Fragment with the Transfiguration of Christ

c. 1515 - c. 1520

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 69.6 cm × width 37 cm
depth 4 cm

Technical notes

The support is a single vertically grained oak plank, 1.0-1.4 cm thick. A 1.7 cm step, 0.2-0.3 cm wide and 0.7 cm thick, was cut at the top on the reverse of the panel. Because only 100 growth rings could be counted, dendrochronology was inconclusive. The white ground extends to the edges of the panel. The remains of the overpainted barbe are visible at the top. There are saw-marks on the left and right sides of the panel. No underdrawing is visible with the naked eye or with infrared reflectography. The paint was applied thinly and the figure was emphasised with contour lines in dark paint. Mordant gilding was used for the halo.

Scientific examination and reports

condition report: I. Verslype, RMA, 11 May 2006
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 4 September 2007

Condition

Fair. The paint layers are rather abraded, especially along the grain. The varnish is discoloured.

Provenance

…; collection Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), The Hague, before 1902;¹from whom on loan to the museum, as Flemish school, c. 1530, 1907-11 (inv. no. SK-C-908); donated to the museum from Hoogendijk’s estate, 1912; on loan to the Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Muiden, 1912-49; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, since 2000

Object number: SK-A-2596

Credit line: Gift of the heirs of C. Hoogendijk, The Hague

The artist

Jan Joest van Kalkar (Wezel c. 1455 - Cologne or Haarlem in or before 1519), manner of

Recently published archival research shows that Jan Joest was born in Wezel around 1455 as the son of Heinrich Joest the Younger and Kathrynen Baegert. His mother was the sister of Jan Baegert, who also worked in Wezel and must have trained Jan Joest as a painter. The latter’s name is first mentioned in Kalkar in a roll-call of soldiers who took part in the siege of Wageningen, the so-called Schouw cedulen, of 1480. In the following decades he is documented in both Wezel and nearby Kalkar. It is not known when or whom he married, but the painter Bartholomeus Bruyn the Elder was his son-in-law and trained with him from c. 1505-12. In 1519, Bartholomeus brought the costly tabbaard gown of the deceased Jan Joest from Cologne to the parish of Willibrordus in Wezel, to which it had been left.

The first document to mention Jan Joest as a painter is dated 1505, when he was contracted to complete the retable wings of the high altarpiece in the Stadtpfarrkirche Sankt Nikolai in Kalkar. Between 1505 and 1508 he and his assistants (who included Joos van Cleve and probably the young Bartholomeus Bruyn the Elder) painted twenty scenes on the altarpiece wings.² Documents show that in 1512, assisted by Bartholomeus Bruyn the Elder, he executed a retable consisting of four panels for the high altar of the Benedictine abbey of St Luidger in Werden, which is now lost.

It was assumed in the past that the artist of the Kalkar Altarpiece was identical with the painter Jan Joest recorded in Haarlem between 1493 and 1519, who is known to have polychromed a statue in 1515 in the city’s St Bavokerk, where he was buried in 1519. Schollmeyer recently demonstrated that this was another painter of the same name, and that Jan Joest van Kalkar might have died as early as 1517-18 in Cologne. This has made the artist’s Netherlandish origins unlikely.

Until recently The Sorrows of the Virgin altarpiece in San Antolín in Palencia was regarded as Jan Joest’s second key work.³ It was ordered in Brussels in 1505 and was recorded in the cathedral in the 16th century as being a work by Juan de Holanda, on which basis it was attributed to Jan Joest. Schollmeyer’s most recent study has demolished that assumption, partly on stylistic grounds.

As a result, the only remaining works which can be securely attributed to Jan Joest are the retable wings of the Kalkar Altarpiece (1505-08) which depict twenty scenes from the life of Christ. In the past a few other religious scenes and portraits were attributed to Jan Joest, mainly by Friedländer and Stange, on the grounds of their stylistic similarities to the altarpieces in Kalkar and Palencia, but not one of them is up to the standard of the ‘Kalkar altarpiece’. The panels in Kalkar associate him with the Cologne school, but with a clear debt to early Netherlandish art. His scenes are characterised by a clear structure combined with decorative Renaissance elements. The manner of Jan Joest’s Kalkar Altarpiece was disseminated by his assistants on the project: by Joos van Cleve in Antwerp and by his son-in-law Bartholomeus Bruyn the Elder in Cologne.

References
Rosenberg in Thieme/Becker XVIII, 1925, pp. 376-77; Friedländer IX, 1931, pp. 9-19; Hoogewerff II, 1937, pp. 428-43; Baudisch 1940, pp. 11-20, 187-92; Stange 1954, pp. 63-72; ENP IXa, 1972, pp. 11-16; Caswell in Turner 1996, XVII, pp. 600-01; Wolff-Thomsen 1997, pp. 14-37, 142-53; Schollmeyer 2004, pp. 42-46, 344-84

(Micha Leeflang/Jan Piet Filedt Kok)

Entry

Christ is depicted full length standing on clouds, making a sign of benediction with his right hand. He is wearing a white gown and cloak held together at the neck by an oval clasp. He is surrounded by a bright yellow light with dark clouds around it. Behind his head is a star-shaped golden halo.

The panel is probably a fragment of a larger Transfiguration of Christ.⁴ The event is described in Matthew 17:1-13, Mark 9:2-13 and Luke 9:28-36. On Mount Tabor in Galilee Christ revealed his divine nature to the apostles Peter, James the Greater and John. His face shone like the sun and his clothes became a dazzling white. The transfiguration is depicted in different ways in painting. In addition to standing on the mountain Christ can be shown floating in the air, as in the Ascension.⁵ Jan Joest’s Transfiguration on one of the wings of the Kalkar Altarpiece is a good example of the second variant. The three apostles are in the foreground, and Christ is flanked by Moses with one of the tables of the law and Elijah (fig. a).

One suspects that the Rijksmuseum painting was originally the top half of the central plank of a fairly large panel, possibly measuring approximately 160-180 x 100 cm, with Moses and Elijah on either side of Christ and the apostles below him in the lower half of the panel. The figure of God the Father with the Holy Ghost found in some transfiguration scenes were probably omitted from this one.

Since scenes of the transfiguration were often part of retables depicting the life and Passion of Christ it is conceivable that the panel of which this is a remnant was part of such an ensemble. The back of the fairly thick panel is unpainted, so this was not a double-sided wing as in the Kalkar Altarpiece and various Antwerp retables with The Transfiguration.⁶ There is also the possibility that it was an autonomous work, like Gerard David’s Transfiguration in Bruges.⁷

The Rijksmuseum panel was labelled ‘Flemish school, c. 1530’ when the museum acquired it as part of the Cornelis Hoogendijk donation in 1912. It was first associated with Jan Joest in the 1976 collection catalogue, where it as described as being ‘in the manner of Jan Joest’.⁸ The transfigured Christ has affinities with the one in the Kalkar Altarpiece (fig. a), while the gesture he is making with his right hand with the remarkably long, slender fingers is comparable to the right hand of Christ in The Raising of Lazarus in the same altarpiece.⁹ What is strange, though, is that the two different facial types of Christ in that altarpiece do not correspond to that of the figure in this panel. As Friedländer said, the features of Christ and other figures there have fairly large noses, prominent cheekbones and wavy hair.¹⁰

In the Rijksmuseum painting Christ has a small nose, delicate features (without prominent cheekbones) and an oval face. The hair and beard were brushed out with a dry brush. The figure can be compared with the work of Jan Joest’s assistants on the Kalkar Altarpiece, Joos van Cleve and Bartholomeus Bruyn. In 1997 Wolff-Thomsen attributed the Amsterdam panel to the latter.¹¹ However, too little is known about the share that the assistants had in the altarpiece and about the early work of the very young Bartholomeus Bruyn (b. 1493) to arrive at a firm attribution, so the term ‘manner of Jan Joest’ seems to be the best for the time being.

(Micha Leeflang/Jan Piet Filedt Kok)

Literature

Wolff-Thomsen 1997, pp. 380-81 (as attributed to Bartholomeus Bruyn); Van Wegen 2005, pp. 30-31

Download Bibliography (PDF)

Collection catalogues

1976, p. 160, no. A 2596 (as The Resurrection of Christ)

Citation

M. Leeflang, 2010, 'manner of Jan Joest van Kalkar, Fragment with the Transfiguration of Christ, c. 1515 - c. 1520', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8107

(accessed 24 November 2024 02:24:54).

Figures

fig. a Jan Joest van Kalkar, wing of the *Kalkar Altarpiece* with *The Transfiguration of Christ*, 1505-08. Oil on panel, 107 x 86 cm. Kalkar, Stadtpfarrkirche Sankt Nikolai