Epitaph for the Ros Family with the Seat of Mercy

Entry

This sandstone epitaph comes from the Grote Kerk in Wageningen, where it resurfaced following the deplastering of a wall during a restoration campaign undertaken in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its original location in the church is unknown. In 1861 and succeeding years, this building was intensively but incompetently restored by an architect from Arnhem.¹ At this time, numerous pieces were removed from the church’s interior, including the epitaph. In 1877, the municipality of Wageningen transferred the epitaph to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, with the piece thereafter ending up in the Rijksmuseum in 1885.

The epitaph attests to the devastation wrought by Protestants during an iconoclastic uprising of November or December 1578 in Wageningen. The heads of God the Father, Christ, and the angels were wilfully destroyed, but also those of the Catholic donors kneeling in the foreground. Even today, the silent witnesses of this raging iconoclasm, sparked in 1566, can still be observed in a great number of churches throughout the Netherlands, especially in Utrecht Cathedral, but also in the churches of Arnhem, Zutphen and Nijmegen.

Despite the serious damage incurred, relevant aspects of the epitaph have as yet been preserved that convey the importance of this artwork. The main scene in the relief’s middle section, crowned by a semi-circular arch, is framed by renaissance architectural ornamentation. At the bottom is a cartouche bearing an inscription. The main scene is the Holy Trinity, depicted in the form a so-called Seat of Mercy or Gnadenstuhl after Dürer’s renowned woodcut from 1511 (fig. a). Seated on a throne, God the Father supports the lifeless body of his son, Jesus Christ, with both hands covered by a cloth. The Holy Spirit floats above his head in the form of a dove. Two angels, dressed as fashionable women, flank the throne and raise God’s richly decorated choir mantle, while holding Christ by his right upper-arm and left hand. In Dürer’s rendition, the scene of the Trinity is staged in heaven. In the Amsterdam relief, by contrast, the scene occurs on a stage-like podium. The armrests of God’s throne arch noticeably outward, thus enhancing the scene’s spatiality. The throne and angels stand on an elevated platform with two recesses framing a semi-circular projection in the middle. Kneeling on either side are the figures of the donors: the male members of the Ros family on the left, the female members on the right. Each of the donors is named in the epitaph’s inscription. Immediately adjacent to the semi-circular projection are the parents. Kneeling on the left is the father, Derick Ros, whose death occurred in 1548. He wears a tabard with slashed sleeves and broad pattens on his feet. His flat headwear lies on the podium at God’s feet. Derick’s wife, Nertwich, kneels on the right, holding a rosary in her hand. Behind the two parents are the kneeling figures of the children: with the son, Gijsbert Ros, on the left, who judging by his crinkled surplice is certain to have been a priest; and the daughter, Gerberich van Ommeren, on the right, wearing an elegant purse that hangs from her sash. All of the figures raise their folded hands in prayer, held in front of the chest.

The donors were in all probability members of a reputable family in Wageningen. An identification of the Ros family, however, has been impeded by the fact that the city’s archive, preserved in the church, was also destroyed during the iconoclasm of 1578. The family’s prominent status is additionally underscored by the scale and artistic quality of the relief. One surviving document from 1563 possibly offers some kind of indication. In this document, one Cornelis van Oemeren is cited as a schepen (city magistrate) of Wageningen, perhaps Gerbreich van Ommeren’s husband.²

The scene of the central relief is set within a typical early renaissance architectural framework comprising a large semi-circular arch resting on two fluted, baluster-shaped columns. These in turn rest on pedestals ornamented with putti, each holding an inscribed panel mounted on a staff. This was a popular motif at this time, with examples found in contemporaneous works of graphic art produced by Dirck Vellert and Heinrich Aldegrever. In the spandrels of the arch, two lively and engaged angels appear, both holding censers. The angel on the left elevates his censer with both hands in order to fan the flames, while the angel on the right sways his upward. The entire central relief itself is in turn framed at either end by an architecture of baluster columns, with garland-and-candelabra motifs at the bottom and three cannelures, each bearing an almond-shaped mask. Both columns are crowned by acanthus capitals that support the projecting ends of the architrave. In the middle of this architrave is a frieze with tendrils and arabesques on either side of a central medallion. The (metal?) filling of this medallion has been lost.

Originally, a fronton may also have crowned the architrave. The plinth at the bottom, bordering the central scene and the inscription plate, is missing and was perhaps completely destroyed.³ Veenstra has pointed out that the current placement of the two ornaments on top of the architrave, each bearing a lunette with shell motif, is likely inaccurate. He suspects their original location – in inverted form – was below the plinth, thus functioning as extensions of the columns above and framing the vertical sides of the inverted triangular inscription tablet as ornamental corbels.⁴ Inscribed on this tablet are the names and dates of death of each of the donors, respectively: Derick Ros (1548), his wife Nertwich (year of death illegible) in painted letters, and beneath this, in carved letters, the couple’s daughter, Gerberich van Ommeren (1566), and son, Gijsbert Ros (1569).

Veenstra viewed the epitaph as one of the most important examples of Dutch renaissance sculpture. He attributed it to Colijn de Nole (1530-1553/59), the Utrecht sculptor responsible for the famous sandstone mantelpiece in the Kampen town hall.⁵ Leeuwenberg rejected this attribution as entirely unfounded, subsequently cataloguing the relief instead as a work by an unknown Northern Netherlandish sculptor active in the years circa 1530-40.⁶

Arguments presented in 1973, however, convincingly established the relief as a work produced in the workshop of the Lower Rhenish sculptor Arnt van Tricht (active c. 1535-d. 1570).⁷ In response to the collapse in the market for wooden sculptures and carved altarpieces, a direct consequence of the Reformation, Van Tricht shifted his workshop production in a new direction. Concentrating on architectural works of sculpture carved in stone, Van Tricht supplied patrons throughout much of the eastern Netherlands, as well as the neighbouring regions of Cleves and Guelders. This often involved the production of mantelpieces and cornices for manors and castles that were being modernized during the early Renaissance in accordance with the style of the era.⁸

The attribution to Van Tricht is founded on similarities between the present work and a group of epitaphs made by the sculptor for the canons of the collegiate church at Xanten. All of these works are bricked into the cloister wall of Xanten Cathedral. The earliest of these epitaphs was produced by Van Tricht in 1544 for Canon Theodor Hanen (fig. b). Here we already see the almond-shaped masks (Turkish crescent moons?) on the pillars, as well as the lunettes with the shell motif. The composition of the middle section of the Amsterdam relief, which comprises two registers, can be observed in another epitaph in the cloister at Xanten, specifically that of the Canon Georg Hezeler from 1545-46 (fig. c). In the 1550s, the style of Van Tricht’s epitaphs becomes far more erratic. The epitaph from Wageningen is more reminiscent of the relatively reserved style of his earlier sandstone carvings, and is likely to have been produced around the year 1550, immediately following Derick Ros’s death. Accordingly, the names and annotated years of death related to other members of the family are later additions to the original inscription in the cartouche, as was common practice with family epitaphs. This is further substantiated by the fact that their dates have been inscribed in stone, while those of Derick Ros (and his wife) are painted.

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
This entry was originally 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. 16