Henry IV (1050-1106), Holy Roman Emperor

Entry

This figure came from the former Mariakerk in Utrecht. The subject, Henry IV (1050-1106), was Holy Roman Emperor, and in that capacity made repeated visits to the cathedral city of Utrecht.⁶ With Conrad (d. 1099), the bishop of Utrecht he appointed, he was the founder of the Mariakerk.⁷ The chapter of the church kept the memory of the emperor alive for centuries in both word and image. For instance, the legend of its foundation by Emperor Henry IV was commemorated with Latin verses chiselled in two of the crossing pillars in the Mariakerk.⁸ The sculpture portrays Henry IV in all his glory, with arched crown, orb and imperial dress: ceremonial armour with a double imperial eagle, a cloak with an ermine cape and an ermine tunic. He wears leg protection with spiral decoration and lion masks on his knees. He originally held an iron sword in his right hand, now broken off.⁹ His name is spelled out in high relief on the front of the marbled pedestal and the date ‘1569’ has been added in gold paint. The sides are decorated with renaissance scrollwork.

Archive sources enable us to attribute the figure to Rijck(aert) Hendricksz van Beest.¹⁰ This woodcarver is recorded as a member of the Utrecht Saddlers’ Guild in 1569. He had his workshop in Abraham Dolesteegje near Lange Nieuwstraat in that city. In 1544 and 1545 Van Beest supplied a carved panel for the organ of the Buurkerk in Utrecht and eight statues for the east doors of the cathedral. In 1546 he designed a number of figures for the cathedral tower passage. Unfortunately none of these works has survived.

The account books reveal that Rijck van Beest also made two statues of Emperor Henry IV for the Mariakerk.¹¹ The first dates from 1563 and the second from 1569. This has caused considerable confusion in the past.¹² The first statue was carved from a block of wood measuring 3.60 by 0.75 metres and would certainly have been larger than life-size. It was placed on the roof of the choir of the Mariakerk, replacing an earlier statue of the same emperor by an unknown woodcarver that dated from around 1545.¹³ Leeuwenberg suggested that the statue dating from 1563 was destroyed during the Iconoclasm in 1566, and that Van Beest made the present figure, which stands just 158 cm high including the pedestal, as a replacement.¹⁴ However, it is clear from various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings and drawings that are regarded as accurate (cf. fig. a) that the statue on the choir of the Mariakerk must have been at least twice the size and that it was supported by a tie rod on the reverse, just above the hips.¹⁵ There are no traces of fixings at this point on the reverse of the present version and the reverse is flat and hollowed out, which would not work for a statue with this function. Although it has not been ruled out, there is no reason to assume that the version from 1563 did not survive the Iconoclasm. In any event, in 1781 the town council commissioned the woodcarver and draughtsman W.N. Koopman (1758-1808) to make a new roof statue of Emperor Henry IV because the old one ‘was almost completely decayed’.¹⁶ As far as we know, nothing remains of the 1563 roof statue.

Weide convincingly identified the present work as one of the tres statuas which, according to a bill dating from 1569, Van Beest had made for the Mariakerk and which is referred to in a second payment made that year for installing three statues in latticed niches in the west front above the entrance.¹⁷ The fact that one of the statues was of Emperor Henry IV is confirmed by a third payment in 1569 for ‘the iron sword placed in the hand of the statue of Emperor Henry’.¹⁸ Logically, the other two figures would have been Henry’s fellow founder, Conrad, and the Virgin Mary, the patron saint of the Chapter.¹⁹ The same trio can be seen on a fifteenth-century embroidered cushion cover from the Mariakerk in the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht (fig. b).²⁰ The facade figure did not resurface in the literature until 1835, when it is described as standing in the chapter house of the Pieterskerk in Urecht.²¹ The statue must already have been removed from there in or before 1712, for in that year the whole west front, including the most westerly nave aisle was demolished because it was crumbling.²² In 1874 the archivist of the Province of Utrecht transferred stewardship of the statue to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst in The Hague,²³ whose collection later went to the Rijksmuseum.

Swillens also attributed a polychromed sandstone figure of Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) in the Centraal Museum to Van Beest (fig. c).²⁴ The statue came from the facade of the house called ‘Keizer Karel’ at 120 Oudegracht in Utrecht, which dates from between 1550 and 1560 and was probably designed by Willem van Noort (d. 1556).²⁵ Charles V adopts a pose similar to Henry IV’s, and both rulers are depicted with the same imperial attributes and wear similar ceremonial armour with the double eagle on the breast. These similarities are purely formal, however, and may also be the result of following the same pictorial tradition. It seems unlikely that the stone statue of Charles really was made by Van Beest, since he is always described in the records as a beeltsnyder (woodcarver).²⁶

Bieke van der Mark, 2024