The Mercy Seat

Entry

This way of representing the Holy Trinity is called the Throne of Grace or, after the Luther Bible, the Mercy Seat (Gnadenstuhl). It symbolizes the reconciliation between God and mankind brought about by Christ’s death on the cross. Although artists made increasingly freer variations of this iconography from as early as the thirteenth century, this early fifteenth-century version retains the archetypical form derived from eleventh- and twelfth-century German and French examples.⁴ God the Father sits on a bench with his crucified son between his legs in front of him. With both hands he holds the ends of the patibulum, the cross-piece of the cross. The Holy Ghost in the form of a dove flies out of his mouth and down towards Christ’s head.

This Mercy Seat comes from the estate of the Utrecht-born ‘Count’ Jan Jacob Nahuys (1801-1864) who in 1858 submitted it along with dozens of other pieces from his collection for an exhibition of ‘old objects’ at the Amsterdam artists’ society Arti et Amicitiae.⁵ According to the brief description in the exhibition catalogue, it was a ‘stone statue, the Trinity, from one of the churches in Utrecht’.⁶ The statue was probably made in the same city.⁷ Unlike other towns in the Northern Netherlands, Utrecht had a large population of stone sculptors from the early fourteenth century onwards, when they were working on, among other things, the decoration of the cathedral.⁸ Unfortunately little evidence of their presence survived the Iconoclasm that raged in 1566, 1579 and 1580.

In the absence of directly related works, the Mercy Seat can best be compared with a St Catherine in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, which was excavated in the cathedral close, Domplein, in 1883 on the site of the former Sint-Salvatorkerk.⁹ Catherine’s robes and those of God the Father both have a double row of folds at the bottom that fall open gracefully. Both statues, moreover, are carved from Hohenleie, a variety of Weibern tuff that can be very finely worked. In the fifteenth century it was brought along the Rhine from the Eifel region of Germany to Utrecht.¹⁰ On the basis of her high-girdled waistline and the vertically fanning folds of her robe, the St Catherine is dated to the last phase of International Gothic, around 1420-30, which in view of the facial type of God the Father, the folds of his robe and the form of the Corpus Christi is also a plausible period for the making of this Mercy Seat. This would mean that these statues are among the oldest locally made surviving stone sculptures from Utrecht.

The subject of the Mercy Seat was popular in the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages, particularly in Cleves and Guelders, Brabant and Hainaut.¹¹ Among the relatively small group of surviving sculptures from the Diocese of Utrecht, no other examples have been preserved. This does not, though, necessarily mean that the subject was not depicted there more often. It is highly likely that the sculpture functioned in a funerary context. In the Southern Netherlands, particularly Tournai, the iconography of the Mercy Seat was widely used on memorials from the end of the fourteenth century onwards.¹² The image was also used in the commemoration of the dead in the north, as we see from the carved epitaph Arnt van Tricht made for Derick Ros (d. 1548) around 1550 which came from the Grote Kerk in Wageningen (BK-NM-3099). The first stone memorials in Utrecht appeared at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Mercy Seat may have been part of an early example in which the figures, in contrast to later versions, were still shown full length.¹³ Such stones were usually rectangular, sometimes with a raised central section. This Mercy Seat may therefore have been the main image, with the person commemorated kneeling in adoration to the right or left, or in the case of more than one person, on either side, possibly accompanied by patron saints.¹⁴ A considerable number of these sorts of early stone memorial reliefs are still in situ in Utrecht churches, particularly the Pieterskerk, albeit severely damaged by iconoclasts. In most cases only the lettering has survived.¹⁵

Another possibility is that the Mercy Seat was part of a sacrament tower or wall tabernacle. The Sint-Pieterskerk in Leuven holds the oldest preserved sacrament tower in the Netherlands. A separately carved polychromed stone sculpture of the Mercy Seat is positioned in the central niche of the tower, which was designed by the architect Matheus de Layens in 1450.¹⁶ Similarly, a fourteenth-century wall tabernacle in the Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg displays a polychromed stone sculpture of a Mercy Seat in its central niche.¹⁷

Bieke van der Mark, 2024