Memorial triptych (formerly called the Gertz memorial triptych) with the Lamentation (centre panel), nine male donor portraits with St John the Evangelist (inner left wing), nine female donor portraits with the Virgin and Child (inner right wing), St Peter (outer left wing) and St Mary Magdalen (outer right wing)

Entry

This triptych, formerly presumed to have marked the burial site of Willem Gertz and his family, is a complex assemblage with a long history. Its centre panel is among the best extant copies after Hugo van der Goes’s lost Lamentation, one of the most admired and frequently reproduced compositions of 15th-century Netherlandish art. The wings of the triptych, dated precisely by the year 1561 painted across the tops of their exteriors, portray a cluster of donor portraits in a style contemporary to the mid-16th century and wholly distinct from that of the Lamentation depicted in the centre panel. The ornamented panels that adjoin the upper and lower edges of the centre panel’s original frame were probably added even later, perhaps in the 19th century.

In the Lamentation, Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus support Christ’s deposed body as the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalen look on in mourning. The gold stippled background and the curved frame along the panel’s upper edge create the impression that the figures are standing in a shallow niche.

Friedländer first attributed the prototype for this Lamentation to Hugo van der Goes in 1904, and his attribution has been almost unanimously accepted ever since.² Assuming that no autograph version had survived, Friedländer referred to a painting in Naples as one of the most faithful copies of Van der Goes’s lost work (fig. a).³ Destrée and Weale subsequently identified a fragment on canvas in Oxford’s Christ Church, which includes John, the Virgin Mary and a sliver of Christ’s body, as a remnant of the autograph painting by Van der Goes. Recent technical analysis has affirmed the autograph status of the canvas (fig. b).⁴ Whether the Oxford fragment constituted the sole original version by Van der Goes has more recently been questioned.⁵

The Amsterdam Lamentation should be considered one of the most faithful surviving copies after Van der Goes’s lost composition. It shares many salient features with the version in Naples, in which a detailed underdrawing, visible even to the naked eye, was carefully followed in the final execution of the work. Both the Amsterdam and Naples versions employ nearly the same colour scheme, facial expressions and drapery folds, and both agree in details such as the curving frame of the background niche, Nicodemus’s rose-shaped hatpin and the stream of blood running down Christ’s neck to his collarbone. The Amsterdam panel, however, is considerably larger than its counterpart and adds a streaming gilt halo around Christ’s head and stippling over the gold background.⁶ Several other copies abandon the niche in favour of a flat background, but are otherwise more or less comparable.⁷

The inner wings of the triptych include a total of eighteen donor portraits, nine male and nine female. The man kneeling at the prie-dieu in the left panel is flanked by two young men and six boys in the foreground, all presumably his sons. Behind them stands John the Evangelist, holding his chalice and making a gesture of blessing. In the right wing, the mother of the family is joined by her presumed daughters: four young women, one wearing a nun’s habit, and a row of four girls. The Virgin Mary stands holding the Christ Child behind the female donors. St Peter and Mary Magdalen stand in simple stone niches on the grisaille outer wings. The overall awkwardness of the figures on the wings – their stiffness and clumsy positioning – points to the work of a less than prominent artist. The anonymous Netherlandish painter cannot be specifically localised as either northern or southern, prior suggestions notwithstanding.⁸

While the original frames of the triptych could have been carved as early as the first half of the 16th century, the 1561 date on the wings suggests that they more likely belong to the second half of the century.⁹

The panels attached to the top and bottom of the central panel of the triptych do not, however, form part of the original object. These panels – adorned with profiles of antique gods, the coat of arms of the Guild of St Luke and an epitaph honouring the souls of Willem Gertz (d. 13 March 1534), his wife Stijntgen Dirck Claessens (d. 6 September 1531), Maria Willemsz (d. 5 April 1538) and Anna Willemsz (d. 14 September 1537) – differ in crucial respects from the triptych itself. The florid style of their carving does not accord with the simple frames around the painted panels, and their relatively poor state of conservation suggests that they have a distinct history, probably as the original frames of another memorial image. Indeed, it would be untypical for the patron who commissioned the wings of the triptych in 1561 (the year inscribed on the wings) to be erecting a memorial image to family members who had died some 20 or 30 years earlier.

As such, the epitaph has no bearing on the identification of the triptych’s donor figures. The portraits remain anonymous, and the painting’s traditional title, Gertz Memorial Triptych, must be rejected. The addition of the panels to the top and bottom of the Lamentation may well date to the 19th century, when the triptych was in the collection of the Dutch artist and self-professed admirer of medieval art Johannes Bosboom (1817-91).¹⁰

This Memorial Triptych is one of several 16th-century Netherlandish epitaphs that centre around the depiction of Christ’s deposed body and a throng of mourners. Examples include Bernard van Orley’s Haneton Triptych (c. 1521-22) and the epitaph of Philip van Hogesteyn (d. 1574) in Durham, painted by an anonymous artist.¹¹ The inclusion of the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalen in the composition extends the scene beyond the standard Deposition described in the gospels (Matthew 27:57-61; Mark 15:42-47; Luke 23:50-56; John 19:38-42) and highlights the contemplation of Christ’s suffering and the mystery of the Passion, two topical and common themes for a memorial image. It has even been suggested that the popularity of Van der Goes’s Lamentation derived from its use in funerary monuments, an intriguing but essentially speculative hypothesis.¹² Yet the use of extant and well-established compositions for epitaphs was almost certainly standard practice, as it allowed local workshops to produce monuments more cheaply and efficiently.¹³ The 1443 Edelheer Triptych in Louvain,¹⁴ a memorial to William Edelheer (d. 1439) and his family, provides a telling counterpart to the present painting, as its central panel is a careful copy after Rogier van der Weyden’s famous Deposition.

Dendrochronology indicates that the centre panel of the Amsterdam triptych could have been painted as early as 1480, suggesting that it was – in all likelihood – created prior to the two donor wings, which date from 1561. Given the significant difference in style and quality of execution between the wings and the centre panel, they should definitely be attributed to two different artists. Perhaps whoever commissioned the triptych purchased the pre-existing Lamentation panel independently, in advance of ordering the wings. But regardless, it is evident that the frame on the wings and the centre panel (excepting the later additions discussed above) form an original unit. The surviving 16th-century hinges binding the three panels together support this conclusion.

(Marissa Bass, updated in 2010)