Callisto Sleeping in a Forest

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 in scale, 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 guaranty.

This simple but effectively carved scene of the sleeping nymph Callisto is a relatively rare example of a mythological scene produced in a Mechelen alabaster workshop. By far the majority of the cleynstekers’ repertoire centred on biblical themes. The sleeping nymph appealed to a rapidly growing predilection for classical, erotic themes featuring ideal female nudes, introduced in the Netherlands around the mid-sixteenth century,³ In addition to a wide variety of representations and paintings, it was above all the work of the Antwerp sculptor Guglielmus Paludanus (1530-1580) who contributed to its overall popularity,⁴ including his sleeping nymph in the Rijksmuseum’s collection (BK-1979-7).

In the relief with Callisto, a narrative element has been added to this theme: floating among the trees in the background is a cloud with the goddess of the hunt, Diana. Initially belonging to the goddess’ retinue, Callisto became pregnant after lying with the supreme god, Jupiter, and was subsequently sent away. This perhaps explains why the moment has been depicted when Diana raises her left hand and commands Callisto, pregnant and caught entirely off guard, to leave at once.

On the basis of the rather slipshod finishing, the present relief can be deemed a relatively late example of Mechelen production, dating from the early decades of the seventeenth century. Conveying an element of luxury, simple scenes such as this still appeared quite commonly in inventories of possessions of the seventeenth century, where they are typically listed as alabaster bordjes (panels/small boards).⁵

Frits Scholten, 2024