The Holy Kinship

Entry

There is no reason to doubt Frans Francken II’s execution of the present work which is signed and dated 1616. The carpet was painted after the support was framed as it runs to a margin at the edge.

The form of the signature is exceptional and does not recur in Francken’s extant oeuvre. As interpreted by McGrath,¹⁰ it may designate the painting as a tribute by the artist to his homonymous father (b. 1542), who died on 3 October 1616. The initials DM¹¹ may well repeat those found on Roman funerary monuments, where they stand for ‘Dis Manibus’, which can be translated as ‘to the shades of the departed’ (or more loosely, ‘to the spirits of the dead’), and precede the name of the deceased. If such is the case, the name that follows in the inscription refers not to the painter of the picture, but to this father, and the initial ‘f’, which follows ‘invenit’, would stand not for ‘fecit’ but ‘filius’, that is the son, Frans Francken II, who invented the composition.

This picture, with its use of powdered gold to mark the radiance of the key figures, is Francken’s only extant treatment of the Holy Kinship. Whether it had a particular relevance to Frans Francken I, or even to the numerous clan of Francken artists,¹² has yet to be ascertained. It would be overambitious to seek to identify the likeness of Frans Francken I among the male relations of Christ; most obvious would be to identify him with the seated figure, but a comparison with Francken’s known appearance is not compelling.¹³

Depictions of the Holy Kinship had been a speciality of Netherlandish and northern German artists, but then declined in popularity following the Council of Trent’s rejection of the legend of St Anne’s three marriages in the mid-sixteenth century.¹⁴

The subject of the present painting was identified by Esser and published by Härting, who also retained the title proposed in the 1976 museum catalogue – Allegory on the Christ Child as the Lamb of God – which had probably been prompted by the central position of the lamb. But the animal is not depicted here as a symbol of Christ’s passion, as it is, for example, in the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent altarpiece (completed in 1432).¹⁵ Francken was probably following the example of Maerten de Vos (1532-1603) in his two, extant treatments of the Holy Kinship,¹⁶ in which the lamb, an attribute of St John the Baptist, was prominently and conspicuously placed.

Including his great-grandparents, Jesus had twenty-five named relations. This tally does not include his two parents and an unidentified uncle.¹⁷ Following the vision of St Colette, an abbess in Ghent, in 1406, which popularized the cult of St Anne,¹⁸ no set formula seems to have evolved as to how many relations should be depicted; for instance Quinten Massijs’s (1466-1530) altarpiece of 1509 in the Brussels Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België included twelve,¹⁹ while Lucas Cranach I’s (1472-1553) triptych of 1507 in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, showed fourteen.²⁰ Assuming that St Joseph is one of the men in the right background, Francken here introduces seventeen. Unusual is the segregated assemblage: on either side of the central group of Mary, Jesus, his grandmother St Anne and cousin St John the Baptist, are women and children on one side, and men, obscurely placed in the background, on the other. A second unusual feature is the seated figure in an ermine cape whose status as a bishop is indicated by the mitre on the ledge above. Notable too is the presence of the dove, above, symbolizing the Holy Ghost.

The bishop may be identified as Zacharias, the father of St John the Baptist, who was a high priest. The man with his hands clasped in prayer may be St Joseph, because of his proximity to Mary and Jesus. It is not possible to suggest identifications for the other relations, because Jesus had four aunts and eight cousins, and Francken depicts, not counting Mary and St Anne, five women and five children. The reason for this discrepancy is obscure.

Gregory Martin, 2022