House Altar with the Last Supper and Agony in the Garden

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.¹ 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.²

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-BR-515). The top element of the present altarpiece contains a relief depicting Christ in Agony. Drawing from comparisons with house altars in Dijon and London, one may assume that the crowning, half-round pediment originally held a now missing alabaster relief of God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Like the all’antica reliefs, the frame would also have greatly appealed to the modern taste of the altar’s patrons. 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.

As well for the principal scenes, sculptors in alabaster are likely to have relied heavily on graphic models. The use of a shared model (drawing or engraving) is the only reasonable explanation for the striking agreement in composition and detail when comparing the Amsterdam house altar to a Mechelen altarpiece in Dijon (fig. a).³ and a separate relief in Cracow.⁴

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. Among Mechelen altarpieces still surviving today, one therefore regularly encounters recurring motifs and elements in a variety of combinations. Details found on the present house altar are also encountered on a comparable work in the Victoria and Albert Museum (fig. b).⁵ The frames of both altarpieces are decorated with putti, caryatids and sphinxes, set against a background pattern of characteristic floral motifs and mascarons. Despite variations in the poses of the putti, the overall agreement is remarkable and additionally reinforced by the adopted colour scheme. Against a bright blue background, the gilt, relief-pressed ornaments provide an eye-pleasing and luxurious contrast to the restrained scenes carved in alabaster.

In the nineteenth century, the present house altar was in the possession of Neville Davidson Goldsmid (1814-1875), an engineer and entrepreneur from London who lived and worked in the Netherlands for more than thirty years. In his role as company director of Goldsmid & Co in The Hague, he oversaw the city’s gas utility. Goldsmid owned an impressive private art collection, which included Vermeer’s painting Diana and her Nymphs.⁶ One year following Goldsmid’s death in Brussels in 1875, the collection was sold in Paris. By this time, however, the present altar had already been had been acquired from Goldsmid’s estate, thus preserved for Dutch national art heritage.

Maria Gordusenko and Frits Scholten, 2024