King, from a Tree of Jesse

Entry

This small relief of a king from a Tree of Jesse likely comes from the Stiftskirche in Cleves, where it originally formed part of a now lost altarpiece together with six other remaining kings today preserved at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp (fig. a).⁴ In 1970, Meurer convincingly attributed these works to the important Lower Rhenish woodcarver Master Arnt (active c. 1460-d. 1492).⁵ Depicted in three-quarter view, the king springs forth from the Tree of Jesse’s foliage wearing a turban-like bourrelet, with a sash tied below the chin called a cornette. He clasps a banderole in his right hand while gesturing with his left. The six kings in Antwerp are rendered in the same lively manner, displaying the vigorous gestures and dynamic poses characteristic of Master Arnt’s style.

The reliefs in the Antwerp Museum were acquired in 1897 from the dealer François van Waegeningh in Nijmegen, twenty kilometres west of the German city Cleves. The Rijksmuseum, in its turn, purchased the present king on the Amsterdam art market in 1899. The presumed shared provenance of these pieces – the Stiftskirche in Cleves – is based on two late nineteenth-century photos of a reliquary in that church, both preserved in the archive of the Rheinische Amt für Denkmalpflege (fig. b). In one of the images, one can see four figures – two prophets (probably Isaiah and Balaam) a king and an angel – mounted on the front of what was probably an early nineteenth-century reliquary. The reliquary was stored in the reliquary cabinet in the north wall of the church’s chancel. In 1879, the Cleves historian Robert Scholten wrote the following about this shrine: ‘In the bottom-most, vaulted section of the cabinet now stands a roughly made oak [reliquary] chest with a pyramidal lid (42” long, 17” wide and 14” high), adorned with foliate work carved from oak from which kings (among them, David with the harp), prophets and an angel sprout, all with a banderole in the hands. It is very evident that the foliage on the present [reliquary] chest has been removed from a much older and larger [reliquary].’⁶ The only king specifically mentioned by Scholten – the David with the harp – is indeed among the six figures in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh. The angel, in turn, has been identified as one of the four figures mounted on the reliquary’s front. Undoubtedly, an additional four figures were mounted on the reverse side, with another figure placed at either end, as indicated by securing points discernible in the second photo. This brings the total on this reliquary to ten figures with foliate work: seven kings, an angel and two prophets. The original Tree of Jesse from which these figures originated would therefore have had at least eight kings. When transferred to the reliquary in the nineteenth century, one or more figures are certain to have been left out, presumably due to insufficient space.

There is no doubt the figures originally came from a Tree of Jesse, the representation of Christ’s family tree that begins with his forbearer Jesse. Images of Jesus’s royal ancestors were much-loved and widely disseminated in the late Middle Ages. The theme comes from the prophecy of Isaiah (11: 1-10), which foretells how a shoot will spring forth from Jesse’s roots and a blossom from his stump. Depictions of Isaiah’s vision show Jesse in a slumbering pose, either sitting or recumbent, with a mighty tree that rises up out of his body. Nestled in the branches of the tree are figures of biblical kings, prophets and other non-royal forefathers of Christ. At the tree’s crown Christ appears, typically in the form of the Virgin with the Christ Child seated or lying on her lap. The Tree of Jesse is a theme frequently encountered on carved wooden retables from the late Middle Ages, and especially those made in Antwerp. In most cases, the tree springs forth from Jesse, who lies recumbent in the predella. Above this, the tree splits into two major branches, which wind their way upwards in the concave mouldings that frame the central scene in the retable corpus and come together once again at the very top. The branches of Jesse’s tree typically frame a Crucifixion, but sometimes an episode from the Life of the Virgin. In the Lower Rhine region, the best-known Trees of Jesse were made by Henrik Douverman, a sculptor born approximately fifty years after Master Arnt. Douverman incorporated the theme in his Marian altarpieces at Kalkar (1518-22) and Xanten (1515-30). The rich fantasy and skilled carving executed in hard oak impress even to the present day.

In the case of the Cleves Tree of Jesse, each of the figures was seated on a single tree branch. Contrary to their counterparts on the St Anthony Altarpiece at Xanten and the Marian altarpiece in Cleves, they were not placed in the predella or the frame’s concave moulding. Instead, the kings were arranged both above and below but also adjacent to each other, as suggested by the foliate work accompanying each king. The banderoles bearing inscriptions clasped in each of the figures’ hands are highly exceptional in this context. Their content originally likely concerned the Virgin (Virga est virgo, the Virgin is the twig, according to Jerome’s translation of the Bible), as derived from the prophecies of Isaiah and Balaam, and the gospels of Luke and Matthew, where reference is made to Jesse.

Several surviving Antwerp altarpieces – known for their rich iconographic diversity – contain a Tree of Jesse in the central corpus. One example is the Marian altarpiece in Bocholt (Belgian Limburg), which possibly provides an impression of the original context of the Cleves figures. It features a tree supporting half-figures of twelve of Christ’s forebears – including David, Saul and Solomon, and the Virgin and Child at its crown – rising up out of a dormant Jesse seated on a throne and accompanied by four prophets holding banderoles.⁷ The Cleves kings, if depicted in the same manner, may very well have belonged to a similarly imposing retable in the Stiftskirche. This altarpiece was perhaps the former Marian high altar that was dismantled at the time of the chapter’s dissolution in 1810.⁸ The angel with the banderole (the only figure without foliage) has also given rise to the theory that an Adoration of the Magi in the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne also originated from the same altarpiece, with the angel forming part of this group or a Nativity.⁹ Also tenable is that the angel accompanied a Virgin crowning a Tree of Jesse. The corpus of the Marian altarpiece at Västeräs in Sweden contains a statue of the Virgin standing on a crescent moon, encircled not only by a rosary and a mandorla, but also by prophets and the kings from a Tree of Jesse. In its original state, each corner of the composition held an angel clasping a bough of the tree, while honouring the Virgin.¹⁰

Artistic parallels for the Cleves fragments can be discerned in several works of Lower Rhenish/Cologne origin. The kings, for example, are similar to those encountered on the Tree of Jesse with Sts Ursula, Mary Magdalene, Catherine and Barbara in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe (Enschede), a painting thought to have been produced in the Lower Rhine area under the influence of the Cologne School.¹¹ Comparable figures – in this case depictions of prophets – can also be seen in the lower corners of a Meeting of the Magi, with David and Isaiah in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles).¹² This painting is attributed to the Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece (active c. 1475-c. 1510), an artist originating from the Lower Rhine region but later active in Cologne. The hard, almost metallic quality of the foliate work, but also the posed gestures of Master Arnt’s half-figures, finds its equivalent in prints by Israhel van Meckenem (c. 1440/45-1503), a goldsmith and engraver active in Cleves and Bocholt. A particularly striking similarity to Master Arnt’s Tree of Jesse fragments can be discerned in a print by him featuring the Tree of Jesse (fig. c).

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
This entry is an updated version of 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, Cleves (Museum Kurhaus) 2004-06, no. 5