesticated it somewhere between there and here. It’s still important, of course – for trade, industry, research, leisure and, last but not least, the planet’s ecological equilibrium – but its importance is now expressed in the language of prose, not poetry. Or, to use a visual metaphor, the sea has come over the centuries to be represented less in mythic iconography and more in dry, naturalist panorama. The exhibition La Flandre et la Mer (Flanders and the Sea) at France’s Musée de Flandre shows how European painters got to grips with this primordial space and, specifically, how two crucial generations of Flemish artists set
the Continent on its course. “These works represent an entirely new way of seeing the sea and, by extension, the world,” says museum director Sandrine Vézilier. “This is what the birth of humanism looks like, when philosophers and artists alike challenged the religious view of the cosmos and humanity’s place in it.” Although the Dutch painters of the Golden Age are widely considered to be the ultimate maritime painters, their neighbours to the south were the ones who paved the way. “When we think of Flemish painters,” says Vézilier, “we usually think of religious scenes and pastoral landscapes. We seem to have forgotten their contribution to the marine genre.” continued on page 5