The Lamentation

Entry

The Virgin’s gaze is focused on her son’s lifeless body, which has just been removed from the Cross by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and placed in her lap. St John, his hand to his face, contorted in grief, stands behind the Virgin. Looking over her right shoulder Mary Magdalene stands on the extreme right, clasping her ointment jar to her breast. The female figure beside her kisses Christ’s left hand, while the woman in the foreground holds his right wrist. They are problably Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome.

Krohm and Theuerkauff associated this touching Lamentation with a Descent from the Cross in the Bode-Museum in Berlin (fig. a) that is alike in respect to size, type of wood, technique and style and undoubtedly came from the same workshop.² Although there are a great many similarities between the figures in the two scenes – compare, for example, St John with his curly hair and grief-stricken face – they considered that small differences in the clothes made it unlikely that the groups came from the same Passion altar.³ Further research is required to provide a conclusive answer.

On the basis of the intensity of the emotions, the affinity with Flemish painting and, above all, the type of wood (walnut),⁴ the two groups can be convincingly placed in the Southern Netherlands, around 1440-50.⁵ For the compressed and relatively busy composition, in which the heads of the figures in the foreground and background are placed immediately above one another, the carver could have been inspired by the late work of the Brussels Master of Hakendover (active, c. 1395-1430), such as his group of the Apostles in Prayer of around 1425 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.⁶ A few decades later similar quite crowded compositions would be associated with Utrecht woodcarving. The first examples from that city can be found in the work of Adriaen van Wesel around 1460-75 (cf. BK-NM-11647) and an Adoration of the Magi from around 1460 by one of his predecessors.⁷ A later example representing the Descent from the Cross in the Bode-Museum in Berlin of around 1490, which is attributed to Van Wesel, shares with the present group a similar diagonal placement of Christ’s body.⁸ By contrast, in the second half of the fifteenth century Southern Netherlandish (particularly Brussels) woodcarving moved towards simpler compositions, with more space left between the figures. This trend is immediately obvious when the present group is compared with a Lamentation from a Brabant (Brussels?) altar dating from around 1490-1510 in Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp, which was based on the same prototype.⁹ Two of the three female saints and St John have been omitted from this much simplified version.

In the past two oak altar groups have been put into the same style group as the Berlin Descent from the Cross and the Amsterdam Lamentation, but were dated on stylistic grounds around ten years later than these walnut carvings.¹⁰ They are an Entombment in the Sint-Martinuskerk in Herk-de-Stad in Belgian Limburg and a Resurrection (BK-14993) in the Rijksmuseum’s collection. In this case both groups unquestionably came from one and the same altar. Although the Resurrection had unanimously been regarded as a typical example of Northern Netherlandish (probably Utrecht) carving until then,¹¹ in 1977 Didier and Krohm placed these four enigmatic works – which they praised for their personal style, superior quality, expressive powers and restraint – in the central Meuse area on the grounds of the stylistic resonance echoed in the work of Master(s) of Elsloo.¹² They even thought it possible that the four groups were created in the same workshop.¹³ The use of two types of wood in one an the same studio is unusual, however,¹⁴ and the stylistic similarity between the two pairs is not close enough to justify an attribution to the same workshop, or even the same region (for the full argumentation, see BK-14993).

More consensus about the Utrecht origin of the oak groups seems to have been achieved since,¹⁵ while a Southern Netherlandish (probably Brussels) origin remains the most likely for the present Lamentation and the Berlin Descent from the Cross. In addition to the arguments already put forward, it can also be noted that the male figure types in these groups and the expressions on their faces echo the influential style of the Master of Hakendover (cf. for example the apostles in his stone reliefs in the choir of the Sint-Martinuskerk in Halle of around 1409) and the fringe-trimmed headdresses built up in different layers that are worn by two of the female saints.¹⁶ This headdress appears not infrequently in the painting and sculpture of the Southern Netherlands and was apparently a (local?) fashion there. It is found, for instance, in the work of the Master of Joachim and Anne, who has been convincingly located in the northwestern part of the Duchy of Brabant (cf. BK-NM-88 and BK-C-2007-2).

Despite the differences outlined above, the stylistic parallels that do exist between the four walnut and oak groups, and between the present group and Utrecht woodcarving in general,¹⁷ can probably be explained by the artistic exchange that came about between the Southern and Northern Netherlands (particularly between Brabant and Utrecht) as a result of the mobility of both artists and works of art (Utrecht pipeclay sculpture is a case in point). Telling evidence of this includes a seated Virgin and Child, a Virgin on the Crescent Moon and a Virgin Reading a Book from an Annunciation: three oak carvings with Antwerp or Mechelen guild marks whose style unmistakably points towards the Utrecht of Adriaen van Wesel.¹⁸

Bieke van der Mark, 2024