Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan

Entry

The alabaster-carving industry in Mechelen originated with the arrival of a small group of artists, employed by Margaret of Austria, governess of the Netherlands at the onset of the sixteenth century. These artists worked primarily in the new antyckse renaissance style imported from Italy. Most important among them where the sculptors Conrat Meit (1485-1550/51) from Worms and Jean Mone (c. 1485-?1554) from Metz, whose presence in the city stimulated local sculptors to shift their efforts in the direction of the new formal idiom and simultaneously the material alabaster. Lipinska maintains that for those artists originally trained in wood, the move to the new, relatively soft stone type alabaster was minor.¹

As a result, a veritable industry in this kind of sculpture began to flourish in the sixteenth century, destined for a market that encompassed much of north-western Europe. Besides the Low Countries, Mechelen alabaster reliefs and altars were exported to places as far away as Poland, the Baltic States and Scandinavia.² The more luxurious versions of these house altars comprised both larger and smaller alabaster reliefs, mounted in ornately carved wooden frames decorated with pressed-gesso patterns. The Rijksmuseum possesses two such altars (BK-BR-515; BK-NM-2918). However, the majority of this so-called cleynstekerswerk centred on small carved tablets featuring mythological and biblical scenes in a virtually unlimited number of variations produced serially well into the first half of the seventeenth century. With dimensions up to 20 x 20 centimetres, these small alabaster reliefs were typically supplied with decorative frames edged with pressed papier-mâché. To enliven the scenes and the frames, polychromers added highlights in gold. Even today, many of these objects still bear the monograms and house marks left by their makers, conveying the competition among artists but also serving as a kind of quality guaranty.

Depicted on this rather simply executed relief is a scene of the Baptism in the River Jordan. Below the scene, an inclined cartouche bears the maker’s mark of a member one of the most productive families in Mechelen, the Van Tissenakens. The monogram ‘TvT’ belongs to Tobias van Tissenaken (c. 1560/70-1624), a painter and cleynsteker documented as living in the city from 1596 up until his death in 1624. In 1619, Tobias was chosen as dean of the Mechelen guild of St Luke.³ In accordance with iconographic tradition, Jesus appears in the middle of the scene standing in the Jordan River, flanked by John the Baptist on the right and two angels appearing on the left. The dove of the Holy Spirit flies above Christ’s head. Conveying an element of luxury, simple scenes such as this still appeared quite commonly in inventories of possessions of the seventeenth century, where they are typically listed as alabaster bordjes (panels/small boards).⁴

Frits Scholten, 2024