Four canons with Sts Augustine and Jerome by an open grave, with the Visitation

Entry

In the foreground of this painting there is a half-open grave with a semi-decomposed body. Kneeling on the left are two canons and St Jerome in a cardinal’s robes with a lion, and on the right there are two more kneeling canons with St Augustine holding a heart.⁴ The white-clad priests flanking the grave are identified by their tonsures, white surplices and black, asymmetrical copes as canons regular of the Augustinian order. The crossed bands on the skeleton’s chest, which is a stole that priests wear underneath the chasuble, show that the body is that of a priest. The dead man speaks to us in the inscription below the grave: ‘Whosoever passeth by, behold and lament’. Below that is written: ‘I am what thou shall be, what thou art I have been; pray for me, I beseech thee’. The inscription on the gravestone reads ‘May they rest in peace’. The plural pronoun indicates that the painting is an epitaph for the four canons depicted in it. It is not known whether there was a source for this text.⁵

Seated on a grassy bank on the edge of an enclosed garden in the middleground is the pregnant Virgin, who is being greeted by Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. This is the Visitation, where the Virgin and Elizabeth usually greet each other standing up. As far as is known, this scene of a seated Virgin and Elizabeth is unique. The door to the hortus conclusus is open, as it is in the pictures by Geertgen tot Sint Jans (SK-A-3901), the Master of Delft (SK-A-3141), and the Master of the Virgo inter Virgines (SK-A-501).

In the garden behind the Visitation are three musician angels. The Virgin, now seated under a tree, and another angel are watching over the Christ Child, who is playing with a hobbyhorse. There are two women by the gatehouse on the right. The Visitation and the scene of Christ’s childhood allude to the imminence of mankind’s redemption. The peacocks in the cloister garden also stand for eternal life.⁶

The scene in the foreground confronted the viewer with death, but the scene just behind it gives a glimmer of hope. It contains a clear reference to the ‘Salve regina’, a medieval hymn that was often sung at funerals.⁷ It is likely that this painting served as an epitaph and was placed near a tomb. Its purpose must have been to encourage the viewer to meditate on his or her own mortality.⁸

It looks as if the background is meant to be a priory garden, with a church on the left and a refectory on the right, possibly the priory of the canons depicted in the foreground. Their asymmetrical black copes of cloth or sheepskin, known as ‘cacullae’, make it likely that they were canons regular of the general chapter of Sion.⁹ They were priests who had sworn the monastic oaths and lived as a community following the rule of St Augustine. There were no fewer than 15 priories of this chapter in the County of Holland.¹⁰

Van Luttervelt suggested in 1952 that the painting was commissioned by the Augustinian Priory of Our Lady on Mount Sion near Delft, whose patron saints were Augustine and Jerome. This seems unlikely, for this epitaph would never have survived the fire at the priory in 1544, which completely destroyed the nave of the church, the iconoclasm of 1566, and the demolition of the priory in 1572.¹¹ Bangs identified the four canons as the four regulars who were successive rectors of Mariënpoel Convent near Leiden around 1500, who died soon after one another: Johannes Crispiani and Gijsbert N., who both died in 1496, followed by Gerard Dirksz in 1504 and Sebastian Fransz in 1507. The latter would be the canon on the far right, who was added at a later stage.¹² Other authors proposed locating the epitaph in the regulars’ Priory of Our Lady of the Visitation, just outside the gates of Haarlem,¹³ or in the Augustinian priory of Hieronymusdal dedicated to St Jerome, which is generally called Lopsen, in Oegstgeest near Leiden. The latter is an interesting idea, because manuscripts were illuminated in the priory, and painters were active there in the late 15th century.¹⁴ However, there are no solid arguments to support any of these options.¹⁵

Infrared reflectography revealed a brushed underdrawing for almost the entire painting. The drapery folds in the foreground figures were built up with an extensive network of hatchings (fig. a), the small figures were defined with a few lines, and the architecture was painstakingly constructed with the aid of a ruler (fig. b). One notable feature is the use of delicate, modelling hatchings in a dark red glaze in the red parts of the garments of St Jerome and Elizabeth which are closely related to the underdrawing in both style and manner of drawing. The canon on the far right was added at a later stage, and was painted partly on top of St Augustine’s robe and the other canon (fig. c).

The Rijksmuseum bought the painting in Paris in 1906 as The Burial of a Patriarch, at which time the body in the grave was completely overpainted with a white shroud on which there were a bishop’s mitre, a crosier and a processional cross (fig. d). This overpaint was removed in 1914, and from then until 1960 the painting was called Allegory of the Vanity of Human Life in the Rijksmuseum’s catalogues.¹⁶

The painting, which had been published in 1902 as a work of the Cologne school,¹⁷ was bought by the museum in 1907 as Dutch school from the end of the 15th century. Friedländer mentioned it in 1932 as probably a painting by the Master of Delft, and felt that the background figures, in particular, were typical of his work.¹⁸ In 1937, though, Hoogewerff rightly drew attention to the stylistic differences, notably in the types of figure and the palette, and gave the unknown artist the ad hoc name of the Master of the Spes Nostra on the basis of the allegorical nature of the scene.¹⁹ So far this is the only known painting by the artist, and it can be dated around 1500 on stylistic grounds, which is not contradicted either by the dendrochronology or Bangs’s hypothesis outlined above.
JPFK