Centre Panel of a Triptych with the Raising of Lazarus

Leiden, c. 1530 - c. 1535

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 75.7 cm × width 78.8 cm

Inscriptions

inscription, lower right, on the seam of the robe of the second figure: GEBOD.HEBT.GOD.LIEF.BOven.AL.Ende (Command love God above all end)

Technical notes

The support of the centre panel (SK-A-3480) has a three-lobed arched top and consists of three vertically grained oak planks (25.1, 27.4 and 23.3 cm), approx. 1.5-2.0 cm thick. The support of the left wing (SK-A-4751-A) consists of two vertically grained oak planks (9.1 and 19 cm), approx. 0.5 cm thick. The support of the right wing (SK-A-4751-B consists of two vertically grained oak planks (16.5 and 11.5 cm), approx. 0.5 cm thick. The top of the centre panel seems to have been trimmed slightly; the tops of both wings have been trimmed. The dendrochronology of the three panels did not give conclusive information as to their dating. The white ground on the centre panel was applied up to the edges of the support. That of the wings was applied up to the edges of the support at the top and bottom, and there are unpainted edges of 0.2 to 0.4 cm on the right and the left sides of both wings (painted surface left wing: 69.7 x 27.6 cm; painted surface right wing: 69.7 x 27.3 cm). The white ground is visible through the paint layers and along the edges of the compositions. Infrared reflectography revealed a rather extensive underdrawing in a dry medium, probably black chalk, on all three panels. It consists of rapid, sketchy contour lines, with parallel and cross-hatching for the shadows, which also partly models the forms. Along the top, left and right sides of the centre panel a line was drawn approx. 1.0 cm in from the edges, probably to indicate the shape of the original frame. The paint layer was applied up to that line (see also SK-A-4706). The line breaks off abruptly in the uppermost arch of the centre panel, which suggests that part of the panel was sawn off here. The principal figures were reserved following the contours set out in the underdrawing. The paint layers are rather transparent, and impasto was used for the highlights. The paint layers depart from the underdrawing here and there. In the centre panel, for instance, the arm and sleeve of the man with the turban on the right were altered considerably, and the strip of fabric hanging from the cap of the man in green beside him was initially planned to go under his sleeve. In the left wing, the eyes of the donor are higher up than they are in the underdrawing, and St James’s feet are slightly smaller and his staff and palm have been moved a little to the right.

Scientific examination and reports

X-radiography: RMA, nos. 27-28, 2 February 1948
infrared reflectography: J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer, RKD, nos. AB 144:3-24, 1977
infrared reflectography: J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer, RKD, nos. AB 306:1-3081:30, 6 October 1980
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 31 October 1995
infrared reflectography: M. Wolters / K. Wensveen [2], RKD/RMA, no. RKDG354, 30 August 2005
condition report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 3 April 2006

Condition

Fair. All three panels are slightly abraded, the centre panel more so than the wings. The varnish on all three panels is slightly discoloured and matte.

Conservation

M. Bijl, 1980 - 1981: complete restoration

Provenance

…; sale, Major Eric Ayshford Knight (1862/3-1944, Wolverley House, near Kidderminster) et al. [his section], London(Christie’s), 1 December 1945, no. 38, as Lucas van Leyden; ...; from the dealer Matthiesen, London, £ 1,500, to the museum, 1946

Object number: SK-A-3480

The artist

Aertgen Claesz van Leyden (Leiden c. 1498 - Leiden c. 1564), attributed to

According to Van Mander, Aert Claesz, better known as Aertgen van Leyden, was born in 1498 as the son of a Leiden fuller, and drowned in Volkersgracht in Leiden in 1564. He initially took up his father’s trade, but in 1516 he was apprenticed to the painter Cornelis Engelbrechtsz. He is documented in August 1521 as ‘Aernt Claesz, painter’ in connection with a debt that he owed to the Guild of St Luke, and he appears in the tax registers as ‘Aertgen, painter’ in 1561 and 1564, when he was living at the address on Zijdegracht recorded by Van Mander.

The latter relates that Aertgen followed the style of his teacher when he became a master painter, before being influenced by Jan van Scorel and later by Maarten van Heemskerck. This evident lack of an individual, recognisable style went hand in hand with a ‘shoddy and unpleasing’ manner of painting, although Van Mander does praise his compositions as being ‘very clever and lively’. He also reports that Aertgen made many designs for glass painters and other artists. Van Mander had himself seen several of Aertgen’s works, among them a Nativity belonging to the widow of the Leiden burgomaster Joan van Wassenaer, and a Triptych with the Last Judgement in the home of Jan Diricksz van Montfoort. Aertgen’s paintings must have been quite popular in the 17th century, judging by the frequent mentions of them in leading collections. Rubens, for example, had a Nativity of his, and the inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions drawn up in 1656 lists several works by him.

Attempts were made to reconstruct Aertgen’s oeuvre in the early decades of the 20th century on the basis of Van Mander’s description of the various influences and styles in his work. Two groups of drawings which Wescher had assigned in 1928 to the Master of 1527 and the Master of the Miracles of the Apostles were attributed to Aertgen van Leyden by Hoogewerff and Van Regteren Altena in 1939, together with a Cologne Nativity and several other paintings. In 1960, Bruyn added a few more paintings and drawings to this large and varied group of works, the core one being The Sermon in the Church (now The Calling of St Antony, SK-A-1691) in Amsterdam, which until then had been given to Lucas van Leyden.

The rediscovery in Valenciennes in 1972 of the 1555 Triptych with the Last Judgement with the Montfoort Family described by Van Mander defines the parameters of the artist’s late style, with elongated figures in the manner of Maarten van Heemskerck.¹ This late triptych could be tied in with five other paintings, but had little if any connection with the oeuvre previously assigned to Aertgen, which as a result was reattributed in the 1986 Art Before the Iconoclasm exhibition to various masters with ad hoc names, such as the Master of the Sermon in the Church.

For the present catalogue, however, it was decided to restore those works to him, because they match Van Mander’s description of his oeuvre. Moreover, to date there have been no convincing reattributions of them to other artists. In addition, there are sufficient points of interrelationship between the various groups of paintings and drawings attributed to Aertgen to justify placing them under one name. It should be noted, though, that there were practical reasons for adopting this approach, and not personal art-historical convictions, for it is still conceivable that several artists were responsible for the oeuvre attributed to Aertgen van Leyden, the more so because there were many artists active in Leiden in this period whose works are at present unknown.

References
Van Mander 1604, fols. 236v-38r; Cohen in Thieme/Becker VII, 1912, pp. 35-36; Wescher 1928; Hoogewerff III, 1939, pp. 388-419; Van Regteren Altena 1939; Bruyn 1960; Bangs 1979, pp. 136-37; coll. cat. Leiden 1983, pp. 92-93, nos. 252-54; Scholten in Amsterdam 1986a, pp. 328-30; Filedt Kok in Turner 1996, I, pp. 166-68; Miedema IV, 1997, pp. 1-10; Feurer in Saur XIX, 1998, pp. 350-51; Ekkart 2000, pp. 125-29; Filedt Kok in exh. cat. Leiden 2011, pp. 201-02

(Menno Balm/Jan Piet Filedt Kok)

Entry

In 1980, after years of separation, the centre panel of the Triptych with the Raising of Lazarus was reunited with its original wings (SK-A-4751-A or fig. d, SK-A-4751-B or fig. e). It depicts the episode described in John 11:1-44, and although there is no mention of it in the gospel, the artist shows St Peter loosening Lazarus’s shroud, possibly as a symbol of freeing him from sin.² This element was undoubtedly taken from another source, quite possibly a play about Lazarus of c. 1530.³ The inscription on the hem of the robe of the second man from the right in the foreground is a reference to Matthew 22:37. On the wings are the donors with their patron saints, James the Greater and Catherine. That the wings do indeed belong with The Raising of Lazarus, as Lemmens believed, is clear from the similarities in style, figure types and underdrawing, as well as from the fact that the landscape extends across all three panels.⁴ The triptych probably served as an epitaph to keep the memory of the donors alive. The side and centre panels have been sawn down a little at the top. Another example of a Leiden painting of the same subject is the Triptych with the Raising of Lazarus of 1558, an epitaph for the Boot family in La Fère, which has been convincingly attributed to Aertgen van Leyden on the evidence of the similarities to his Last Judgement triptych in Valenciennes.⁵

The clothing of the donors, the man with a fur-lined tabbaard with hood and the woman with a linen headdress with tails, could be dated between 1525 and 1545. The identity of the donors is not known, but the palm branch leaning against the man’s shoulder and his patron saint James the Greater make it likely that he belonged to a brotherhood of Jerusalem pilgrims. It is therefore not inconceivable that the triptych was originally placed in the chapel of the Jerusalem pilgrims on the former Cellebroedersgracht in Leiden.⁶

The entire triptych is extensively underdrawn, probably in a dry medium (fig. a, fig. b). One striking feature is the use of many curly lines, with which the main figures were carefully prepared. Those lines are also present in the background, although there they merely give a rough indication of the placement of the final forms. The underdrawing of the architecture is also quite meticulous. The artist only departed from the underdrawing in a few places.

A great deal of care was lavished on the attractive decoration of the robes of a few of the figures. Some of the decorative shapes used were already indicated in the underdrawing. The painstaking manner of working, which virtually eliminated the need for alterations, seems typical of this master. The same kind of precise and detailed work can be seen in a coherent group of drawings by the Master of the Miracles of the Apostles,⁷ whom we are placing under the name of Aertgen van Leyden for the reasons set out in the biography. This is illustrated, for example, by a drawn design for a Triptych with Esther before Ahasuerus in Braunschweig (fig. c),⁸ in which the scene is drawn in a similarly detailed way as the underdrawing of the Amsterdam triptych. Both works contain the elongated figures that are found in the entire group of drawings. The drawings have stereotype figures which are repeated constantly. One such is the crowned woman, who appears in our painting as St Catherine on the right wing. In the drawing in Braunschweig she is Esther, and there she is kneeling. The crowned woman also corresponds stylistically to the figure of St Adrian in a triptych for the Kanis family, now in Nijmegen, which at one time was attributed to Jan Wellens de Cock.⁹ Technical examination of that triptych has shown that the similarities are restricted to the types of figure, and that the underdrawing and painting technique differ too much to justify an attribution to the same hand.¹⁰ The similarities in style, underdrawing and technique are closer to several paintings from the workshop of Cornelis Engelbrechtsz, such as The Lamentation in Vienna attributed to the pseudo Jan Wellens de Cock.¹¹

The Rijksmuseum bought the centre panel in 1946, at which time it was attributed to Aertgen van Leyden. That attribution was abandoned after the discovery of Aertgen’s Last Judgement triptych of 1555 in Valenciennes, which is mentioned by Van Mander, because the stylistic differences were considered to be too great.¹² It is true that the differences in style between the triptych and the other paintings attributed to Aertgen in the present catalogue, such as The Calling of St Antony (SK-A-1691) are considerable, particularly as regards the underdrawing. However, the difference between the cursory and sketchy underdrawing in The Calling of St Antony and the more detailed one in the present triptych can also be explained by a difference in function. Moreover, the elongated figures do correspond closely to those in the Valenciennes triptych. For that reason the attribution to Aertgen van Leyden has been retained here. The Calling of St Antony may be typical of an early phase in his career, when he was working under the influence of Lucas van Leyden, whereas this triptych appears to represent a later mannered style datable around 1530-35 in which the influence of Cornelis Engelbrechtsz is still present.

(Menno Balm/Jan Piet Filedt Kok)

Literature

Van Regteren Altena 1939, pp. 83, 230, no. 50; Bruyn 1960, pp. 79, 93; Nijmegen 1975, pp. 13-19 (as Master of the Kanis Triptych; Aertgen van Leyden ?); Kloek 1984, p. 88 (as Master of the Kanis Triptych); Scholten in Amsterdam 1986a, pp. 163-64, no. 46 (as Leiden school, c. 1530-35); Köhler 1986, pp. 76-77 (as Master of the Kanis Triptych); Scholten 1986a, pp. 66-68 (as unknown Leiden artist)

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Collection catalogues

1948, p. 54, no. 1449 D1 (as Aertgen van Leyden); 1960, p. 173, no. 1449 D1 (as Aertgen van Leyden); 1976, p. 345, no. A 3480 (as Aertgen van Leyden); 1992, p. 104, nos. A 3480, A 4751-a/b (as Leiden school, c. 1530-35)

Citation

M. Balm, 2010, 'attributed to Aertgen Claesz. van Leyden, Centre Panel of a Triptych with the Raising of Lazarus, c. 1530 - c. 1535', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.12117

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