Flight into Egypt (Patacon?)

Entry

This positive impression and corresponding negative mould (BK-2010-10-1) are in the shape of a gothic quatrefoil combined with a four-pointed star. The central medallion depicts the Flight into Egypt, surrounded by alternating decorations (clockwise from the point of the star at the top): a flower, a squirrel, a flower or insect, the head of a putto, a flower, a bird, a flower and the head of a putto. Each element is framed in a laurel wreath.

This decorative relief is an example of the relatively cheaply reproduced popular devotional items that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries responded to a rapidly growing individually experienced religiosity in north-western Europe.³ In the urbanized Netherlands there was a particularly great demand for them among laymen in the towns and cities, pilgrims and members of religious orders. As well as simple woodcuts and engravings, lead pilgrim’s badges and pipeclay figurines and reliefs, devotional objects were also made in pewter, wax, stucco, papier-mâché and even edible materials like marzipan or cake.⁴ The designs are usually fairly schematic and were probably often derived from woodcuts. Their fragility, the intensive use to which they were subjected and the coming of the Reformation mean that few intact examples of the output of this significant industry have survived. Most of those that have are in Germany. Some tondi, moulds and impressions from the Middle Rhine region, which are similar in size and material, are held in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.⁵ The combination of an intact mould and corresponding contemporaneous impression dating from the sixteenth century is therefore extremely unusual.

The design of this mould and impression is not medieval, although the style of a mould and impression of a relief of the Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan (BK-2010-9-1 and -2) from the same find is late gothic. This suggests that the two reliefs were probably made in the same pottery in the mid-sixteenth century at the earliest. This Leiden pottery in Galgenveld was probably active for anything between a century to a century and a half, because among other pieces from the same find there are a mould and impression of the World Upside Down dated 1645.⁶ This means that the possibility that this Flight into Egypt was made later in the sixteenth century or even in the early seventeenth cannot be ruled out.

It is as yet not possible to establish the extent to which this pottery was a continuation of a Leiden pottery that produced devotional figurines in pipeclay in the nearby Varkenmarkt in the fifteenth and possibly early sixteenth centuries. In 1989 the firing spoil from this medieval pottery – a great many fragments of statuettes, reliefs and moulds – was found opposite Varkenmarkt 13 in Leiden.⁷ These fragments, whose subjects are the same as pipeclay finds from other towns and cities, have no obvious iconographic or physical similarities to the material from Galgenveld.

Aside from the diversity in style and shape, another noteworthy aspect of the Galgenveld find is the fact that religious and secular subjects occur in the same place. This raises the question as to the function of the reliefs that were found. The different shapes – here a star, elsewhere a round or rectangular curved relief – make their use as decorative wall reliefs, for example by a fireplace, unlikely, although the technical and stylistic likeness to sixteenth-century hearthstones is considerable.⁸ Their use for private devotions at home, for instance standing on a shelf, in a small niche or on a simple house altar, is conceivable, but there are no other known Netherlandish examples. Since the Flight into Egypt is regarded as one of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin and as such was often placed, in the form of a small tondo, around a likeness of the Mater Dolorosa, this relief could have been used in this context.⁹

The most plausible explanation is that reliefs like this were used as what are known as patacons.¹⁰ These small clay tablets were made for use as decorations on festive loaves and cakes at the end of the year. The designs in the clay were usually painted. Their use was most common in the Southern Netherlands from the sixteenth century onwards. The patacons were often made in pipeclay, although there were also cheaper variants in local types of clay.¹¹ Most of them are relatively small, but larger examples – with a diameter similar to this Flight into Egypt – also occur.¹² The patacons were mostly incorporated in Christmas and New Year cakes, although they may also have been used in bread for other religious and secular feast days in the last months of the year.

Frits Scholten, 2024