Northern Lights: Masterpieces of Flemish Caravaggism presents a focused selection of seventeenth-century Flemish paintings that examine how artists from Flanders engaged with, adapted, and tested the implications of Caravaggio’s naturalism.
Opening on 10 December 2025 at Colnaghi Brussels, the landmark presentation celebrates the first year of the gallery’s Brussels space and returns to a period of artistic exchange that has often been acknowledged, but rarely analysed with sustained attention. Flemish Caravaggism, long overshadowed by the dominant narratives surrounding Rubens and his circle, emerges here as a heterogeneous and intellectually active field shaped by mobility, experimentation, and collaboration across Rome, Naples, and Antwerp.
The exhibition brings together works by minds such as Matthias Stom, Hendrick de Somer, Abraham Janssens, and Jan van Dalem; artists whose careers unfolded across Rome, Naples, Antwerp, and Brussels. Among the works on view is a representative cross-section of Flemish engagements with Caravaggio. Matthias Stom’s Mocking of Christ, with its pared-back nocturnal intensity; Hendrick de Somer’s Neapolitan David with the Head of Goliath, which reflects the city’s shift from Ribera’s stark naturalism toward a softer, more chromatic idiom. Abraham Janssens’s Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, however, signals the classicising turn of an artist who had been among the earliest Flemish painters to confront Caravaggio in Rome. A newly identified Bacchus by Jan van Dalem, a rare example from an exceptionally small oeuvre, demonstrates his independence from mainstream stylistic currents. Together, these paintings outline the plural nature of Flemish responses to Caravaggio, ranging from close emulation to deliberate reinterpretation.
Northern Lights positions these artists within a broader re-examination of Flemish Caravaggism, a field long overshadowed by the dominant narrative of Rubens’s workshop yet central to the formation of seventeenth-century European painting. By presenting these works in Brussels, the exhibition highlights the region's often overlooked role in shaping a transnational visual language that circulated between northern Europe and the Italian peninsula. It also reflects Colnaghi’s ongoing commitment to rigorous scholarship and to foregrounding movements that have played a significant role in the historical development of European art but remain underrepresented in public discourse.