The Northern artists who went to Rome in the early seventeenth century and stayed there, like Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and the now much celebrated Valentin de Boulogne, are famous but rare. Much more common are Northerners who drank at the Roman font but then returned home: Rubens, the Utrecht Caravaggisti Terbruggen and Honthorst, Rembrandt’s teacher Lastman, the Frenchmen Vouet and Mignard, and perhaps (though a visit has yet to be proved) Georges de La Tour and Vermeer. Michael Sweerts (1618–64) is one such returnee, lesser known but extremely fetching and sympathetic. Born and trained in Brussels, he went to Rome in his twenties and spent a decade in the company of artists who socialized in convivial groups like the Schildersbent, where they were called Bentvueghels (birds of a feather). For a while he went the way of the Bamboccianti, painters of low-life subjects. One of his more daring ideas was to take the seven corporal works of mercy that Caravaggio had compressed into a single painting and spread them out in a full series. One already senses a painter who saw the Lord in the poor, the sick, and the dying.

Sweerts arrived in Rome imbued with the Netherlandish ideal of drawing from life, naer het leven. There he absorbed the ethos of the Accademia di San Luca, where life drawing merged into the aesthetic of the ideal. Sweerts studied ancient sculpture but came to venerate above all the statues of his countryman François Duquesnoy (d. 1643), the most Hellenic of Baroque artists. Quotations from Duquesnoy’s sculpture turn up in the bathing and begging nudes in Sweerts’s Bambocciesque paintings. His fascination with the education of the artist resulted in many paintings that show the studio of the artist, popularized and idealized at the same time. Aspirants draw from the nude in dark rooms cluttered with piles of body parts in plaster, where an antique Juno might lie side by side with a torso by Duquesnoy.

Poussin painted his monumental Plague at Ashdod around the time of the plague threat of 1632. Twenty years later Sweerts tried to rival it in his largest and most ambitious canvas, Plague in an Ancient City. With a little under a hundred figures it pulls out all the Poussin stops: the heroic nude shown in extremes of emotion, virtuoso foreshortening and perspective, and references to antique pathos formulas all placed in a setting of grand classical architecture. The specific plague is hard to nail down and the meaning purposefully opaque. Perhaps Sweerts was striving to reach the seeming profundity of the great French master, whatever it meant. The Plague was a tour de force but it showed that his genius lay elsewhere.

Sweerts had carved a respectable niche for himself in the Roman art world. He participated in the academy held in Palazzo Pamphilj on the Corso. He had clients and was now a cavaliere. Still, he decided to return to Brussels before he was forty. The moment was propitious. The Hapsburg archduke, Leopold Wilhelm, was a great art collector. Sweerts obtained permission to set up a privately financed academy that would feed both the art scene and the tapestry industry. Still, Sweerts nurtured a piety so deep that it loosened him from his new moorings. In 1660–61 he went to Amsterdam where he took up a life of pious austerity and eventually joined the Société des Missions Étrangères. These French missionaries thought at first that a pious painter would be useful. He accompanied a mission bound for Siam but by the time they got to Tabriz no one could stand him: “our good Mr. Svers is not the master of his own mind” said the priest in charge (172). He found his way back to Portuguese Goa where he died in 1664. The last two years of wandering remain a blank for us.

Sweerts is the subject of an extensive monograph of 1996 by Rolf Kultzen and an exhibition in Antwerp and two American cities in 2002. Now Lara Yeager-Crasselt rethinks the personality and painting of this appealing artist in a fine new book with special attention to the world of academies and the education of the artist. Just as Sweerts crossed boundaries—between Italy and the North, between Catholic Flanders and the United Provinces—she builds bridges between areas of scholarship usually kept apart. Brussels emerges as a protagonist that no longer blushes to be put in the company of Antwerp and Rome. The lively text and superb plates capture the fascination of this intelligent cosmopolite and make us regret that such a fine painter would throw in the sponge to head for the Orient.