Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an image of the Pilgrimage of Life

The study of Patinir’s landscapes sets out to demonstrate that they are grounded in the moral and religious thought of his time and closely related to late Medieval devotional art. The first part demonstrates that the figural elements in Patinir’s landscapes are based on a type of ‘devotional image (Andachtsbild) with secondary scene’s that goes back to the paintings of Van der Weyden and Memling. The second part of the book contains an iconographic analysis of the landscape itself, particularly in The Penitence of St Jerome in the Louvre, Paris, and in three paintings in the Prado, Madrid: Landscape with St Jerome, Charon and Man’s Soul and Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The book argues that these images are determined by the allegories of the pilgrimage of life and of life’s two paths.