Holy Knight (St Victor?)

Entry

This saintly knight is depicted in a walking pose, with the right leg positioned one step in front and the left leg slightly bent. In addition to the armour with fleur-de-lis decoration and a coat of chain mail underneath, he wears a twisted leather band, ornamented with flower buds around the hips. While rarely encountered in carved renderings of armour accessories, the same detail is likewise encountered on a sculpture of St George preserved in the Rijksmuseum, attributed to the circle of the sculptor Hans Klocker (BK-NM-11363-A). Known as a dupsing (or dusinc), these belts came into fashion in the second half of the fourteenth century and remained popular through the mid-fifteenth century. Worn low over the hips, they were typically made of enamel or iron-chain links. At court, however, the dupsing was made of precious metal and served as a clothing article from which a money-purse could be hung. When part of a knight’s armour, it functioned as a belt for hanging one’s sword. Over his armour, the saint wears a cloak that that folds up and back, over the shoulders, with a round morse at the breast joining the two sides. Like the belt below his waist, such details give this knight a princely air. Judging from his downward gaze, the flat surface of the reverse and the upward-sloping base, the sculpture originally stood at a level of significant height, perhaps against a column or as figure in an altarpiece.

This sculpture has traditionally been interpreted as a depiction of St Victor of Xanten.² Victor was sent to Xanten as the Roman commander of the Theban Legion. It was there that he met his death as a Christian martyr. When depicted as a saintly knight, Victor’s attributes are commonly a shield and spear, as well as a banner to distinguish his identity as a commander. Considering the absence of these attributes in the present work, this image could also very well depict one of the other saintly knights venerated in the Low Countries: George, Adrian, Mauritius, Quirinus or Gereon.

Unfortunately, nothing is known about the sculpture’s provenance. Establishing its origin on stylistic grounds also proves difficult. Hilger drew a link to a St Victor attributed to a follower of Dries Holthuys (active c. 1480-c. 1510) in the church of Grieth.³ Stylistically, however, the two statues show few similarities. The manner in which the cloak ‘folds back’ over the shoulders does indeed appear Lower Rhenish. Nevertheless, no association can be established between the known workshops active in that region and the Amsterdam knight. His static pose and apathetic facial expression are fairly uncommon and in fact more reminiscent of Northern Netherlandish production.

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
This entry was originally published in F. Scholten and G. de Werd, Een hogere werkelijkheid: Duitse en Franse beeldhouwkunst 1200-1600 uit het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam/Eine höhere Wirklichkeit, Deutsche und Französische Skulptur 1200-1600 aus dem Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, exh. cat. Cleves (Museum Kurhaus Kleve) 2004-06, no. 9