Triptych with the Adoration of the Magi (centre panel), the Donor and his Six Sons with St Jerome (inner left wing), the Donor’s Wife and her Seven Daughters with St Catherine of Alexandria (inner right wing), St Christopher (outer left wing) and St Antony Abbot (outer right wing)

Entry

The centre panel of this triptych of 1517 shows the adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2:11). The Virgin is seated in the centre of the scene with the Christ Child on her lap. The oldest king is kissing Christ’s right hand, while the younger one, depicted in profile, is proffering a goblet of myrrh, which is an allusion to Christ’s divinity. Both motifs are found in adorations by Geertgen tot Sint Jans,⁸ and Jacob Cornelisz used them in one version of the woodcut series of The Life of the Virgin of 1507 (fig. a).⁹

On the left wing are the donor with his six sons and Jerome, his patron saint. One of the boys is wearing a white shroud, signifying that he had died before the painting was made. The man’s wife is depicted on the right wing with St Catherine of Alexandria and seven daughters, the smallest of whom, on the left, is also wearing a shroud. At the tops of the wings are the donors’ coats of arms. Painted in grisaille on the outer wings are St Christopher on the left and St Antony Abbot on the right, and two more coats of arms.

Several attempts have been made to identify the donors on the wings. Back in 1926 Sterck suspected that they were members of the Heereman family. He linked the woman’s coat of arms to the Ramp family, which is supported by the research presented below.¹⁰ In 1993, Dudok van Heel again associated the arms with the old Amsterdam family of Heereman.¹¹ He identified the quarterings as (1) Heereman, (2) Van Hollen, (3) Van Zeller and (4) Baerland, and the woman’s arms of alliance on the right wing as (1) Heereman and (2) unknown. However, since the coats proved to be later overpaints, possibly dating from the 18th century, Dudok van Heel suggested in 1996 on the basis of genealogical research that the triptych had been made for the Amsterdam apothecary Claes Bouwesz Cat (?-after 1536) and his second wife Volckgen Jansdr (before 1489-1551).¹² Although the visible coats of arms are indeed later overpaints, examination with infrared reflectography clearly shows that the division of the shields and devices in the fields of the woman’s arms had already been planned in the underdrawing stage, although there it was smaller and hung vertically rather than diagonally (fig. b).¹³ The later overpaint made it a little larger to match the man’s quartered arms, which were painted at the same time. The man’s original coat, which can be seen beneath the surface of the paint (fig. c), probably consists only of the Heereman arms, although the X-radiographs are a little unclear on this point. Although it proved impossible to detect an underdrawing of the man’s coat of arms, and since X-radiographs failed to provide any additional information, the underdrawing of the woman’s arms makes it clear that the couple must indeed be members of the Heereman family.

Although there is no couple in the family tree for this period who are known for certain to have had six sons and seven daughters, there is a possibility that the man is Peter Ghijsbertsz Heereman (May 1469 - between February 1539/1541) and the woman his first wife, whose name is not known.¹⁴ The coats of arms on the outer wings, which are original and not overpainted, are those of the Heereman family on the left wing and an unidentified mark on the right wing.

The overpainting of the arms on the fronts of the wings may have been ordered by Frederik Jacob Heereman van Zuydtwijck (1663-1745), who might have had his family portraits enhanced in an attempt to gain entry to the knightage of the province of Gelderland. The male coat of arms on the triptych was augmented with three quarterings belonging to Gelderland families, possibly as a result of Frederik’s marriage to Elisabeth Catharina van Scherpenzeel (1674-1720), who came from an old family of Gelderland nobility. He was buried in the Church of the Clarissenkerk (Church of the Poor Clares) in Roermond in 1745, and there is a suspicion that the triptych was taken to Italy from a church or monastery in Roermond at the end of the 17th or beginning of the 18th century, for in 1792 it was in a Franciscan friary near Messiera.

There may be some uncertainty about the identity of the donors, but there is none at all about the attribution to Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen. Stylistically, there are many points of correspondence with other works that are fairly securely attributed to him, such as the St Jerome Altarpiece of 1511 in Vienna,¹⁵ and the epitaph with The Nativity of 1512.¹⁶ Various aspects of the technique are also his, such as the almost hatched manner of painting with a small, stiff brush and thick, sturdy paint. He also enclosed almost all of the contours with dark brown paint, and the palette is fairly turbid. The underdrawing, too, corresponds to many of the works by Jacob Cornelisz examined with infrared reflectography, and betrays a crabbed hand of the kind described by Jacobowitz and Stepanek in connection with his woodcuts as ‘gnarled and frequently disorganised’.¹⁷ He consistently used more hatching in the underdrawing than seems necessary for preparing the specific passage.

The architecture on the wings does not match up with that of the centre panel, and there are also differences in colour between them, as well as physical discrepancies.¹⁸ It is therefore not inconceivable that the wings were attached to the centre panel later, although the technical and stylistic unity of the wings and the central panel, as well as the comparable underdrawings, indicate that the wings are autograph as well, and cannot have been attached to the centre panel long after 1517.

There are three other versions of the centre panel, dated 1520, 1536 and 1537, the first of which was regarded as autograph by Friedländer.¹⁹

(Daantje Meuwissen)