Dismas, the Penitent Thief, from a Calvary

Entry

In many Netherlandish and German retables carved in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the scene of Christ’s crucifixion on Golgotha formed the fulcrum of a sculptural visual narrative comprising numerous figures. In most cases, the scene of the Crucifixion or Calvary was located in the upper range of the altarpiece’s middle section, where the crucified figure of Christ – flanked by the two crucified thieves – towered high above droves of soldiers, spectators, family members and disciples while

In iconographic tradition, the thieves’ contorted bodies and their broken limbs were tied to bare, gnarled trees with stumped branches. In stark contrast to these figures, Christ was presented in dignified frontality, with his body nailed to a perfectly straight wooden cross. The scene itself can be interpreted as a prefiguration of the rite of confession. Dismas appeared on Christ’s right (from the viewer’s perspective on the left), the ‘penitent’ thief who upon professing his regret received forgiveness and the promise of eternal paradise. On the opposite side of Christ stood the tree of Gestas, the ‘impenitent’ thief condemned to eternal damnation after mocking Christ (Luke 23:39-43; The Gospel of Nicodemus 10:2).

The present two woodcarvings depict the two thieves in their dramatic struggle with impending death. Both are tied to their respective tree trunks with thick ropes, with the head hanging low while their feet desperately seek some kind of support on the branches. According to custom, the good thief Dismas, shown here, is portrayed as a young, beardless man. His limp body hangs to the right; his right forearm, originally present, is missing. His only piece of clothing is a loincloth, knotted at the right hip. Gestas’s (BK-16547-B) body slumps down dramatically to the left, with his eyes closed. He wears a short, open vest over a shirt, with a shirt-tail emerging from the right leg of his breeches. Modish details such as the codpiece and the ornamental slashing on the breeches indicate a dating circa 1530. The accompanying figure of Christ on the cross has not been preserved.

Considering their small scale, these woodcarvings would have belonged to a small altarpiece in a chapel or for private use, as were two even smaller woodcarved thieves preserved in the Rijksmuseum’s collection (BK-2014-20-1 and -2). Their specific artistic origin remains unclear. Stylistic parallels can be found in examples of woodcarving production in Antwerp, where a retable industry is known to have thrived on a major scale in the first half of the sixteenth century. Most of the Antwerp Passion altars included a Calvary scene featuring this specific type of the crucified thieves. A prime example is the retable of Neerharen, produced in the same early-renaissance style phase as the Amsterdam thieves.¹ The thief on the right of this Antwerp retable displays a pose comparable to that of the Amsterdam Dismas, while the clothing of several figures in the foreground are decorated with slashing in the same manner as Gestas’s pant legs.

The Amsterdam thieves nevertheless lack the pronounced, almost caricature-like expressiveness typical of Antwerp mannerist carving at this time. Moreover, the poses of the two figures, albeit contorted, are not in the contrived manner observed in Antwerp production. Their style, especially in the more reserved physiognomic types and the naturalness of the poses, as well as the curls in the hair and the greater attention to the accurate rendering of the anatomy, appear more closely related to examples from the Lower Rhine region, such as the two thieves from Henrik Douverman’s Retable of the Seven Sorrows of Mary of 1518-21 in the Sankt-Nicolaïkirche in Kalkar.² Leeuwenberg compared the Amsterdam crucified figures to a thief in the former Wilm Collection,³ a work carved in oak and believed to have been produced in Kalkar. He even posited that all three figures could have been made by the same hand,⁴ though this seems highly improbable, even if only on the basis of the varying wood types. More similar is the exquisitely carved Crucified Thief in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which Williamson linked to the crucified figures in Amsterdam.⁵ This work is also deemed to have a Lower Rhenish origin, though direct examples of woodcarving for comparison are equally scant.

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
An earlier version of this entry was published in F. Scholten and G. de Werd, Een hogere werkelijkheid: Duitse en Franse beeldhouwkunst 1200-1600 uit het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam/Eine höhere Wirklichkeit, Deutsche und Französische Skulptur 1200-1600 aus dem Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, exh. cat. Cleves (Museum Kurhaus Kleve) 2004-06, no. 20