Flight into Egypt

Entry

Its size and flat back suggest that this charming group was originally part of a carved altar piece. It represents Joseph, Mary and the Christ Child on their flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:3). Joseph, walking in front, is depicted as a contemporary traveller with his kit. Although renewed, the rope on which Joseph’s knapsack hangs and that used for the ass’s reins is actually a real (braided) cord. Other striking characteristics include the rocky base, worked with a gouge, on which several boulders lie, the corkscrew curls in Joseph’s hair and beard, Mary’s decorative drapery and the figures’ delicate faces, with half-closed eyes and mouths drooping at the corners.

The Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht has in its collection a Christ Carrying the Cross that is so closely related in every respect to the present group that there can be little doubt that these two works originated in the same workshop (fig. a). Their similar measurements and related iconography even suggest the distinct possibility that the two groups once belonged to the same retable, the subject of which must have been the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin.¹ For example, the figure of Mary, with her head-covering, pointed nose and swollen eyelids, is identical in both groups, and the other, above-mentioned stylistic characteristics of the Flight into Egypt also recur in Christ Carrying the Cross, including the technical oddity of using materials other than wood. In fact, most of the thorns in Christ’s crown consist of metal. On the basis of the richly decorated Renaissance costume with slashed sleeves, the Christ Carrying the Cross and, by association, the Flight into Egypt, are dated to around 1520-30.

The two groups, which have not previously been connected with one another, are both difficult to localize within the Low Countries. Preising assigns the Christ Carrying the Cross in the Museum Catharijneconvent to a group of late-medieval carved wooden images that display characteristics of both Utrecht and Brussels, although their place of production cannot be pinpointed.² Leeuwenberg situates the Amsterdam retable fragment in the city of Utrecht or the county of Holland and dates it to around 1510-15 on the basis of its ‘lively folk types’ (pittige volkstypen), ‘poignant expression’ (kernachtige uitdrukking) and the similarity to the 1511 woodcut of the Flight by the Amsterdam engraver Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (RP-P-BI-6257).³ There is, moreover, some degree of relationship to a Nativity of Christ, attributed to an Utrecht master and dated to around 1470, which is to be found in the Museum de Fundatie.⁴ On the other hand, the general atmosphere sooner recalls several figurative woodcarvings by Joes Beyaert (1405-1483), who was active in Leuven.⁵ An oak retable group of around 1500, representing Christ in the House of Simon the Pharisee (Museum de Fundatie), recorded on stylistic grounds as Southern Netherlandish or possibly Lower Rhenish, is closest in style to the two retable fragments discussed here, although it, too, offers no clues as to its place of origin.⁶ For now, Van Vlierden’s general localization of the Utrecht Christ Carrying the Cross in the Southern or Northern Netherlands must suffice for both pieces.⁷

A largely polychromed, alabaster Flight into Egypt that appeared on the French art market in 1994 corresponds to the Amsterdam specimen in almost every detail (fig. b).⁸ This statuette, meanwhile stripped of its polychromy, was sold at auction in 2017.⁹ Its odd appearance and considerably lower quality strongly suggest that it is a modern copy. For example, the figures’ proportions are unconvincing, their poses are relatively stiff, and the buttonholes on Joseph’s sleeve – visible in the present piece – are missing. Remarkably, the alabaster group has a background that is lacking in the Amsterdam fragment. It cannot be ruled out that this hilly landscape is a more or less faithful rendering of the original background of the Amsterdam Flight, which is now lost. It is more likely, however, that the background was invented by the copyist to obtain a more complete whole. Given the pictorial tradition, the tree that presumably belonged to the retable fragment would have stood on the missing piece of the base behind the ass. In this regard compare, for example, the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Retable of 1500-30 in the Sint-Leonarduskerk in Zoutleeuw, which includes, at the very top, a similar composition (though in reverse) (fig. c). The same pictorial motif is also present in an eighteenth-century rendition of the theme in terracotta in the Van Herck collection in Antwerp.¹⁰ The alabaster statuette presumably originated in the same workshop as an alabaster copy, recently sold at auction in Brussels, produced after another late-medieval retable fragment of a woman holding a lantern (midwife or Persian Sibyl), which is, probably coincidentally, also part of the Rijksmuseum’s collection (BK-NM-9253).¹¹

Bieke van der Mark, 2024