Egmond Tympanum, St Peter with Count Dirk VI of Holland (c. 1114-1157) and his Mother, Countess Petronilla (c. 1082-1144)

Entry

This tympanum, which came from the church of Egmond Abbey, is the oldest surviving specimen of monumental sculpture in Dutch art history and an early example of medieval dedication art.⁵ The relief is a frontal, half-length image of St Peter with a double-bit key and a crozier. On either side of his head, in letters written under one another, are the (misspelled) Greek words: AΓΥωC ΠHTPVC (Saint Peter).⁶ St Peter is worshipped by two much smaller, half-length figures, whose faces are so seriously damaged as to be virtually indistinguishable.

The Latin inscription on the plinth, HIC THID[E]RIC ORAT – OPUS H[O]C PET[R]ONILLA DEC[O]RAT (Here prays Dirk – Petronilla adorns this work), identifies these figures as donor portraits of Petronilla of Saxony, Countess of Holland (c. 1082-1144), and her son, Count Dirk (Theodoric) VI (c. 1114-1157). The design was carved on the back of an old red Bunter sandstone sarcophagus lid, which may have come from the Main or the Weser area.⁷ Two deep, parallel decorative grooves on the back of the tympanum show the outlines of what was originally the trapezoid cover of a tomb (fig. a). It is believed that the slab was converted into a tympanum in Egmond by the monks at the abbey.⁸ Count Floris II (c. 1085-1121), Petronilla’s consort and the founder of the first stone-built abbey church in Egmond, does not appear on the tympanum. For this reason it is generally assumed that the relief must have been made after his death on 2 March 1121. Since his son Dirk is depicted as a beardless youth and, as can be inferred from the inscription, Petronilla was the donor of the tympanum, it is likely that it was done not long after the count’s death, and in any event between 1121 and 1130, when the countess and widow Petronilla acted as regent for her underage son.

The building work of the new, more prestigious stone-built abbey church in Egmond founded by Petronilla, started in the same period, while the first abbey church remained in use until well into the twelfth century.⁹ However, it is unlikely that the tympanum was intended to be installed above the entrance of this second abbey church, since the first, temporary entrance to that church was not completed until around 1143 and the main entrance to the west building (above which the tympanum was eventually reinstalled) was not finished until near the end of the twelfth century.¹⁰ As Den Hartog has convincingly argued, the tympanum was probably initially installed above the entrance on the south side of the new church, a section that was under construction at the time.¹¹ This entrance was used by the monks, to enter the church from the abbey that was situated at that side. In that case the prayer carved in the round arch around the tympanum, ‘Oh, Keeper of the Gate of Heaven, admit this flock kneeling before you with pious hearts and reconcile them with the King of the Angels’, served as a constant reminder for them to pray for the salvation of the souls of Petronilla and her son, as well as the other counts of Holland. Furthermore, by including her portrait and the Latin inscription, ‘Petronilla adorns this work’ [i.e. the church], the countess also establishes herself as the patroness of the tympanum and the founder of the new abbey church.

Countess Petronilla was a fervent supporter of the ideas of the Gregorian Reform, whose objective was to place all the monasteries under the direct authority of the Pope. She hoped that this would prevent the powerful Bishop of Utrecht from taking charge of her abbey. To leave her allegiance to the Pope in no doubt, she even changed her name from Geertruid to Petronilla – a reference to the martyr of the same name, who was believed to be the daughter of the apostle Peter, the ‘forefather’ of the popes.¹² This political and religious bond is quite explicitly depicted in the tympanum by portraying St Peter as a pope, not as an apostle.¹³

The tympanum is one of the earliest examples of a pictorial tradition of sculpted Romanesque founders’ portraits that include, for instance, an early thirteenth century tympanum from red sandstone that originates from a church in the town of Larrelt (Germany),¹⁴ and the St Cecilia Tympanum (c. 1160-70) in the Museum Schnütgen in Cologne.¹⁵ Stylistically the Egmond Tympanum bears some resemblance to the design on the trapezoid sarcophagus lid made from Baumberger sandstone on the tomb of Bishop Gottschalk von Diepholz (d. 1118) in the minster in Bad Iburg, Westphalia.¹⁶ There are parallels between the stiff frontality of St Peter and the bishop, their triangular heads and the downturned corners of their mouths. The Egmond Tympanum differs, however, in the unusual way St Peter’s hair is rendered as a double row of tight curls. This echoes a Byzantine pictorial tradition that appears on coins and seals.¹⁷ The spelling of Peter’s name in Greek letters, the parity accorded Dirk and Petronilla and their praying hands, known as deësis, are also Byzantine characteristics.¹⁸ Byzantine art and culture had found their way to the Low Countries in the tenth century through the marriage of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II and the Byzantine princess Theophanu in 972, and their frequent visits to Nijmegen. In Egmond this was reflected, for instance, in the dedication miniatures in the Egmond Gospels of around 974-80, which were much influenced by Byzantine compositional schemes.¹⁹

Klomp points out that in Petronilla’s time, the early twelfth century, the Byzantine character of the tympanum was already outmoded. However, he convincingly explained the decision to use this visual idiom, not customary at that time, as a reference to the transfer of the allodium of the major part of the territory that would later be called the County of Holland to Dirk II in 985.²⁰ Empress Theophanu, who had meanwhile been widowed and was acting as regent for the empire for her five-year-old son, later Emperor Otto III, was responsible for this extraordinarily generous gift.²¹ More than a century later, Petronilla seems to have stressed the Counts of Holland’s claim to the territory by decorating Egmond Abbey with a tympanum in a Byzantinizing style that referenced the Ottonian court.²² A tenth-century miniature in the abbey’s treasury may have served as a model.²³

In 1573 the complex was burned down by the Geuzen (the Beggars) on the orders of their leader, Diederik Sonoy (1529-1597). The tympanum was left behind in the ruins where it was rediscovered in the early eighteenth century and identified as one of the oldest works of art in the Netherlands. Unfortunately it was also wilfully damaged at that time by – of all people – the amateur historian Andries Schoemaker of Amsterdam. He included a drawing of the tympanum in his well-known historical and topographical ‘atlas’ (fig. b), casually noting: ‘In 1712, when I passed through that gate [of Egmond Abbey] over great heaps of stone and saw this St Peter, I took my key and chipped off a piece of the nose.’²⁴ Back in Amsterdam he gave the souvenir to a ‘young Catholic woman who was much pleased with it’.²⁵ At some point between 1801 and 1804, after the local civic guard company had, it is said, been using it as a target for years,²⁶ the tympanum was removed from the crumbling ruin.²⁷ In 1820 the widow of the Lord of Egmond presented it to the Koninklijk Instituut van Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schoone Kunsten, which was then housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.²⁸ This institute entrusted the piece to the Rijksmuseum which was also located in this mansion at that time. A drawing dating from 1845 shows the tympanum above the entrance of a small stone structure in the garden of the Trippenhuis (fig. c).

Bieke van der Mark, 2024