Anton van den Wyngaerde’s threefold project of the Panorama of Walcheren (c. 1547-1570)

Anton van den Wyngaerde’s (c. 1490-1571) Panorama of Walcheren in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp depicts the mid-sixteenth-century island of Walcheren and the North Sea across ten meters of paper. Its length and extensive geographic coverage make it unique amongst the artist’s extant oeuvre. Primarily known for his depictions of Spanish and Netherlandish cities drawn for King Philip II, Van den Wyngaerde did paint a similar prospect in 1564 for the king’s El Pardo palace. The present panorama (also known as Zeelandia descriptio) owes its origins in part to that project. Though often mined for illustrations of a c. 1550 Walcheren, the drawings themselves have not been studied since 1956, when Jules van Beylen proposed a series of unspecified dates for the entirety’s manufacture. The present study clarifies the timeline for the current Panorama’s generation over several decades. Through examination of the object, its depicted environments, and archival material, at least three discrete working periods and three distinct panoramic sections are proposed. The artist initially travelled across the island sketching its locations sometime between 1547 and 1552. After arriving in Spain in 1562 at Philip II’s request, Van den Wyngaerde compiled his earlier sketches into an overall draft. The first third of the present Panorama belongs to this preparatory stage for a second project. He then produced a more finished, colored drawing from the draft, in which he updated and corrected visual information. The middle section remains from this second stage. The c. 1564 El Pardo painting likely replicated the colored presentation drawing. The third project, undertaken between c. 1567 and c. 1570, copied at least a portion of the painting if not the entire prospect, and remains extant in the right section. The remainders from these projects were then combined at an indeterminate time to form the Panorama as it exists today.