Christ on the Way to Calvary

Entry

Christ’s ascent to Calvary is briefly told in all four Gospels: Matthew 27:31-32; Mark 15:20-21; Luke 23:26, 28, 32; and John 19:16-17. Following a by then well-established tradition, Jacob Jordaens shows Christ beneath the cross, the base of which is held by Simon of Cyrene. The Saviour passes by St Veronica, who proffers the holy handkerchief or veil, as the Virgin weeps nearby.⁵

The painting was offered for sale in 1969 by the Dutch Province of the Society of Jesus, as coming from the Sint-Franciscus Xaveriuskerk, otherwise known as the Krijtberg, in Amsterdam. The Krijtberg was in fact the name of the foremost of a row of three houses on the Singel which was bought for the Jesuits in 1650, and converted into a hidden church; it opened 1 January 1654.

The general assumption has been that Jordaens’s painting was commissioned to occupy the space above the high altar of this hidden church, although it was apparently first recorded there only in 1936 when it was published as the work of Jordaens.⁶ This provenance has now been questioned by Schillemans⁷ and Van Eck⁸ on the grounds that it is smaller than the three other altarpieces of 1656 and 1657, all of the same size, which came from the Krijtberg,⁹ and which, following Jesuit practice, would have been rotated above the high altar in accordance with the liturgical year.¹⁰

The Rijksmuseum picture has generally been dated between 1655 and 1660 on stylistic grounds. In 1656 Father Thomas Dekens, Provincial of the Flemish-Belgian Province, listed four Jesuit missionaries in Amsterdam.¹¹ Other sources allow us to identify the hidden churches at which three of them officiated: Peeter Laurensz (1588-1664) at the Krijtberg; Hendrik Alckemade van Nydenborch (1613-1680) at the Keyserskroon Zaaier and August van Teijlingen (d. 1669) at the Paapegaai. Before all of these were officially shut in 1708, the Paapegaai on the Kalverstraat was transferred to the regular clergy on Father Van Teijlingen’s death in 1669.¹² Van Eck, presumably following Allard,¹³ believed that the Jordaens was painted for the Zaaier and proposed that it was transferred from there to the Krijtberg when the Zaaier was wrested from the Jesuits in 1669.

In support of Van Eck’s hypothesis is the fact that, according to De Bruyn, the Krijtberg Quellinus came from the Zaaier¹⁴ (having fortuitously had the correct measurements for its new home). But it has to be said that in our present state of knowledge there is no means of knowing if the early history of the Jordaens was similar. This might be the case, but of the four Jesuits discussed by Dekens only the building activity of Laurensz at the Krijtberg is mentioned – it was criticized for its extravagance. A discrepancy in size of 27 and 16 cm in height and width could have been made good by a framing element, and could be explained by – a remote possibility – human error.

Laurensz came from Mechelen and was one of the most prominent Jesuit fathers in the northern Netherlands. He had been active in Amsterdam since 1628, following three years spent at the Jesuit church in Breda.¹⁵ Only one of the Krijtberg altarpieces can perhaps be associated with him. The Vision of St Ignatius at Storta, apparently signed and dated 1656 by the otherwise unknown P.N. Bosch, derives from Abraham Bloemaert’s lost altarpiece for the Jesuit College at ’s-Hertogenbosch,¹⁶ which Laurensz might have known when he was at nearby Breda.

The commission to Jordaens could have come direct from Amsterdam or via the Jesuits in Antwerp. The Father Superior of the Dutch Jesuit mission in 1652 was Frans van der Meersch, followed in 1656 by Adriaan Cools. The Provincials at the Flemish-Belgian Province in the 1650s, all Antwerp born, were Joan Engelgrave, appointed 1652, Thomas Dekens from 1654, and Johan van Renterghem from 1657.¹⁷

From Jordaens’s standpoint it can be said that while he worked extensively for Catholic religious orders, the Ascent to Calvary is seemingly his only known Jesuit commission. He had had contact with the United Provinces since at least his first documented visit there in 1632. By 1649 work on his most important Dutch commission – for the Oranjezaal in the Huis ten Bosch – was in contemplation. In 1661 he received a commission to execute a painting for the Amsterdam Town Hall.

The Rijksmuseum picture, of which there is a studio variant in reverse in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam,¹⁸ appears to be Jordaens’s only treatment of the subject. It was carefully planned with the components reserved and apparently only one pentiment (in the base of the yellow garment of the horseman) and one unexplained shape beneath Christ’s robe and the soldier’s arm. A drawing in the Pushkin Museum¹⁹ may be his earliest extant consideration of the composition. It concentrates on the suffering of Christ as the cross is pressed down on his stumbling body by a Roman soldier and a Jew. A second compositional drawing in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (Mass.),²⁰ shows Jordaens alleviating Christ’s suffering by introducing the figure of Simon of Cyrene. As D’Hulst has pointed out, the artist most likely had turned to Paul Pontius’s (1603-1658) print of 1632 after a design by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)²¹ to develop his ideas further: the pose of Simon and the introduction of St Veronica, the Virgin, and St John result probably from Jordaens’s study of it. He continued to modify the design before executing the painting chiefly by abandoning the two tormenters shown pressing down the cross and replacing them with one of the thieves and an executioner carrying tools. For the second thief – difficult to identify, if not altogether absent in the Fogg Art Museum sheet – he turned, as D’Hulst pointed out, to Rubens’s altarpiece for the Sint-Pieter en Pauluskerk in the Benedictine monastery of Afflighem, installed in 1637 (see SK-A-344).²² The thief in the foreground being marched forward by the soldier in armour is evidently inspired, though in reverse, by the group in the left foreground in that altarpiece. Jordaens must have seen it, or drawings for, or related to, it (in two of which – albeit recently doubted as autograph – the thieves are being marched to the right).²³

The placement of the three horsemen was not inspired by Rubens; Jordaens may have developed the motif from Dürer’s two prints of the Way to Calvary, one of which also includes an executioner carrying a ladder with his head between the rungs in similar subsidiary role in the procession.²⁴ The idea, also found in earlier works other than Dürer’s, was adapted by Otto van Veen (1556-1624) in his picture in Brussels.²⁵

Two head studies by Jordaens of an old man²⁶ and a young woman in three-quarter profile²⁷ have also been associated by D’Hulst²⁸ with preparation for the altarpiece. De Haan believes that the drawing for the young woman need not have been specifically for this St Veronica, whose hair is decorated in the painting, but should be connected with the shepherdess in the Adoration of the Shepherds at Frankfurt of 1653,²⁹ and that the study for the old man could have served equally well for the shepherd at the left of the Lyons Adoration of the Shepherds³⁰ as for Simon of Cyrene. It has to be said that in none of the cases (nor in others she cites) is either drawing exactly replicated; they could rather have served as Jordaens’s starting points and for reference.

The horseman to the right wears what Jordaens took for a rabbi’s headdress as depicted for instance in the Christ Among the Doctors³¹ of 1663 at Mainz. His jowly features are also deployed as a characteristic of one of the doctors there. The physiognomy of Christ is like that in The Vision of St Bruno,³² formerly in the Bode-Museum, Berlin, and in the Copenhagen Christ Blessing the Little Children,³³ where the mother, seen in profile with her hand raised, also recalls the Virgin in the Ascent to Calvary.

The Rijksmuseum picture – as an altarpiece – was meant to be seen from a distance, and this might explain the rather hard silhouettes of the horsemen and their horses. Some studio participation here and in the rising hill towards Golgotha is quite possible; otherwise the altarpiece can be considered autograph, even allowing for the less than happy appearance of Christ’s robe probably due to its subsequent, unrecorded mistreatment.

Gregory Martin, 2022