The Death of the Virgin

Entry

As was customary in the late middle ages, the death of the Virgin is situated in a domestic interior. Mary is lying in a four-poster bed and is surrounded by the twelve apostles. Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea relates how an angel brought them together from all over the world to the house near Mount Sion where the Virgin lay dying. The apostles gathered around her bed and stayed with her for three days. When, on the third day, they spoke of Christ, he appeared before them surrounded by angels.⁴ That is the moment that Hugo van der Goes depicted in his famous painting in Bruges (fig. a).

In the Rijksmuseum painting the artist has depicted the Virgin nearing death. John is placing a lighted candle in her hands, as happened during the administration of the Last Sacraments. It symbolised faith in Christ and in eternal salvation.⁵ Leaning on John’s shoulder is another apostle, probably Peter, with an aspergillum for sprinkling holy water. The painting is probably based on a lost work by Robert Campin which is known from later copies. Some of the elements, such as the complex tiled floor, and above all the fireplace on the left and the view outside through the window, do indeed recall similar domestic details in the work of Campin, such as the right wing of the Diptych with the Virgin and Child by a Fireplace in the Hermitage, and the right wing of the 1438 Werl Altarpiece with St Barbara in the Prado.⁶ The Hugo van der Goes version is known from three copies in Berlin (fig. b), London and Prague, which are associated with the artist in the literature.⁷ They can all be related to a painting that must have been executed around 1480 in Van der Goes’s workshop.⁸

Although the interior and composition of the Amsterdam panel are broadly the same as those in the versions in Berlin, London and Prague, there are differences in the depiction of the apostles and other details. The two figures on the left, for instance, appear to be lighting incense, for they have a censer and a vessel containing incense. Beside them stands the apostle St James the Less, identified as such by his fuller’s staff. The other apostles are kneeling or seated around the bed, lamenting, praying, and reading prayers from a missal. Their features contorted with sorrow, with large hollow eyes and long noses, the mourning apostles are in marked contrast to the serene expression of the Virgin, who appears to have been derived from Campin. The apostles’ expressive heads and the quite multicoloured and warm palette that are characteristic of the unknown master who made this painting, are found in no other works that have been attributed to the Master of the Amsterdam Death of the Virgin in the past. Given the rather old-fashioned figurative vocabulary, which must derive from earlier models, one would be tempted to date the painting earlier in the 15th century than permitted by the dendrochronological dating of the panel in the beginning of the 16th century.

The highly meticulous and detailed underdrawing with hatchings in brush (fig. c) in a wet medium points to a careful build-up of the clothing in light and shaded passages that was followed faithfully in the painted surface. Examination of a few paint cross-sections shows that it was applied in several layers on top of a lead white layer, the imprimatur. The careful drawing of the outlines of the faces and hands in a brownish or red paint is found in paintings by Geertgen tot Sint Jans as well as in late works by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen. White highlights were used in the faces. The style also differs from that of other late 15th-century Netherlandish masters, who generally handled their paint more flowingly and employed a lighter palette.

The paint structure and technique of the Amsterdam Death of the Virgin follow the example of the Flemish Primitives, and are remarkably traditional for the late 15th century. Although the saturated colours do not immediately recall the period 1430-40 in which the model must have been made, the traditional, technical build-up of the painting does. These striking differences can perhaps be explained by raising the possibility that the panel was executed not in the northern Netherlands or Flanders but in Utrecht or the eastern Netherlands. In addition to Utrecht, one could think of the area around Arnhem and Nijmegen, where the Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece was active.⁹
Little more is known about the provenance of The Death of the Virgin than that it came from the Catholic Almshouse of the Seven Electors in Tuinstraat in Amsterdam, which was founded around 1645, where a chapel was installed in the late 18th century. An inventory of 1862 states that the painting had been given to one of the almshouse regents for safekeeping.¹⁰ In 1932, Friedländer grouped a small, quite heterogeneous oeuvre around the panel, still the property of the almshouse at the time, which he gave to an artist whom he named the Master of the Amsterdam Death of the Virgin and saw as a direct precursor of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen. Hoogewerff was more inclined to place the unknown artist in Utrecht, and attributed most of the paintings which Friedländer had given to the Amsterdam painter to the Master of the Almshouse of the Seven Electors, with the exception of two Passion scenes in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-2129 and SK-A-2130), which he assigned to the Master of the Lantern.¹¹

(J.P. Filedt Kok)