Inner Left Wing of an Altarpiece with the Wedding Feast of St Elizabeth and Louis of Thuringia in the Wartburg

Entry

This panel and three others (SK-A-3146, SK-A-3147-A, SK-A-3147-B) originally formed two wings painted on both sides from an altarpiece made for the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht.⁹ The flood is depicted on the outer wings (SK-A-3147-A, SK-A-3147-B). A massive storm surge inundated the Grote Waard polder on the night of 18 to 19 November 1421, and the flood got its name from the 19 November feast-day of St Elizabeth of Hungary, also known as Elizabeth of Thuringia (1207-31). Scenes from her life are shown on the other two panels (SK-A-3145; SK-A-3146), which were originally the inner wings of the altarpiece. The central panel has not survived and it is not known what it portrayed, or whether it was painted or carved. The altarpiece very probably stood on the altar dedicated to St Lambert in the Grote Kerk. It was commissioned by descendants of the inhabitants of Wieldrecht, one of the villages destroyed in the flood, who settled in Dordrecht after the event.¹⁰

The right wing (SK-A-3147-B) shows the breaching of the dike near Wieldrecht. In the centre of the left wing (SK-A-3147-A) is Dordrecht, to which people are fleeing with their belongings, although some have died as they tried to escape the rising waters. Several villages and rivers are labelled with their names in the landscape, which extends over both panels.¹¹ Near the village of Houweningen, halfway up the left panel, there is a depiction of the legend about a little girl called Beatrijs, who supposedly survived the flood because a cat kept her cradle balanced in the water.¹²

The scenes on the two panels appear at first sight to show a continuous landscape looking from Dordrecht to the east and south-east. The left wing is a view along the river Merwede, with places like Papendrecht and Sliedrecht. Further back are Almkerk, Waspik, Raamsdonk and, in the top right corner, Geertruidenberg. Although the topography of the left wing is fairly accurate, a great deal of licence was taken with that on the right wing. The artist shifted his vantage point, folded the landscape in like a fan, and looked more towards the south. As a result, places like Wieldrecht, Cillaarshoec, Strijen, Maasdam and Puttershoek, which are all south-west of Dordrecht, have ended up on the right edge of the panel.¹³ The horizon is also closer to the viewer than in the other painting.¹⁴ The artist adopted a certain cartographic approach in the left panel, but in the other one he modified the landscape in order to show as much of the Grote Waard polder as possible. It is possible that Wieldrecht was also moved to a position at top right to show the course that the water took as it drove the donors’ ancestors towards the safety of Dordrecht. The depiction of the St Elizabeth’s Day flood is a remarkably early record of such an event from the recent past.

The inner wings have various scenes from the life of St Elizabeth.¹⁵ Reading them anticlockwise from top left to the right foreground, the left wing (SK-A-3145) shows Elizabeth, accompanied by her servants Guta and Isentrudis, making a vow to her first counsellor, Rüdiger. In the left foreground is the wedding feast of Elizabeth and Louis IV of Thuringia in the Wartburg. The guests include King Andrew II of Hungary, Elizabeth’s father, and Sophie, Louis’s mother. On the right the couple part as Louis goes off on the crusade. Here Elizabeth is making a second vow, to Master Conrad of Marburg, her second counsellor, swearing that if Louis dies she will observe conventual celibacy. The scene of the top left on the right wing (SK-A-3146) probably shows Elizabeth’s expulsion from the Wartburg after Louis’s death, which is being announced by a mourner dressed in black. In the left foreground she is tending the sick in the hospital she founded. On the right she is on her deathbed, attended by Master Conrad, and two angels carry her soul up to heaven after she has died. The final scene, in the centre background, shows her being buried by Franciscan monks.¹⁶

All the panels have an elaborate underdrawing done with the brush, but it was not followed closely in the paint.¹⁷ On the panels showing the flood, rapid curved lines indicate the shapes of the landscape, with ovals for the trees. The places in the Grote Waard were underdrawn, usually with a prominent spire (fig. a), but the figures were not prepared (fig. b).¹⁸ When the composition was painted, villages, towns, church towers and trees were moved or altered relative to the underdrawing (fig. a). These changes could have been prompted by a desire for topographical accuracy or by a search for an artistically satisfying composition. The way in which the artist manipulated the landscape suggests that the latter is more likely. This is supported by the underdrawings on the inner wings, where a similar approach was adopted, particularly in the landscape and the buildings in the background of the scene with the wedding feast. The way in which the towers there were shifted away from their underdrawn outlines is very close to the treatment of the flood scenes (compare fig. a and fig. c). The figure scenes were also underdrawn, which is only logical, since they are the main subjects, and once again similar licence was taken. There are many alterations, some of them major. For example, the man playing the shawm in the immediate foreground was not prepared but was painted over the underdrawing of the table and the musician behind him (fig. d). This change was made before the tiled floor was painted, for it makes allowance for his trailing cloak. In the other panel, SK-A-3145, Elizabeth is now supporting a man, but in the underdrawing she stood upright with her gaze to the left (fig. e). She also has a nimbus in the underdrawing, which is absent in all the other scenes. It is possible that she was portrayed in a similarly static pose on the centre panel of the altarpiece, which would account for this change. A radical alteration was made in the middleground and background. The green area between the two foreground buildings was probably occupied by her burial in the underdrawing (fig. f). That scene, though, was moved up the panel, where originally there were buildings in the underdrawing. These changes were probably related to the addition of the angels carrying Elizabeth’s soul up to heaven. They were not prepared in the underdrawing, but were added over the underdrawn outlines of the building. The fact that the architectural details take the painted angels into account indicates that changes were also made during the painting process, as was the case with the added musician in the left panel.

Although it is not impossible that the donor demanded some of these changes, one can only conclude from the fact that they are so similar that they were personal preferences on the part of the artist. Differences in the painterly quality of the inner and outer wings suggest that several hands worked on the paint layer. However, the similarity of the approach to the underdrawing points more to a single artistic personality being responsible for all four scenes.¹⁹ The panels can be dated c. 1490-95 on the evidence of the dress and shoes worn by the figures.²⁰ The dissimilarities between the underdrawing of these panels and that of The Conquest of Rhenen by John II of Cleves in 1499 (SK-A-1727) make it clear that these works were made by two different artists, as demonstrated by Buijsen.²¹

There are a number of later repetitions of the flood scenes on the outer wings, and in each case they were conflated into a single painting (fig. g).²² There is also an anonymous painting of around 1620 with the same subject but a different composition.²³

(M. Wolters)