House Altar with the Last Supper, Abraham and Melchizedek, and the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist

Entry

During the sixteenth century, one observes a gradual decline in the preference for large wood-carved retables, a development that more or less coincides with the emergence of small house altars featuring relief-carved scenes in alabaster.⁴ The predilection for this relatively costly material was a trend sparked in part by Margaret of Austria’s court in Mechelen. The city’s alabaster-carving industry originated with the arrival of a small group of artists, as well from abroad, employed by the governess of the Netherlands at the onset of the sixteenth century. These artists worked primarily in the new antyckse renaissance style imported from Italy. Most important among them where the sculptors Conrat Meit (1485-1550/51) from Worms and Jean Mone (c. 1485-?1554) from Metz, whose presence in the city stimulated local sculptors to shift their efforts in the direction of the new formal idiom and simultaneously the material alabaster. Lipinska maintains that for those artists originally trained in wood, the move to the new, relatively soft stone type alabaster was minor.⁵

This so-called cleynstekerswerk centred on small carved tablets featuring mythological and biblical scenes in a virtually unlimited number of variations produced serially well into the first half of the seventeenth century. With dimensions of approximately 10 x 12 centimetres, these small alabaster reliefs were mounted in decorative frames edged with pressed papier-mâché. To enliven the scenes and the frames, polychromers added highlights in gold. Even today, many of these objects still bear the monograms and house marks left by their makers, conveying the competition among artists but also serving as a kind of quality guaranty.

In addition to this relatively standard serial work, the cleynstekers also produced house altars comprising multiple reliefs, both large and small, mounted and presented as a whole in ornately carved wooden frames. Two such altars – both with the Last Supper as the principal scene – are held in the Rijksmuseum collection (for the other altar, see BK-NM-2918). The present altarpiece is of the greatest import and arguably one of the finest examples of Mechelen alabaster carving.⁶ All indications are that the altar was originally in the possession of the former Johanniter Commandery Sint-Jansdal near Harderwijk: in the early eighteenth century, it was excavated precisely on this site, crated in a box with a gilded (Johanniter?) crucifix and preserved in exceptionally good condition. In the year 1566 – only approximately fifteen years after its completion – it was perhaps hidden to prevent potential destruction by Protestant iconoclasts. Many of the crates used to transport these pieces were later reused and painted as permanent shrines for the altarpiece. The same perhaps occurred with the present piece.⁷

While house altars were supplied from pre-existing inventory, one iconographic detail on the present altarpiece – specifically, the Virgin depicted together with St John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Johanniter Orde in the top alabaster relief – betrays the fact that it could only have resulted from a special commission. Equally telling is the high-quality of all the carvings, thus ruling out any possibility of serial production. The second relief, occupying the centre, depicts Christ’s final meal taken together with his disciples, a scene very frequently encountered on Mechelen altarpieces. With its implicit reference to the Eucharist, the Last Supper was a theme particularly well suited for a retable. The third alabaster relief in the bottom register contains a frieze-like scene related to an Old Testament typology of the Eucharist: Melchizedek’s meeting of Abraham, with bread and wine. Above all the all’antica manner of this section, showing horsemen attired in classical raiment, recalls Roman sculpture and would certainly have appealed to the altar’s style-conscious patrons.

The same is no less true of the frame, with its classical orders and a fanciful combination of decorative banding and scrolling, garlands, griffins, mascarons and putti adorning the sides. As with all of these Mechelen altarpieces, the frame is conceived as a portal or doorway in the classical style, with a pedestal and two freestanding half-columns on pilasters that support the entablature. The entablature in turn consists of a frieze on which rests the aforementioned crownpiece framing the smaller, arched relief, likewise flanked by griffins, decorative banding and scrolling. All of these classical and grotesque motifs are derived from the repertoire of the Antwerp artist Cornelis Floris (1514-1575), whose model prints were widely esteemed and disseminated.

The production of such house altars was laid out according to a certain distribution of tasks: the cleynstekers carved the alabaster reliefs, with others responsible for the wood-carved decoration on the frames and the papier-mâché or gesso-pressed ornamentation and a third group for the gilding of the frame and specific details on the relief. Characteristic of artistic production in the Southern Netherlands at this time, this breaking down of the working process facilitated production on a serial basis, without sacrificing the artwork’s costly and unique allure.

Frits Scholten, 2024