St Roch

Entry

St Roch lived around 1300 in Montpellier, France. Upon the death of his affluent parents, Roch took their wealth and distributed it to the poor. He then set out as a beggar on a pilgrimage to Rome. During his journey and while in the papal city, he is said to have cured vast numbers of people suffering from the plague through prayer and the sign of the cross. On his return trip home, Roch came down with the illness himself and retreated to a hut, where he was nursed by an angel. His daily bread was brought to him by a dog, who also licked his wounds clean. Roch recovered miraculously. Unrecognizable by the time he arrived home, however, the inhabitants of Montpellier treated him with suspicion. He was subsequently thrown into prison, where he died five years later. The veneration of St Roch was actively promoted by the Franciscans. In 1485, the saint’s skeleton was transferred to the Chiesa di San Rocco in Venice, where it remains to this day.

Starting in the mid-fifteenth century, Roch was invoked as a patron saint against the plague. In the Lower Rhine region, the region from which this statue originates, the saint’s veneration emerged in the late fifteenth century, undoubtedly sparked by a major outbreak of the plague in 1493, followed by a second wave in 1510 that served to further strengthen his popularity. The saint’s notoriety in this region was eventually so widespread that he came to be considered a ‘Holy Helper’, a saint whose name was directly invoked against one specific illness. Though Roch was not one of the fourteen saints officially designated by the Catholic Church, at this time he surpassed even St Sebastian, whose popularity as a patron saint of the plague-inflicted was on the wane.

Roch is traditionally depicted. Dressed in pilgrim’s attire, he points with his (now missing) right hand in the direction of a plague boil located on the inner thigh of his left leg, visible through a hole in his stocking. Clasped in the opening of his tunic is a small prayer book. On his head rests a bonnet. Running across his breast is the chinstrap of his pilgrim’s hat, which is now lost but once hung down his back. Judging by the direction of Roch’ gaze, the now absent dog would have been standing on the right side of the polygonal plinth, which, like the left side and in keeping with symmetry, was likely wider. One cannot rule out the possibility that, in the sculpture’s original state, Roch was also accompanied by the figure of an angel. The manner in which one side of his long cloak falls back over the right shoulder is a motif frequently encountered on sculptures produced in the Lower Rhine region, where such polygonal plinths are also common.

Originating from the Lower Rhine region and the eastern Netherlands is a series of strikingly similar Roch statues produced around 1500, works today preserved in the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht,² the Sint-Nicolaaskerk in Jutphaas (municipality Nieuwegein)³ and the German cities Bienen and Ginderich.⁴ In 1970, a Lower Rhenish Roch in the Museum Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf) was attributed to Jan van Halderen,⁵ an apprentice of Master Arnt of Kalkar (active c. 1460-d. 1492), the woodcarver responsible for both predella groups in the high altar of Kalkar. Lastly, the Roch statues preserved in Uedem (Kreis Kleve), the municipal museum of Goch,⁶ the Sankt-Nicolaïkirche in Kalkar and the Sankt-Antonius Abbaskirche in Hanselaer all date from the early sixteenth century, circa 1510.

Most similar to the Amsterdam sculpture in compositional terms is a St Roch in the Pfarrkirche Sankt-Peter und Paul in Kranenburg,⁷ with only minor differences in detail. In both cases, the figure’s bonnet is framed by pipe-shaped curls. The right hand pulling back the tip of the tunic to reveal a wound on the inner thigh of the left leg is a recurring motif, as is the small prayer book clasped in the opening of the tunic, albeit on the opposite side. The sculpture in Jutphaas also follows the same scheme. Without question, the present sculpture was produced in the sphere of Master Arnt of Kalkar, and more specifically, the circle of the Cleves woodcarver Dries Holthuys (active c. 1480-c. 1510).⁸ An attribution to one specific master remains as yet elusive.

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
An earlier version of this entry was 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. 6.