Virgin and Child Seated on Clouds with St John the Baptist and an Angel

Entry

The alabaster-carving industry in Mechelen originated with the arrival of a small group of artists, employed by Margaret of Austria, 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.¹

As a result, a veritable industry in this kind of sculpture began to flourish in the sixteenth century, destined for a market that encompassed much of north-western Europe. Besides the Low Countries, Mechelen alabaster reliefs and altars were exported to places as far away as Poland, the Baltic States and Scandinavia.² The more luxurious versions of these house altars comprised both larger and smaller alabaster reliefs, mounted in ornately carved wooden frames decorated with pressed-gesso patterns. The Rijksmuseum possesses two such altars (BK-BR-515; BK-NM-2918). However, the majority of 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 up to 20 x 20 centimetres, these small alabaster reliefs were typically supplied with 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 guarantee.

The present relief is a work belonging to the early phase of Mechelen production. Mary, in particular, clearly reflects the influence of one of the ‘pioneers’ of Renaissance alabaster sculpture in the Low Countries, Jean Mone (c. 1485-?1554). This is evident in details such as the flowingly arched headdress, a motif Mone likely adopted from Bartolomé Ordóñez (c. 1480-1520) during the former’s Spanish period. Two figures similar to Mary in the present relief are the Mary in Mone’s Entombment in Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts)³ and a Mary on the altar in the Sint-Martinuskerk in Halle (1533).⁴ Also the youthful head type of Christ and St John, recalls Mone’s style.

In style and iconography, the Amsterdam relief is similar to three other alabasters, one of which is signed at the reverse by the cleynsteker Gilles Remijs (private collection, Belgium).⁵ The other two works are preserved in the Gruuthuse Museum in Bruges and the Museum het Vleeshuis in Antwerp, respectively.⁶ In all three examples, the Virgin appears seated on a group of clouds surrounded by angels, cherubs, and in most cases, St John the Baptist. Although its surface is somewhat abraded, the present piece is qualitatively the strongest of the four reliefs, both compositionally – with the flowing lines of the drapery folds transitioning into the clouds almost organically – and in terms of the figures’ poses and anatomy.

A seminal work for the dating of these alabasters is a walnut relief of the Virgin and Child, depicted in the clouds and surrounded by angels, that has a small cartellino inscribed with the year 1536. While this relief also falls stylistically in line with Mone’s work, it displays an even greater affinity to the Utrecht sculptor Colijn de Nole (1530-1553/59).⁷ This suggests that alabaster reliefs of this nature were likely to have emerged around the same time, circa 1540. The ultimate source of inspiration for these representations were Italian engravings or drawings after Raphael, such as Marcantonio Raimondi’s Virgin and Child Seated on Clouds in Aureole (RP-P-OB-11.748), after Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno,⁸ Garvagh Madonna,⁹ or Alba Madonna.¹⁰

Lastly, mention must also be made of a painted representation of Caritas, floating on a cloud, in a scene of the Crucifixion from the workshop of Bernard van Orley, court painter to Margaret of Austria (1487/91-1541), Governess of the Habsburg Netherlands.¹¹ Caritas, here personified by Margaret herself, is depicted in a pose and headdress clearly corresponding to those of the Madonna in the present alabaster relief.¹² This agreement suggests that the relief’s maker had access to Van Orley’s invention, a finding further pointing to an origin in the immediate circle of the court sculptor Jan Mone.

Frits Scholten, 2024