The Meeting of the Magi

Entry

When this exceptionally wide and varied group was recognised in 1977 as a work by the Utrecht woodcarver Adriaen van Wesel (c. 1417-in or after 1490) it was immediately suspected that it was one of the widely scattered elements of the large Marian altar that the sculptor made around 1475 and 1477 for the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady in Den Bosch. This proved correct, since the work ties in very well iconographically and stylistically with other parts of the altarpiece. Dendrochronological analysis has moreover established that the date of the oak used fits perfectly with the history of the making of the altar. It was also possible to establish that the wood has very similar growth characteristics to that in other parts of the same altar.¹³

The history of this Marian altar is in a sense typical of the fate that befell many altarpieces in the Low Countries, which were destroyed during the sixteenth-century iconoclastic riots, fell into disuse during the Reformation and the components were scattered. The altar was commissioned in 1475 for the Confraternity’s chapel in the Sint-Janskathedraal in Den Bosch. Adriaen van Wesel, one of the most important woodcarvers of his day in the Netherlands, supplied the work unpainted in 1477. The Confraternity did not raise the money for the expensive polychromy until 1508 to 1510, but the altar was given two shutters with exteriors painted by Jheronimus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) in 1488.¹⁴

The altar escaped the riots in 1566 unscathed thanks to the far-sightedness of one of the members of the Confraternity, who got soldiers to guard the chapel against the destructive mob for six days and nights. The altar was then moved to a safer place. It was reassembled in the chapel in 1567 and probably remained there until 1629. In that year Den Bosch passed into Protestant hands. It appears that the Marian altar was stored in the Confraternity House and sold off in pieces in the course of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century; the building of the new Confraternity House in 1846 may have been a factor in this. In 1896 the Confraternity had only two carved groups with their original caisses left from the original altar.¹⁵

To date a total of thirteen figures and figure groups from the Marian altar have come to light. On the basis of these elements it is possible to make a rough reconstruction of the shape, size and iconography of the altar, which must have been a good seven metres wide when it was open (fig. a).¹⁶ In the centre was The Nativity with The Adoration. This was also the position of the group of Joseph with Three Musician Angels (BK-NM-11647) and The Kneeling Virgin (BK-NM-11713). The Meeting of the Magi discussed here was placed above them. Scenes from the life of the Virgin were depicted in the lower flanking sides of the altar, in various compartments. The scope of this Marian cycle is unknown, but in any event it included the fragments of The Annunciation, The Visitation (BK-NM-11394) and The Death of the Virgin (BK-NM-11859). The two small hinged caisses that are still held by the Confraternity contain Emperor Augustus with the Tiburtine Sibyl (fig. b) and St John on Patmos (fig. c).¹⁷

In the late Middle Ages the meeting of the magi on their journey to Bethlehem was frequently used as a background scene in an Adoration of the Magi, which would be positioned above the central Nativity stable in altarpieces. The curiously stacked composition of the figures, which indicates a relatively high position in the ensemble, makes it likely that this group was placed in this way in the Den Bosch Marian altar. A similar arrangement is found in a late fifteenth-century Brussels Marian altar in the Stedelijk Museum Het Broodhuis in Brussels.¹⁸

Van Wesel chose not to depict the subject in the conventional way. His inventiveness is evident, for instance, in the disposition of the heads of the magi’s three horses, which come together in the centre of the group to give formal symbolic substance to the meeting. From the left comes an old king with two followers, in the centre, coming out of the background is the ‘black king’ with his squire, while on the right the third wise man is assisted to dismount by his page. This young man, on the extreme right at the edge of the scene, most clearly betrays Van Wesel’s hand and is one of the stylistic keys to the attribution of the group to Van Wesel’s Marian altar: we find virtually identical figures with the very characteristic ‘spaghetti’ hair in, among other places, the group of Joseph with Three Musician Angels and in St John in The Death of the Virgin, both from the same altar.¹⁹

Below him another rider from the left-hand king’s retinue and a servant with a dromedary have begun to descend to the stable. In the background there are five more followers on horseback, and there are some shepherds with their flock in the rocky landscape on the left. The woodcarver created a dynamic composition in which the finishing of the individual figures was subordinated to a degree of theatricality and to the overall impression: a certain carelessness and sloppiness are evident here and there in the finish, an aspect that can be found elsewhere in Van Wesel’s oeuvre.²⁰

Frits Scholten, 2024