Woman with Lantern (Midwife or Persian Sibyl), from a Nativity or Adoration of the Shepherds

Entry

In the past, the present figure of a woman holding a lantern in her right hand was incorrectly identified as St Gudula of Brussels. Given the figure’s scale, but also the form of the sloping ground on which she stands, there is no doubt this work once belonged to an altarpiece. This discounts the figure’s identification as the Brussels saint, who in addition to a lantern typically holds a book and is nowhere documented as ever having appeared in a retable. In 1973, Leeuwenberg managed to correctly identify this figure as the woman holding a lantern sometimes encountered in retables produced in Antwerp, specifically in scenes of the Nativity or the Adoration of the Shepherds as preserved in, for example, the churches at Löfta (Sweden), Fromentière (France), Bielefeld (Germany) and Kerdévot (France).⁴ In a retable group depicting the Adoration of the Shepherds today preserved in Berlin, dated circa 1510 and bearing the Antwerp quality mark of the hand, the woman with the lantern is situated behind Joseph on the right.⁵ She also appears in one of the wings of an Antwerp retable from 1515-16 in the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw.⁶ Integrated as an independent figure in the concave moulding, there she appears on the left of the niche with the Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate. In light of the context, the woman with the lantern can in each and every case be identified more specifically as one of two figures: either a midwife or the Persian Sibyl, with the latter figure being the prophetess from classical antiquity who predicted Christ’s birth from a Virgin.

In 2017 Guillot de Suduiraut established a stylistic connection with the Antwerp guild-marked Marian retable in Rennes Cathedral, an altarpiece that can be dated around 1500-15.⁷ On the basis of a perceived stylistic agreement and the iconography of the Woman with Lantern, she surmised that the figure might possibly have come from this altarpiece, and more specifically from the Nativity scene on the lower left, where indeed a standing figure on the right-hand side is missing. As was characteristic of retable sculpture dating from this period, the Woman with Lantern – like the figures of the altarpiece at Rennes – was originally richly gilded. This is confirmed by the remnants of gilding and traces of punched detailing in the hem of the mantle and lining the cap of her headdress.

During the most recent restoration of this retable from Rennes, an attempt was made to physically fit the Amsterdam figure into the Nativity scene, located in the lower-left compartment of the central caisse.⁸ In terms of style, pose, the direction of the gaze and the iconography, the figure at first seemed to indeed fit very well in the overall altarpiece and particularly this specific scene. As such, the hypothesis that the Rijksmuseum piece once belonged to the altarpiece at Rennes was seemingly confirmed, but also that it had to have been removed prior to 1857, as a photo of the altarpiece taken in that year shows the right-hand figure was already missing.

All considered, however, arguments for rejecting this provenance prevail. The first major obstacle is the statue’s dimensions. The original figures of the Rennes altarpiece adhere to an undeviating hierarchy of scale: at the highest level are the largest figures, followed by somewhat smaller figures in the middle zone, even smaller in the predella, and lastly, the most diminutive figures in the concave mouldings. The Woman with Lantern, however, clearly deviates from this hierarchical system, being too small for the Nativity (even when taking into account its original size was somewhat larger, prior to the shortening of the underside), but also too large for the predella (where there is no suitable place in terms of the iconography). Its inclusion in an altarpiece clearly structured according to a consistent and strictly hierarchical system would simply be illogical.

A second argument is the steeply sloping ground surface, which in no way corresponds to the angle of the base on which the other Nativity figures stand. Furthermore, there is insufficient space to convincingly accommodate the Amsterdam figure in the background. When integrated in this manner, the Woman with Lantern would largely be concealed behind the kneeling figure of Joseph in the foreground, with her attribute – the lantern – entirely blocked from view. This is an undesirable and illogical consequence, as it renders her unidentifiable. Finally, while the style of the Amsterdam figure approaches those of the figures at Rennes, its finishing displays a higher level of refinement, certainly when considering the relatively small format. This can be observed in finely executed details such as the delicate hands, the face, the lantern and the relatively complex play of the drapery folds – all exceptional for such a secondary figure.

Lastly, recent dendrochronological analysis has shown that the oak from which the Woman with Lantern was carved originates from a different growing region (eastern Netherlands/north-west Germany) than that of the groups in Rennes (Baltic region). Domínguez-Delmás presents this new assessment of the timber’s origin as a strong argument for the figure’s attribution to a workshop in the Northern Netherlands, where oak from this growing region was bought and sold.⁹ She proposes that the Brabantine cities worked exclusively with oak imported from the Baltic region and slow-growing wood from the Meuse valley. In the absence of sufficient supporting data on the trade and the use of oak in the Netherlands during this period, however, Domínguez-Demás’s hypothesis, which rests solely on material-historical and dendrochronological arguments, provides inadequate grounds for rejecting the localization of the statue’s manufacture in Antwerp. Her explanation of the figure’s similarity to the altarpiece in Rennes as a reflection of a strong stylistic influence on Northern Netherlandish sculpture emanating from Antwerp is equally unconvincing.

When all taken into account, these arguments point to a scenario in which the Woman with Lantern did not belong to the altarpiece in Rennes, but to a different one, now partly or entirely lost, centring either on the Passion of Christ or the Life of the Virgin. Given the stylistic agreements between the Amsterdam statuette and the figures from Rennes, this unknown altarpiece will have most likely been produced in a workshop in Antwerp and might have even been of a quality superior to that of Rennes.

Recently, a nineteenth- or twentieth-century alabaster replica of the Woman with Lantern was sold at auction in Brussels (fig. a).¹⁰ This work presumably comes from the same workshop as an alabaster copy of another late medieval retable group in the Rijksmuseum collection, depicting the Flight to Egypt (see the entry on BK-1955-18).

Frits Scholten, 2024