Amy Knight Powell, Segers' Iconoclastic Vernacular

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Amy Knight Powell
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amy
Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

Amy Knight Powell
1. On Segers and the Danube School, see

Karel G. Boon, Introduction, in Egbert
Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Seghers
(Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1968), pp. 6 7.
3. Wilhelm Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules

Seghers: ein physiognomischer Versuch (Erlenbach
Zuerich: Rentsch, 1922).
4. This and all following translations of Einstein are
borrowed from: Carl Einstein, The Etchings of
Hercules Seghers, trans. by Charles
W. Haxthausen, intro. Sebastian Zeidler, October,
vol. 107, 2004, p. 157. Psycho-diagnostic is
Fraengers term. Fraenger, Die Radierungen, p. 12.
# The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcv021
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015 343 364
2. Born in Antwerp, Coninxloo spent about seven

years in the Calvinist enclave of Frankenthal in the
Palatinate before moving to Amsterdam in 1595,
where Segers was apprenticed to him about a
decade later. Coninxloo probably saw and acquired
drawings by Danube school painters during this
time. On Coninxloo, see Martin Papenbrock,
Landschaften des Exils: Gillis van Coninxloo und die
Frankenthaler Maler (Cologne: Bohlau, 2001).
Though Hercules Segers etchings picture unruly places, they are extremely
carefully crafted prints; many of which are made up of countless, delicate
dashes and stipples. A good number of these meticulously worked up etchings
are, nonetheless, interrupted here and there by aberrant marks like those
that cut across the upper right corner of River Valley with a Waterfall (Fig. 1). An
etching, to which Segers added drypoint hatching to create tone, River Valley
with a Waterfall is typical of Segers prints in that it is a unicum printed in
blue ink on yellow paper prepared with bluish-grey body colour and varnished.
None of the other impressions of the print are quite like it.
River Valley with a Waterfall pictures a tiny town that has barely escaped a
torrent of water flowing down between jagged cliffs. At lower left, a rickety
fence descends parallel to the flow of the water. At upper left, a hoary tree
trunk cuts across our view. And at upper right, a roughly x-shaped network of
aberrant lines slices through the fabric of the image as if someone had
crossed it out. These scratches are in fact vestiges of the rigging of an image of
a ship that Segers had earlier made on the same plate. The strange instrument
that dangles in the centre of the sky was the tip of the foremast of that ship.
Here, hanging inverted in the sky, at the terminus of the deepest scratch,
this pointed form evokes the etchers needle. And, in so doing, it casts that
instrument as one of creation as well as destruction: the tool with which the
artist painstakingly built up the substance of the image and the weapon with
which he negated it.
The familiar story of the birth of art and the expressive artist in the early modern
period would have us take Segers aberrant marks for inscriptions of authorial
presence. The graphic styles of Segers predecessors Albrecht Durer and the
Danube landscape painter Albrecht Altdorfer have been well described in these
terms. These German artists, with whom Segers was no doubt familiar, turned
line into a trace of the artistic self.1
Segers can certainly be inserted into a line of influence that descends from
Durer, through the Danube School, to Gilles van Coninxloo (Segers teacher),
to Segers himself, and to Rembrandt that icon of Dutch expressionism,
whose distinctive etched line and painterly impasto have come to stand for
everything that is authorial in the Western tradition.2 Avant-garde critics and
artists have, however, seen Segers idiosyncrasy in a different light. Rather than
tracing his artistic lineage, they have described his social (and political)
isolation. In a monograph of 1922, Wilhelm Fraenger tells the story of Segers
transformation into the stony world he depicts.3 When, in 1929, the anarchist
and art critic Carl Einstein published a short essay on Segers in the avant-garde
journal Documents, which he co-founded with Georges Bataille and Georges
Wildenstein, he relied heavily on Fraengers psycho-diagnostic monograph
and its story of the petrifaction of the self, arguing that Segers projected his
impotence and his masochism onto the landscape . . . his tormented inner
conflicts onto an indifferent external motif .4 Fraenger and Einstein view
Segers prints as outpourings of a soul so tormented as to be severed from
Amy Knight Powell
history. His was an asocial realization of the self , writes Fraenger, which occurs
outside the continuity of the historical process and, therefore, entirely eludes the
historico-critical method of interpretation.5 Einstein invokes the artists disgust
with all sociability, calling him a Holland against the grain . . . all the
Netherlandish contentment turns into an infernal ennui.6 Such a man,
Einstein concludes some pages later, had no place in a Holland that affirmed all
objects with perfect contentment.7
Writing between the two world wars, Fraenger and Einstein felt licensed to
diagnose Segers in (their own) modern terms because Segers, they argue, was
radically estranged from his own time and place.8 In 2012, filmmaker Werner
Herzog likewise identified Segers as more suited to the present than to the past.
Herzogs Hearsay of the Soul, made for the Whitney Biennale of 2012, is a
five-channel digital projection of Segers etchings intercut with scenes of the
contemporary Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger, whose music makes
audible the whisperings of Segers soul or so the marriage of Segers silent
images and the histrionic voice of the cello would have us believe. Like Fraenger
and Einstein, Herzog lifts Segers out of his own historical context into an artistic
filiation with the present, buoyed by expressionistic feeling.
346 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015
5. asozialer Ichverwirklichung, die auerhalb der

Kontinuitat geschichtlicher Prozesse sich ereignen
und deshalb der historisch-kritischen Methode zur
Deutung schlechterdings entzogen sind. Fraenger,
Die Radierungen, p. 12.
6. Einstein, The Etchings, p. 154.
7. Einstein, The Etchings, p. 157.
8. Zeidler explains that Einstein finds in Segers
prints a scandalous countermodel to the dominant
art of his period, thereby providing proof for how
that period was in fact riven by a struggle of
multiple, opposing forces. Sebastian Zeidler,
Introduction, October, vol. 107, 2004, p. 11.
Fig. 1. Hercules Segers, River Valley with a Waterfall (rst version), etching with drypoint printed in blue on yellow paper prepared with bluish-grey body colour,
varnished, 14.3 19.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo # Rijksmuseum.)
9. Mainstream art historians have proposed many

possible lines of influence. See, for example,
Karel G. Boon, Hercules Seghers en zijn voorlopers
(Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1967). For a critical
overview of these accounts and the Segers literature
in general, see Wolfram Morath, Zum Verstandnis der
Radierungen von Hercules Segers: Bildgeschichte und
Formbegriff (Hildesheim: Olms, 1996), pp. 11 32.
10. As translated in David Freedberg, Dutch
Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century (London:
British Museum, 1980), p. 30.
So, whereas mainstream art historians have chronicled Segers relationship to

artists of his own and earlier times, the avant-garde has insisted that his only
significant relationship is an ahistorical kinship with the avant-garde itself.9
Despite this significant difference, the mainstream and the avant-garde have
tended to agree on the expressiveness of Segers prints. In what follows, I will
argue against this tendency and for the radical anonymity of Segers marks. I
will suggest that Segers learned his line from the anonymous scratchings of
sixteenth-century image-breakers (that is, Reformation iconoclasts) as much as,
if not more than, he learned it from his vaunted artist-predecessors. Whereas
influence, as traditionally conceived, is a process of mutual self-definition,
which reinforces identity (as a condition of self-expression) through an agonistic
transmission of style, the bad influence of the iconoclast, who is no one in
particular he has no personal style, no body of work, and no name cuts
the mark away from its maker.
Around the time that Segers became active as a printmaker, a new kind of
landscape image sometimes called rustic, sometimes realistic became popular
in the Netherlands. Window-like, these landscapes invite their viewers to
embark on imaginative journeys through the countryside. The allegorical title
page of Claes Jansz Visschers print series Pleasant Places, a landmark in the
development of this new mode, advertises a collection of eleven landscapes for
the armchair traveller (Fig. 2): Pleasant places you may see here, you art lovers
who have no time to travel far, places situated outside the agreeable town of
Haarlem or thereabouts. Buy without thinking for too long.10 Above these
words, Diligence and Time flank the coat of arms of Haarlem with its motto
VICIT VIM VIRTUS (Virtue conquers force).
Catherine Levesque has shown that here and in the images that follow, Visscher
equates his own artistic labour with the Haarlemmersdiligent restoration of their
land during the peace afforded by the Twelve Years Truce (1609 1621), a
Fig. 2. Claes Jansz. Visscher, Diligence and Time with the Coat of Arms of Haarlem, c. 1612, title page from
the series Pleasant Places, 10.3 16 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo # Rijksmuseum.)
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015 347
Rustic Landscapes
Amy Knight Powell
11. Catherine Levesque, Haarlem Landscapes

and Ruins: Nature Transformed, in Time and
Transformation in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, ed.
by Susan Donahue Kuretsky (Poughkeepsie:
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, 2005), p. 52.
12. Though Buytewech participated in the
development of the rustic landscape, his style is so
singular that he deserves to be separated out here.
See Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, pp. 312.
Fig. 3. Claes Jansz. Visscher, Zandvoort aan Zee, c. 1612, from the Pleasant Places series, 10.3 15.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo # Rijksmuseum.)
welcome interruption to the ongoing Eighty Years War between the Dutch
Republic and Spain.11 Visscher makes the places pictured in his series available
for acquisition (buy without thinking too long, he exhorts the viewer) by
means of etchings that work as diligently as the labourers who appear
throughout the prints. In Zandvoort aan Zee, which takes us to a village just
outside Haarlem, fishermen are busy stretching out their nets to dry (Fig. 3).
The cross-hatching of these nets is perfectly in order, as is each hatch and
crosshatch of the gentle weather high up in the sky. In the foreground, an artist,
watched by two bystanders, leans against the fence and sketches the scene. A
close look at the village church reveals that much of the damage it suffered
during the Spanish siege of Haarlem (1572 1573) is yet to be repaired.
Despite this evidence of the Eighty Years War on the level of the motif, there is
no hint of disturbance on the level of the marks that comprise the picture. In
Visschers hands, the medium of etching functions more or less seamlessly to
allow our identification with the figures in the scene.
Segers probably joined the Haarlem guild of painters in 1612, the same year or
so that Visschers Pleasant Places saw print and that Esaias van de Velde and Willem
Buytewech, leading figures in the development of the Dutch rustic landscape, also
joined the guild. Two years later, Jan van de Velde, landscape etcher and cousin of
Esaias, joined as well. The Van de Veldes produced landscape print series
representing local scenes and monuments much like Visschers print series
that participated in the formation of Dutch identity during the early years of
the Republic.12
13. On the spilled acid, see An Van Camp,

Hercules Segers and His Printed Paintings, n.p.
,https://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/
HerculesSegers_painted-prints-introduction.
pdf. [accessed 1 September 2015].
14. On the issue of time and how it bears on
Segers highly unusual print processes as well as on
the ruined landscapes that he depicts, see the
excellent essays: Levesque, Haarlem Landscapes
and Ruins, pp. 56 9; Christopher P. Heuer,
Entropic Segers, Art History, vol. 35, no. 5, 2012,
pp. 93457.
15. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Seghers,
pp. 445.
Segers experiments with etching would take him in a very different direction.
He produced no series, and the emphatically singular prints that make up his small
oeuvre contain precious little relevant to the shaping of identity. Inhospitable and
largely uninhabited, Segers landscapes refuse the viewing subject all the
transparency and ease of disembodied exploration that Visscher offers. In the
large print River Valley with Four Trees, the abbreviated squiggles and dashes that
indicate clouds, the streaks of ink raining down from upper right probably
created by acid accidentally spilled on the plate and the formidably dense
stippling of the rocky cliff faces fail to cohere into a unified image (Fig. 4).13
This formal incoherence matches the ruination of the terrain. Whereas
Visschers Pleasant Places confidently align artistic labour with the project of
restoration in the wake of war, Segers prints suggest an artistic labour divided
against itself.14
In subject matter and composition, Segers remained closer to the mannerist
Alpine landscapists of the sixteenth century than did his Haarlem contemporaries.
In terms of technique, however, he was exceptionally experimental. He almost
always continued to work his plates after they came off the press, clipping them
with little regard for straight edges, layering on washes of paint, and adding
heightening. He made counterproofs (prints from other still wet prints) (Fig. 5).
He reworked plates, producing different states of the same print, and he used
drypoint hatching or selective wiping of the plate to create tone.15 He printed on
stained paper, uncommonly thick paper, and cloth. And he sometimes varnished
his prints, just as if they were paintings.
Fig. 4. Hercules Segers, River Valley with Four Trees, etching printed in black on white paper, clipped, 28.5 47 cm. British Museum, London. (Photo # British
Museum.)
Amy Knight Powell
16. Van Hoogstraeten calls them printed

paintings. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules
Seghers, p. 17.
17. Approximately eleven exist in two
impressions, five in three impressions, and the
remaining in runs between about five and twenty.
Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Seghers, p. 49.

pp. 169.
Fig. 5. Hercules Segers, Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road, etching, counterproof on brown prepared
linen, overpainted with yellow oil paint and (in the sky) with grey-white paint, which has turned black through
oxidation in some areas, clipped, 15.6 16 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo # Rijksmuseum.)
As the seventeenth-century painter and writer Samuel van Hoogstraten pointed

out, and as has often been repeated, each of Segers etchings is more or less
unique, closer to a painting than a print.16 Only about 183 impressions of
Segers etchings, pulled from about fifty-four plates, are extant. Twenty-two or
so of his etchings exist in only one impression, but even where we have multiple
impressions, they cannot be exchanged for one another because so many have
been subjected, as I have described, to painting, selective wiping, clipping, and
a variety of other secondary processes.17 In addition to these deliberate
processes, Segers systematically embraced the accidents of printmaking: false
bite, imperfections in the polishing of the plate, unintentional lines and smears,
water stains, and so on.18 The deliberate interventions and the accidents that
render each of Segers impressions unique admit something seemingly foreign
into their fabric as if someone other than the artist had left his mark there.
Iconoclasm
Segers was born in Haarlem in about 1589 and died, probably in Amsterdam,
between 1633 and 1638. He seems to have been the son of a Mennonite father
who fled the Spanish inquisition in Flanders, and for a time, he was a pupil of the
landscape painter Gillis van Coninxloo, a member of the Reformed church who
left the southern Netherlands in 1585 also for religious and political reasons.19
All told, more than one hundred thousand people left the southern provinces in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of the Spanish inquisition, most
18. On Segers use of accident and chance, see

Morath, Zum Verstandnis, p. 236; Wolfram Morath,
Ein Grenzganger im Zentrum des barocken sensus
allegoricus: der hollandische Landschaftsradierer
Hercules Segers, in Druckgraphik: Funktion und
Form, ed. by Robert Stalla (Munich: Deutscher
Kunstverlag, 2001), p. 67 and 73; Heuer, Entropic
Segers, p. 944.
Fig. 6. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Church at Sloten,

c. 1650, pen and ink on paper, 11.8 17.9 cm.
The National Museum of Art, Architecture, and
Design, Oslo. (Photo # The National Museum.)
21. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise,

Greatness and Fall, 1477 1806 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995), pp. 3623.
22. Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Written by Fynes
Moryson (London: John Beale, 1617), p. 53; Israel,
The Dutch Republic, p. 363. See also Jonathan
I. Israel, The Intellectual Debate About Toleration
in the Dutch Republic, in The Emergence of Tolerance
in the Dutch Republic, ed. by Christiane
Berkvens-Stevelinck, Jonathan I. Israel, and
G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1997),
p. 5.
23. H. Janse, De lotgevallen der Nederlandse
kerkgebouwen (Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek,
1969), p. 72; Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in
Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007), pp. 118 55.
Fig. 7. Pieter Saenredam, Church of St Cunera in Rhenen, 1655, oil on panel, 50 69 cm. Mauritshuis,
The Hague. (Photo # Mauritshuis.)
20. On the Flemish emigre context, see

J. G. C. A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders in de Noordelijke
Nederlanden in het begin van de Gouden Eeuw 1585
1630 (Haarlem: Becht, 1987). Segers himself was
probably a Mennonite, though we cannot be sure.
of them relocating to one of the cities of the north, like Amsterdam or Haarlem.
From his teacher, Segers would have learned not only a Flemish mannerist mode
of landscape painting but also something of the history of the sixteenth-century
image wars a history he had probably heard a good deal about at home.20
The iconoclasm that swept the Netherlands in August and September of 1566
began near the Flemish city of Steenvoorde and spread first through Flanders and
then north. Within weeks, churches and monasteries throughout the seventeen
provinces had been struck, more than four hundred churches within Flanders
alone. Though the iconoclasms of 1566 subsided quickly to be followed by
only sporadic events on a smaller scale they ushered in the Eighty Years
War, which would eventually lead to the division of the Netherlands in two.
While the southern provinces would remain subject to the Spanish crown and
loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, the seven northern provinces would win
their independence and unite to form a nominally Calvinist Republic, one by
one banning Catholic worship from the public sphere.
By the 1580s, the Catholic Church of the Dutch Republic had been thoroughly
dismantled and largely though by no means entirely suppressed, but little had
really been established in its place.21 The provincial governments had appropriated
most churches and monasteries, but many of these buildings would remain empty
for some time to come. As evidence of this situation, Jonathan Israel quotes the
travelogue of an Englishman, Fynes Moryson, who visited Utrecht in 1593 and
reported that There be thirty Churches, but only three are used for divine
service.22
Only slowly, as the Reformed Church gained ground, would parish
communities begin to restore some of the appropriated buildings. Restoration
began in the 1580s, but it was not fully underway until the turn of the century.
It probably reached its peak in the first decades of the seventeenth century.23
Even when a church began to be used again, sometimes only that part of it
required for services was restored. For example, when Rembrandt sketched the
church at Sloten, near Amsterdam, around 1650, its nave had been fitted with a
Amy Knight Powell
Scratches and Whitewashes
Segers prints reflect these forms. They are shot through with crossings-out and
erasures products of the deliberate interventions and the accidents that I
discussed earlier. We find these scratches and whitewashes in the two extant
Fig. 8. Master of Alkmaar, Burial of the Dead,

1504, panel from the Altarpiece of the Seven
Mercies, oil on panel, 103.5 56.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo # Rijksmuseum.)
Fig. 9. Anonymous (Upper Swabia), Saints

Catherine and Barbara, c. 1510, oil on panel,
162.5 80.5 cm. Museum des Landes Glarus,
Freulerpalast, Na
fels. (Photo # Museum des
Landes Glarus.)
new roof, where the congregation could gather, but its choir still lay in ruins
(Fig. 6).24 In such cases, damage remained to be seen even after a building had
been made functional again. The strange disjunction between the heavy, hastily
scribbled lines of the fence in the foreground of Rembrandts drawing and the
finer pen work of the church underscores the inconsistency of the buildings state.
In Pieter Saenredams painting of the transept of the Church of St Cunera in
Rhenen, a small town on the Rhine between Utrecht and Arnhem, we also
glimpse signs of earlier conflicts (Fig. 7).25 When Saenredam made this
painting, in 1655, based on a drawing of about a decade earlier, he did nothing
to disguise the damage on the compound pier to the right, where statues that
once decorated the column capitals have been torn away, leaving behind ragged
vestiges of their bases.26 These architectural scars are easy to overlook because
they fit in so well with the conspicuously stained and mottled veil of white paint
covering the churchs walls, which, in Saenredams day, had not so long ago
been decorated with murals.27 While making formerly Catholic churches
suitable for Reformed worship entailed repairing structural damage done by
iconoclasts and soldiers, it also required completing the purification initiated
by the image-breakers. This included whitewashing figurative and ornamental
wall paintings.28
Decorative objects associated with Catholic ritual also had to be disposed of.29
Altarpieces and liturgical implements were returned to individuals or to the guilds
that had commissioned them, sold to the highest bidder, or altered to fit Reformed
expectations.30 Many works, some unscathed and others partially damaged,
ended up in civic and private collections.31 Even after most of the evidence of
iconoclasm had been cleared from churches, therefore, a good deal of it would
have continued to be visible in other places. When Karel van Mander published
his Schilder-boeck in 1604, the destruction wrought by iconoclasts was still well
enough remembered for him to recall specific paintings that had been destroyed
and to indicate which collections housed the remains of others. A few
remnants from [a painting by Jacob Cornelisz] are to be seen in Haarlem at
Cornelis Suyckers [house], in the Sevensterre, writes Van Mander. I
remember also seeing, not far from the Dam in Amsterdam, some pieces of a
broken up altarpiece he had painted.32 Reporting on iconoclasm in Delft,
Dirck van Bleyswijck calls such remnants the surviving and salvaged bits and
pieces of these outstanding works.33 Many such salvaged pieces would have
been crisscrossed with the iconoclasts negating scratches, as are the Master of
Alkmaars Burial of the Dead (Fig. 8) and an anonymous painting of two female
saints from the Swiss village of Mitlodi, which was defaced, tossed into the
river Linth, and later rescued downstream (Fig. 9).34
In rehearsing this well-known history of the image wars, I mean to stress that,
though Reformation iconoclasm was brief, its impact was long-lasting. During
Segers life, its effects could still be felt and seen.35 During this period, the
iconoclasts dynamic acts of image-breaking hardened into a set of static forms
and what had been done with the express purpose of removing forms that
Calvinists and others deemed inadequate to the task of representing the divine,
yielded in turn its own forms, two of which would emerge as the lasting face of
sixteenth-century iconoclasm: the scratched out image and the whitewashed wall.
24. This drawing is cited in Spicer, Calvinist

Churches, p. 130. Because the Reformed Church did
not need as many churches as the Catholic Church,
hundreds of churches, many in the countryside,
were either sold or simply allowed to fall into ruin.
Janse, De lotgevallen, pp. 71 2. Meanwhile, the
countryside itself, its farms and villages, also lay in
ruins.
25. Gary Schwartz and Marten Jan Bok, Pieter
Saenredam: The Painter and His Time (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 192 7.
26. For another example of Saenredams
documentation of lingering evidence of
iconoclasm, see his drawing and painting of the West
Part of the Nave of the Mariakerk in Utrecht in Liesbeth
M. Helmus, (ed.), Pieter Saenredam, The Utrecht
Work: Paintings and Drawings by the 17th-Century
impressions of Rocky Valley with a Path (Figs 10 and 11). Here, as elsewhere, the
legibility of the illusionistic space diminishes as we move from one impression
to the next. The first impression has distinct areas of light and dark, which help
define the three-dimensionality of each rock formation and the spatial recession
of the whole. One can make out a river with a path above it and a couple
strolling in the sun. The presence of the couple and the clear trajectory of the
path leading towards the village in the distance suggest that this is traversable
terrain. But the tumbling of the river with its rocky banks down into the shadowy
depths far below our elevated viewpoint sets us a world apart from the figures
who enjoy the warmth of the sun on that relatively flat stretch in the middle
distance.
This is a landscape into which we would have to hurl ourselves if we wanted to
enter it, not one intowhich we could easily wander, as they seem to have done. Nor
is this aworld that we could easily escape. The mountains at the far end of the valley
close off the view. Despite its immensity, the space represented here is confining,
not least of all because of the strangely opaque sky. Entering and exiting this
Fig. 10. Hercules Segers, Rocky Valley with a Path (rst impression), etching with drypoint printed in black on off-white prepared paper, coloured with watercolour
and body colour: the sky greyish-white, the river white, the foreground partly brown, clipped, 23.6 28.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo # Rijksmuseum.)
Amy Knight Powell
landscape by identifying with the strolling couple the kind of identification that is
taken for granted in Visschers Pleasant Places would be difficult at best. In the
second impression, difficulty of identification and entrance becomes sheer
impossibility. The strolling couple, Segers nod towards a habitable world, is
absent, as are the tonal differences that would help us make sense of the
landscapes extension into space. We are left instead with a collection of tiny
forms, which earn Segers Einsteins appellation monomaniac of the atom.36
This accumulation of small motifs buries the broad outlines of the landscape,
and along with these outlines the spatial structure they imply dissolves.
The closer and more uneven clipping of the second impression accentuates these
atomising and flattening effects. The second impression is only a fragment of the
first. Much of the path has been cut away as well as the repoussoir cliff on the right,
which is such a critical point of orientation for the viewer. The second impression
has the feeling of having been clipped and then clipped again until a sufficient
degree of flatness and abstraction had been achieved.37
This flatness then culminates in the sky. In the first impression, it is created with
a greyish-white wash of paint that subsumes the mountaintops. The mountain
peaks glimmer faintly through this blanketing whitewash just enough to
inform us of the depth that has been lost. The sky is handled differently in the
second impression, but the results are just as flat. Bare paper except for a few
scratches and stains created by foul biting of the plate, the sky hangs over the
mountaintops like a veil, separated from them by a strange zone of delicate
Master of Perspective (Utrecht: Centraal Museum,

2000), pp. 122 3 and 1323. This painting is
discussed in Celeste Brusati, Reforming Idols and
Viewing History in Pieter Saenredams Perspectives,
in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the
Early Modern World, ed. by Michael W. Cole and
Rebecca Zorach (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), pp.
34 5.
27. For an excellent discussion of the
time-stained white walls in this painting, see
Angela Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting
the Church in the Dutch Republic (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012),
pp. 2243.
28. For discussion of specific Netherlandish
churches whose wall paintings were whitewashed,
see David Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting in the
Revolt of the Netherlands, 15661609 (New York:
Garland, 1988), p. 109, 111, and 112; Jeremy
Dupertuis Bangs, Church Art and Architecture in the
Low Countries Before 1566 (Kirksville: Sixteenth
Century Journal Publishers, 1997), p. 108.
Whitewash was not the only material used to cover
murals. Black tar and grey and brown plaster or
paint were used for this purpose as well. See, for
example, H. Janse, De oude kerk te Amsterdam:
Fig. 11. Hercules Segers, Rocky Valley with a Path (second impression), etching with drypoint printed in black on white paper, severely clipped, 16.3 24.6 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo # Rijksmuseum.)
Fig. 12b. Anonymous (Upper Swabia), Saints Catherine and Barbara, detail of Fig. 9.
Fig. 12a. Hercules Segers, Rocky Valley with a Path (second impression), detail of Fig. 11.
Amy Knight Powell
cross-hatching. At the bottom of the sky, just above this cross-hatching, a few
inexplicable grids of black trial scratches appear (Fig. 12a). White grids can also
be picked out in the grey elliptical stain above. These odd, non-mimetic marks,
which make the sky appear even flatter than it otherwise would, bear a striking
resemblance to the scratches that crisscross that painting of two female saints
fished from the river Linth (Fig. 12b).
Negation
29. This process was slow and in many places

would remain incomplete. See Regnerus
Steensma, Desacralisatie binnen het gereformeerd
protestantisme: De protestantse omgang met de
inventaris van de voormalige katholieke kerken, in
Materieel christendom: religie en materiele cultuur in
West-Europa, ed. by Arie L. Molendijk ( Hilversum:
Verloren, 2003), pp. 211 32. Nor did this process
ever result in a truly empty church, as Mochizuki
reminds us. Mia M. Mochizuki, The Netherlandish
Image after Iconoclasm, 15661672: Material Religion
in the Dutch Golden Age (Burlington: Ashgate,
2008).
30. For examples of partially censored or
otherwise altered works of art from the
Netherlands and elsewhere, see Freedberg,
Iconoclasm and Painting, pp. 129 30; Cecile
Dupeux, Peter Jezler, and Jean Wirth, Bildersturm:
Wahnsinn oder Gottes Wille? (Munich: Fink, 2000),
pp. 3509.
31. Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 547 8. For a
detailed study of the city of Haarlems acquisition of
religious art during the Revolt, see Truus van
Bueren, Tot lof van Haarlem: het beleid van de stad
Haarlem ten aanzien van de kunst werken uit de
geconfisqueerde geestelijke instellingen (Hilversum:
Verloren, 1993). On the confiscation of churches in
Amsterdam in 1578, see R. B. Evenhuis, Ook dat was
Amsterdam (Amsterdam: W. ten Have, 1965),
vol. 1, pp. 95 6. On the secularisation of artworks
in Leiden in 1572, see Bangs, Church Art, p. 18. Still
other examples are given in David Freedberg, Art
and Iconoclasm, 15251580: The Case of the
Northern Netherlands, in Kunst voor de
beeldenstorm: Noordnederlandse kunst 1525 1580
(s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1986), pp. 76 8.
32. Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious
Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First
Edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603 1604), trans.
and intro. by Hessel Miedema (Doornspijk:
Davaco, 1994), fol. 207v, see also fols. 204r, 206r,
210v, 224v, 241v, 254r v, 259v.
33. Dirck van Bleyswijck, Beschryvinge der stadt
Delft (Delft: Arnold Bon, 1667), p. 250, as
translated in Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting,
p. 121. For examples of such salvaged pieces from
various countries, see Dupeux, Jezler, and Wirth,
Bildersturm, pp. 31649; Stacy Boldrick, David
Park, and Paul Williamson, Wonder: Painted Sculpture
from Medieval England (Leeds: Henry Moore
Institute, 2002), pp. 8398.
34. Dupeux, Jezler, and Wirth, Bildersturm,
pp. 623, 3401.
Sixteenth-century iconoclasts left behind a small but significant repertoire of

negative marks. By appropriating these marks, Segers was not simply
perpetuating the iconoclasts censorship of icons. After all, his appropriation
involved the active displacement of their marks onto the secular genre of
landscape. This displacement is exactly the unexpected that Michel Foucaults
essay on genealogy teaches us to expect. Foucault describes the primary
mechanism of historical change as the violent or surreptitious appropriation of
a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a
direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game.38
While Segers never defaced an icon as such, that is, a representation of holiness in
human form, his displacement of the iconoclasts negating marks onto the genre of
landscape occurred at a moment when that genre had begun to flatter human form in
the way that an icon does. The so-called rustic landscapes mass-produced by Segers
peers picture a world perfectly shaped to its human inhabitants. In Visschers
Zandvoort aan Zee, human figures work in, watch over, and stroll through the
landscape, gently caught up in its network of lines (Fig. 3). Their fitting-in invites
the viewer to imagine moving into this comfortable world as if it were simply a
mirror of her own.
According to Calvin, idolatry is fuelled by a desire for just this kind of specular
affirmation: Daily experience teaches that flesh is always uneasy until it has
obtained some figment like itself in which it may fondly find solace.39 If
idolatry boils down to narcissism, as Calvin suggests, then we might say that
Segers drags his negating scratches across the flattering mirror held up by the
rustic landscape. His scratches negate the illusion of three-dimensional space
that is the very armature of the genre, flattening the image, blocking our
imaginative exploration of its fictive three-dimensional world, and returning us
in the process to the surface of the print.
With these negative marks, Segers brings the iconoclastsdemystification of the
cult image to its logical conclusion. Calvin insists on the difference between the
image and what it represents: [Isaiah] teaches that Gods majesty is sullied by
an unfitting and absurd fiction when the incorporeal is made to resemble
corporeal matter, the invisible a visible likeness, the spirit an inanimate object,
the immeasurable a puny bit of wood, stone, or gold.40 Segers prints concede
this point, reminding the viewer of the incommensurability of the image and
what it purports to show, but these prints reveal the iconoclast to have been yet
more thorough than even he himself knew. Without quite knowing it, the
iconoclast called attention not only to the materials, such as wood, stone, and
gold, but also the marks that the image is made of.
Unlike the marks of the picture-maker, which are designed to disappear into the
pictorial illusion, the marks of the picture-breaker (and Segers aberrant marks, in
turn) are meant to be seen as such, that is, to be legible as marks. These marks
disclose, in turn, the marks that comprise the pictures they deface. In several of
Segers prints, non-mimetic lines crisscross the sky. These lines are the
remnants of an earlier image of a ship. At some point, Segers cut up the plate
bouwgeschiedenis en restauratie (Waanders: Zwolle,

2004), p. 186 and 252; Marco Blokhuis, (ed.),
Vroomheid op de oudezijds: drie Nicolaaskerken in
Amsterdam (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw,
1988), p. 30.
35. When Van Hoogstraten wrote his treatise on

painting in 1678 long after Segers death he
devoted an entire chapter to the history of
iconoclasm, describing it as a recurring
phenomenon that still needed to be guarded
against. For discussion of this fact, see Brusati,
Reforming Idols, p. 49.
36. Einstein, The Etchings, p. 154. See also
Fraenger, Die Radierungen, p. 33.
37. On Segers aesthetic of the ruined and the
fragmentary, see Morath, Ein Grenzganger,
p. 73.
38. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 86.
39. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), vol. 1,
p. 108.
40. Calvin, Institutes, vol. 1, p. 101.
p. 17.
on which he had etched this ship and used its pieces to make several new
landscapes, including River Valley with a Waterfall (Fig. 1) and Mountain Gorge
Bordered by a Road (Fig. 13). According to the proto-romantic account of Segers
life in Van Hoogstratens 1678 treatise on painting, the despairing and
impoverished artist cut up the large ship plate after he failed to sell the prints
he had pulled from it. (Van Hoogstraetens narrative ends with the drunk and
despairing artist falling down a staircase to his death.41)
In most of the impressions made from the re-used plates, fragmentary rigging is
still visible. Some art historians have argued that Segers was unhappy with this
rigging and tried to diminish its effects.42 But Segers must have liked the
persistence of this ghostly image of a ship that emblem of Dutch identity,
power, and wealth [think of the boat on the title page of Visschers Pleasant Places
(Fig. 2)] reduced to a scrawl. And he must have especially liked the iconoclastic
impression that it makes in its recycled form, since he neither burnished out the
rigging on the plates nor painted over it in the prints. Moreover, he consistently
oriented the re-used plates so that the bulk of the rigging would appear in the
sky, where it would be most visible and therefore cause the greatest pictorial
disturbance. This is the case, for example, in River Valley with a Waterfall, in which
one of the lines that slices across the sky ends in that pendulous weapon, which
Fig. 13. Hercules Segers, Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road, etching with drypoint printed in blue on
paper prepared with pink body colour, 16.6 15.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo #
Rijksmuseum.)
Amy Knight Powell
Inexpressivity
It would be natural to see the iconoclasts freeing of the mark from the task of
representing the world as a precursor to the birth of the artist in the modern
sense: that is, the artist as the expressive wielder of the painters brush or the
etchers needle. But that would be a mistake in Segers case. Segers line is too
true to the iconoclasts to be authorial. Regardless of how much feeling it may
seem to convey, the iconoclasts line remains anonymous as little expressive,
except in the most tautological sense, as it is representational. It tells us
nothing about the particular person who made it other than that he was an
iconoclast, and it tells us this less by means of a quality inherent to the line than
by virtue of its relation to what it negates. Iconoclastic lines are rarely gestural
or calligraphic, which is why we do not talk about them in terms of style.
Fig. 14. After Dirck Eversen Lons, A Delft,

Rotterdam, Gouda, or Hague Ferry, from a series
of ten prints, 1642, engraving, 22.7 16 cm.
Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam.
(Photo
#
Rijksmuseum.)
42. For example, Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules

Seghers, p. 77.
43. This belongs to a series of ten prints.
The inscription reads: Sailing is better than
rowing, /And so one saves ones oars. Translated in
Irene de Groot and Robert Vorstman, Maritime
Prints by the Dutch Masters (London: Fraser, 1980),
cat. no. 54.
bears an ironic resemblance to not only the etchers needle but also the sword in the
Haarlem coat of arms (Figs 1 and 2).
The pictorial disturbance created by this rigging takes the form of an
iconoclastic disclosure, as I described earlier: the making visible of the normally
invisible marks that comprise the picture. In Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road,
the vestigial rigging of the vessels bowsprit hovers in front of the landscape
separate from its illusion of three-dimensional space (Fig. 13). In places, however,
the rigging merges with the other lines in the print. Where this happens, it tends
to lift the mimetic lines comprising the landscape into its own non-mimetic
register. For example, the parallel lines that define the path receding perpendicular
to the picture plane are pulled out of their mimetic role when one sees them as
suspended alongside the ropes. This confusion of mimetic and non-mimetic lines
gives the ships rigging its disruptive force.
When Segers prints systematically undo their own spatial illusions, piece by piece
revealing what they are made of, they are only keeping visible what sixteenth-century
iconoclasts had earlier exposed. Far from separating him from his historical context,
Segers negativity was a kind of seismographic sensitivity to the aftershocks of the
Protestant Reformation. Segers is not Holland against the grain, as Einstein calls
him, but rather nothing so much as the grain of (Dutch) picture-making pried
loose from the task of representation. In this sense, he was more properly historical
than many of his contemporaries, including Visscher, who were content to picture
pleasant scenes, full of local colour and pride in place. While Segers was busy
remembering the history of sixteenth-century image-breaking, Visscher and others
were carrying on as if the act of laying down a line had weathered iconoclasm
unchanged.
Though Segers may have learnt more from iconoclasm than many of his
contemporaries, he was not alone in feeling its effects. One finds in the many
Dutch marine paintings and prints of the seventeenth century visual puns based
on a rhyme between the artists line and the nautical rope. These puns have an
effect not unlike the rigging in Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road. Much of the
visual pleasure afforded by A Delft, Rotterdam, Gouda, or Hague Ferry comes from
the doubleness of the line cutting across the sky (Fig. 14).43 This line can be seen
either as rope or as the engravers mark but never quite simultaneously as both.
This single taut line sustains all the tension between these two possibilities,
which carry with them representation of the world and its undoing, respectively.
Even in the hyperbolic calm and self-assurance of this engraving, in what
Einstein would surely ridicule as its Netherlandish contentment, we can detect
something of the legacy of iconoclasm, something of how it changed the nature
of mark-making.
45. See the chapter on whitewash in Fleming,

Graffiti, pp. 73 8. Mochizuki records fifteenthand sixteenth-century payment records for the
whitewashing of St Bavos Church in Haarlem.
Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image, p. 1 and 15n.1.
See also Victoria Ann George, Whitewash and the
New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation (London:
Pindar Press, 2012).
46. There has been a great deal of inconclusive
speculation about whether or not Segers ever
travelled to Italy.
47. Or in the way that the censors whitewash has
been available to William Kentridge in his
interrogation of the South African politics of
forgetting? See Leora Maltz-Lecas dissertation
(Harvard, 2008) and forthcoming book Process as
Metaphorand Other Doubtful Enterprises. Many thanks
to Leora for sharing the manuscript with me. On
Twombly as graffitist, see Roland Barthes Cy
Twombly: Works on Paper, in The Responsibility of
Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation,
trans. by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1985), p. 167; Rosalind E. Krauss, The
Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994),
pp. 25667; Yve Alain Bois and Rosalind
E. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone
Books, 1997), pp. 147 52.
44. See the chapter on graffiti in Juliet Fleming,

Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
(London: Reaktion Books, 2001), pp. 29 72. She
associates early modern graffiti with notions of
authorship that were collective, aphoristic and
inscriptive, rather than individualist, lyric and
voice-centered. Fleming, Graffiti, p. 41. Fleming
provides bibliography on graffiti in English
churches. Research on churches in other European
countries has been done as well. Particularly
relevant is Pleschs work on graffiti associated with
religious wall paintings, including a few instances in
which this graffiti seems to have been intended to
cross out or cancel the underlying image. See, for
example, Veronique Plesch, Memory on the Wall:
Graffiti on Religious Wall Paintings, Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 32, no. 1,
2002, pp. 167 97, esp. 169. On graffiti in
paintings of church interiors, see Vanhaelen, The
Wake of Iconoclasm, pp. 2733.
Moreover, the Reformation iconoclast was not the inventor of his own marks.
There is abundant evidence to suggest that, during the middle ages and
renaissance, visitors to churches felt relatively free to scratch words, images,
and other marks into the plaster of the walls, in some cases, right over images
of saints and other figures.44 Long before the Reformation, it was also the
practice to periodically clean the walls of churches (and homes) with a coat of
whitewash made of lime and water.45 During the image wars, iconoclasts simply
put these familiar practices to use. When Segers took up these impersonal marks
in turn, he let them stand over and against his own pictures, as if they were
separate from and even hostile to his own project. In other words, though he
turned these marks to his own ends, he never fully claimed them for himself.
While influence is ordinarily a kind of debt that one is obliged to repay by citing
ones source which is not to say that artists always meet this obligation the
artist who borrows from the iconoclast owes him nothing. Even if he wanted to
repay him, he might have trouble identifying him. This may account, in part,
for why there is no evidence in the written record of Segers life which in
any case is very thin of his engagement with the traces left behind by the
image wars. Because the iconoclast is nobody in particular, at least, according
to the history of art, if not according to the law, his influence on Segers is one
that the artist and his early commentators would not have felt compelled or
necessarily even able to address.
Still why not look to more obvious sources for the rougher aspects of Segers
style, to Titian and other Venetians, for example? Though we do not have written
evidence to prove their influence on Segers and though their roughness is, formally
speaking, very different from Segers, speculation about their relevance to him
might be easier to accept, simply because they are artists.46 While scholars of
early modern art routinely entertain arguments about stylistic influence based
on circumstantial evidence, we are more reluctant to consider speculation
about influence that moves beyond the bounds of high art, despite what has
become the norm in scholarship on more recent periods. But might not the
iconoclasts vernacular mark-making have been available to Segers in the way
that the low art form of graffiti was available to Cy Twombly in the 1950s as a
resource for unmasking Abstract Expressionisms ideology of self-expression?47
To make a small untitled painting on gessoed board of 1957, Twombly laid down
orange, red, brown, and black wax crayon, over which he used a brush and his
fingers to smear a rough impasto of cream-coloured house paint, allowing it to
clot up in places and in other places to blend into a muddy mess with the
crayon below (Fig. 15). Into this, he then scratched his lines, cutting through
the over-paint with a lead pencil to expose the crayon. The process and scale of
Segers counterproof Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road (Fig. 5) are entirely
different from the process and scale of Twomblys 1957 painting. (Segers print
is about one-quarter the size of Twomblys painting.) But their effects are
similar, insofar as Segers black line appears, as does Twomblys, to cut through
the substance of the ground. In order to achieve this effect, Segers first prepared
a cotton support with brown paint and then counter-proofed an image in black
ink onto it, before finally blotting out the sky and parts of the landscape with
greyish-white over-paint. Segers often prepared both his cloth and paper supports
in this way, using conspicuously uneven washes of paint that set the stage for his
printed marks to appear as if they were incised into a prior image.
Taking up Jacques Derridas metaphor of the cut, Rosalind Krauss describes
Twombly as a graffitist, who strikes in a tense that is over . . . . [delivering]
his mark over to a future that will be carried on without his presence. His
mark, she continues cuts his presence away from himself, dividing it from
Amy Knight Powell
within.48 Because to make a mark, to leave a trace, amounts to an amputation of a

part of the self, graffitis paradigmatic I was here is ironic. Twomblys line, Krauss
explains, strikes simultaneously against the support of the mark and against its
maker.49 This applies to Segers as well. No one makes marks outside of
history, as Fraenger and Einstein would have us believe Segers did; his marks
(and all others) must necessarily emerge from the detritus of history, but they
must, just as necessarily, separate from the historical person who makes them.
While there is no textual evidence to suggest that the iconoclasts marks were a
resource for Segers in the way that the graffitists marks were for Twombly, there is
good morphological evidence. Some may object that this morphological evidence
is inadequate, mere pseudomorphosis, particularly since it bears no clear or
predictable relation to process. Much could be said, for example, about the
differences in the materials and processes that resulted in the two
morphologically related fragments that form the crux of my argument (Fig. 12a
and b). But there is good reason to focus on morphology rather than on process
(or, for that matter, intention and affect) in this case. During the
post-iconoclastic period in which Segers lived, iconoclastic acts were very rare.
This was the time, as I said earlier, in which the iconoclasts gestures hardened
into inert forms, and it was these forms that Segers lived with. It was the
48. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 260. The

absence of the sender, of the addressor, from the
marks that he abandons, which are cut off from him
and continue to produce effects beyond his presence
and beyond the present actuality of his meaning,
that is, beyond his life itself, this absence, which
however belongs to the structure of all writing
and I will add, further on, of all language in
general. Jacques Derrida, Signature Event
Context, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 313.
49. Bois and Krauss, Formless, p. 151.
Fig. 15. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1957, oil, pencil, and crayon on gessoed board on paper-faced canvas, 49.8 70.2 cm. Gift of Carol O. Selle, the Denise and Andrew
Saul Fund, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC. (Photo # The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.)
50. On the relation between iconoclasm and

abstraction, see Sven Lutticken, Gert Jan Kocken:
The Art of Iconoclasm, SMBA Newsletter, vol. 100,
2007, n.p.
51. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,
p. 79.
52. Ibid.
53. als habe er sich selbst als ahistorisch, sich
selbst als mythisch anonym erlebt. Fraenger, Die
Radierungen, p. 13.
Trial Scratches
According to Fraenger, Segers neither signed nor dated his prints because he felt
out of place in seventeenth-century Holland, as if he experienced himself as
ahistorical, as mythically anonymous.53 Though Fraenger and Einstein are right
to see Segers prints as exceeding the context into which he himself was born, I
have argued that these prints are nonetheless marked by history, specifically a
vernacular history of iconoclasm. I would also suggest (and this is a related
claim) that Segers had a signature of sorts. Not one that affirms his unique
personal identity but rather a signature that attests to the impersonality of the
elements of etching: its marks and the surfaces on which they are made.
In the enigmatic Ruins of a Monastery, a large grid of trial scratches imposes itself
without rhyme or reason in the centre of a cloudless sky (Fig. 16). This fuzzy web
of drypoint hatching, which hovers over the ruins of an unidentified monastery,
perhaps destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts, fails to conform to any
recognisable meteorological, nephological, solar, lunar, or astral event. Nor is
there any reason to believe that it conceals an error, since such an error could
have been simply burnished out.
Though the trial scratches that appear in the second impression of Rocky Valley
with a Path (Fig. 12a) are considerably smaller and looser (they are free-hand lines,
whereas the trial scratches in Ruins of a Monastery are ruled, drypoint, lines), they
are similarly located in the sky and have a similarly flattening effect. We find small
trial scratches again in other prints, for example, in the second version of River
Valley with a Waterfall (Fig. 17).54 In fact, trial scratches of some sort appear
frequently enough in Segers work and infrequently enough in the work of
others to be seen as signatory marks. (As far as I know, only Rembrandt who
learnt a great deal from Segers occasionally allowed trial scratches to be
visible in a finished print in the way that Segers does.)
But a trial scratch makes for a strange autograph. While it records the hand
testing its own trace, it has no personality. Like the standard testing, testing
one says into a microphone to see if it is turned on, the trial scratch is primarily
54. Trial scratches appear in the following

additional prints, as numbered in
Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Seghers: 20,
22(I)a, 22(I)b, 22(I)c, 22(II)e, 22(II)f, 22(II)g, 24a,
41.
iconoclasts non-mimetic line rather than their process that worked its way into
Segers prints.
If Segers anonymous scratchings can be thought of as one of the several origins
of modern arts non-mimetic line which would eventually culminate in
twentieth-century abstraction then art could be said to originate, in part, in
the iconoclast.50 To think the possibility that art begins in iconoclasm entails
giving up, even if only momentarily, those proper names that prop up the
narrative of the birth of art during the renaissance. According to Foucault, such
a sacrifice of the proper is precisely what genealogy demands. This is what
distinguishes it from a quest for origins: what is found at the historical
beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the
dissension of other things. It is disparity.51 This disparity undoes the
traditional logic of the origin, whereby the origin always precedes the Fall. It
comes before the body, before the world and time; it is associated with the
gods, and its story is a theogony. But historical beginnings are lowly. . .derisive
and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation.52
When genealogy undoes our infatuation with names, it becomes possible to
imagine iconoclasm as the beginning of art, rather than simply the end of the
icon. It becomes possible, that is, to imagine the fall (of art) preceding its
origin, and the nameless, forgotten iconoclast fathering the divinely inspired
artist, whose name resounds through history.
Amy Knight Powell
Fig. 17. Hercules Segers, River Valley with a Waterfall (second version), etching printed in green, which has
oxidised around the edges, on white paper, clipped, 15.7 19.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo #
Rijksmuseum.)
a dry run of the equipment. It is meant to gauge the thickness of the ground, the
quality of the needle, and the bite of the acid. Segerssignatory trial scratches are,
therefore, doubly ironic: not only do they fail to represent the artist as a unique
individual, but they also fail to represent the three-dimensional world. Trial
scratches kill the illusion, which is why most etchers make a point of hiding
Fig. 16. Hercules Segers, Ruins of a Monastery, sugar-lift etching with drypoint, printed in black on white
paper, 13.8 21 cm. British Museum, London. (Photo # British Museum.)
55. On the effects of signature in general, see

Derrida, Signature Event Context, pp. 30730.
56. On the addition of Segers name in a
seventeenth-century hand, see
Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Seghers,
cat. no. 44.
57. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,
p. 88.
them. Segers instead puts them in the sky, where they will be most visible and most
clearly divested of the ordinary job of cross-hatching, which is to model
three-dimensional forms, including the rocky protuberances that fill his etchings.
Insofar as the trial scratch functions as a signature for Segers, it identifies him as
the anonymous maker of those non-mimetic marks that bear an iconoclastic
relation to his own artistic identity, the identity of the people and places he
pictures, and the identity of the viewer who would identify with those people in
turn.55 It seems that at least one seventeenth-century collector would have
preferred a more conventional signature. By clipping his impression of Ruins of
a Monastery, this collector banished that signatory blur of anonymity from the
sky (Fig. 18). He then neatly inscribed Segers name below the ruin, in a space
that the artist himself had left untouched except for a few tentative trial
scratches off to the right.56
Recognitions
Because they are attentive to the negativity of Segers attitude towards the ideology
of identification that sustains the rustic landscapes of his peers, Fraenger and
Einstein get more right about his work than many of his commentators. But
they are wrong to understand this negativity as releasing him from history and
into the ranks of a perennial, expressionist avant-garde. Despite its disruption
of linear time, their own identification with Segers is what Foucault would
describe as the false promise of the discipline of history, as traditionally
conceived: we must dismiss those tendencies that encourage the consoling play
of recognitions. Knowledge, even under the banner of history, does not depend
on rediscovery, and it emphatically excludes the rediscovery of ourselves.57
There is a blind spot in Fraenger and Einsteins story about Segers, a refusal to
acknowledge the conclusion towards which their own arguments lead: namely,
Segers is no more theirs than he was Hollands. Each time they come close to
arriving at this conclusion, they rush in to shore up his crumbling identity with
modernist myths of heroic isolation, self-expression, and originality, making of
him an artist to be redeemed (and claimed by them) posthumously. However
much they would like to recognise their own political alienation reflected back
at them from Segers prints, Fraenger and Einstein are as little present in these
strange landscapes as is Segers.
Fig. 18. Hercules Segers, Ruins of a Monastery, sugar-lift etching with drypoint, printed in black on white
paper, severely clipped at top, annotated at bottom with Harculus Segers fecit in a seventeenth-century
hand, 10 21 cm. British Museum, London. (Photo # British Museum.)
Amy Knight Powell
A history of artists (as opposed to artistic forms), whether in the traditional or

avant-garde mode, will discover in Segers a harbinger of expressionistic feeling. In
such a history, feeling functions as an idealist, invisible currency exchanged
between past and present. I have tried to delineate Segers place in (early)
modernity differently, tracing a genealogy of his aberrant marks rather than his
inner states. If I have returned Segers to the Holland that he, according to
Fraenger and Einstein, found so utterly alienating, it has been in order to
understand the anonymity of his line: that inexpressive line that emerged from
the dissension of sixteenth-century iconoclasm, passed through Segers prints,
and that would eventually find its way into twentieth-century abstraction,
meandering and cutting through many other things along the way. Such a
genealogy is based neither on shared artistic intentions nor on shared social
disaffections but rather on the detachment of even the most historical line from
the persons who make it.
This short essay was a long time in the making, and many people helped along the way.
I would like to thank Al Acres, Carmen Bambach, Perry Chapman, Elizabeth Cropper,
Charles Dempsey, Melanie Gifford, Hanneke Grootenboer, Rachel Haidu, Christopher
Heuer, Estelle Lingo, Peter Lukehart, Leora Maltz-Leca, Jaleh Mansoor, Peter Parshall,
Lorenzo Pericolo, Andrew Robison, Larry Silver, Cathy Soussloff, and Christopher Wood.

Amy Knight Powell, Segers&#39; Iconoclastic Vernacular

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Amy Knight Powell

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Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

1. On Segers and the Danube School, see

3. Wilhelm Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015 343 364

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2. Born in Antwerp, Coninxloo spent about seven

Amy Knight Powell

5. asozialer Ichverwirklichung, die auerhalb der

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Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

9. Mainstream art historians have proposed many

So, whereas mainstream art historians have chronicled Segers relationship to

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015 347

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Amy Knight Powell

11. Catherine Levesque, Haarlem Landscapes

348 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015

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Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

13. On the spilled acid, see An Van Camp,

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Amy Knight Powell

16. Van Hoogstraeten calls them printed

19. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Seghers,

As the seventeenth-century painter and writer Samuel van Hoogstraten pointed

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18. On Segers use of accident and chance, see

Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

Fig. 6. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Church at Sloten,

21. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise,

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015 351

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20. On the Flemish emigre context, see

Amy Knight Powell

Scratches and Whitewashes

Fig. 8. Master of Alkmaar, Burial of the Dead,

Fig. 9. Anonymous (Upper Swabia), Saints

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Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

24. This drawing is cited in Spicer, Calvinist

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Amy Knight Powell

Master of Perspective (Utrecht: Centraal Museum,

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Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015 355

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356 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.3 2015

29. This process was slow and in many places

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Sixteenth-century iconoclasts left behind a small but significant repertoire of

bouwgeschiedenis en restauratie (Waanders: Zwolle,

Segers Iconoclastic Vernacular

35. When Van Hoogstraten wrote his treatise on

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Amy Knight Powell

Fig. 14. After Dirck Eversen Lons, A Delft,

42. For example, Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules

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Amy Knight Powell, Segers' Iconoclastic Vernacular

Amy Knight Powell, Segers' Iconoclastic Vernacular