Jan Swart van Groningen facing Orient. Encounter, Assimiliation, and Reinvestment of a Foreign Culture

Little is known about Jan Swart van Groningen. In his famous Schilder-Boeck, Carel Van Mander wrote about the one he described as an "ornament of Dutch painting" that he travelled to Italy and stayed for a time in Venice. Like Albrecht Dürer before him, he took advantage of this stay to meet some Orientals, of whom one knows there were many at the time in the City of the Doges, and to learn about their culture. This encounter certainly marked a decisive turning point in the master's career.
Upon his return to the Low Countries, Jan Swart tried to pass on to his contemporaries the knowledge he had recently acquired through his contact with Turks, in a region that was then virtually ignorant of most of the oriental customs. The Procession of Turkish Riders, a remarkable five woodcuts series published in Antwerp in 1526, is certainly the most indicative example of it. Moreover, the artist's works, especially his drawings, reveal the extraordinary fascination he developed for the Orient. Indeed men wearing orientalizing turbans became recurrent characters in his Oeuvre, even though the subject depicted did not impose on him to do so, so that the precise identification of the iconography is sometimes made difficult, as we shall see.
This paper aims to show how Jan Swart's stay in Venice and his encounter with Orientals irrevocably shaped the artist's career. Through emblematic cases, we’ll also highlight how he managed to assimilate a new formal repertoire, which he then mobilized and adapted to new iconographic and aesthetic constraints.