The Virgin Crowned by the Infant Christ

Entry

The wax-lined support of this painting is made up of three horizontally joined strips of canvas of different weaves. The strip at the top is made up of two pieces vertically joined, measuring 14.5-15.0 cm in height. They are joined together and to the main, middle canvas by lining. The central canvas is a near square, 105.7-107 cm high. The tacking edges at the left, right and bottom have been cut away. It is stitched to the bottom strip, which is 14-15.5 cm high. The central canvas has a double ground of a layer of chalk, and above, one of lead white mixed with black and earth pigments. The upper piece has a single ground of a layer of chalk. There is cusping towards all the edges of the central canvas apart from at the top. The imprint of the original strainer, about 6-8 cm wide, is evident at all its edges except the top where it is only 3-4.5 cm wide, indicating that the canvas has been reduced by 2-3 cm. No underdrawing has been detected. Dilute, brown undermodelling is present beneath the sleeve of the Virgin with sketchy, white brushstrokes to indicate the folds. The composition was built up working from the back using reserves. The paint surface is smooth and opaque, yet applied thinly with passages of wet-in-wet blending.

There are a good many pentiments discernible in infrared reflectography; most likely these were not all made during the same campaign. A) Pentiments made during the initial campaign: the Virgin’s forehead was enlarged; the cloth on which the Christ Child stands was extended at its base; the instrument-playing angel’s profile, proper left arm and right shoulder have been adjusted, and the foreshortening of his proper right arm has been reduced; the fall of drapery on his back was lowered. B) Pentiments made at a subsequent stage: the fall of the Virgin’s veil was reduced; her lowered look to the left was altered to a frontal gaze; more of her chest and bosom was displayed; the fingers of her proper right hand were extended, where more of the white cloth was first depicted; the extent of Christ’s hair and that of the instrument-playing angel was enlarged. The red drapery below and to the left of the viola da gamba was overpainted when the lower strip of canvas was added, at which point, too, the clouds were expanded without reserves.⁵

Three main issues concerning the present painting have been the cause of confusion, and clarification is set out in the following order. The iconography unusually combines at least two separate aspects of Christian belief. The attribution of the work, which has been in the Rijksmuseum collection since the early nineteenth century, has only been settled in recent decades. Conservation has exposed the problematic character of its composition due to old interventions; however, this does not jeopardize the essential integrity of this physically complex work inspired as it most probably was by a lost painting by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641).

The description in the 1818 sale catalogue confined itself to an account of the image, and in the early years at the museum, the painting was described as the Holy Family. From 1858, the subject was given as the Glorification of Mary, although there is no such subject derived from the Bible or scriptural exegesis.⁶ The 1976 museum catalogue described it as the Apothesis [sic] of the Virgin. The key to the main intended meaning lies in the rubric to Schelte Adamsz Bolswert’s (1584/88-1659) engraving after a lost painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).⁷ This engraving shows the crowned Virgin with her Child in her arms, trampling on a serpent coiled round the globe of the world. Christ points down to the serpent. The rubric to the print reads ‘Ipsa conteret caput tuum. genesis 3’, this is a reference to the sentence (in the Vulgate) in Genesis 3:15, in which God admonishes the serpent for beguiling Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and states that ‘she will bruise your head’.

As Mâle relates, the gender of the pronoun was disputed between Catholics and Protestants. The former favoured the feminine reading, which was taken to refer to the ‘new Eve’, the Virgin, whereas Protestants opted for the masculine, which was understood to allude to Christ.⁸ Rubens’s interpretation depended on the feminine reading, while Van Dyck opted for the alternative.⁹ In the museum picture the now faint serpent on the globe is not actually suppressed. But it may be understood that the Virgin and Child participate in subduing it, though not, for instance, as deliberately and specifically as is shown in Caravaggio’s Palafrenieri altarpiece (Galleria Borghese), in which the serpent is trampled on.¹⁰

In the Rijksmuseum painting it may seem that as much emphasis, if not more, is placed on the second intended meaning conveyed by the Christ Child crowning the Virgin with a wreath of white and red roses. In Rubens’s paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin,¹¹ angels offer her wreaths, and in the unused modello at St Petersburg for an Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin,¹² the risen Christ crowns his Mother with a chaplet of red and white roses. But no precedent has been found for the Infant Christ’s playing this role. The roses refer to the traditional concept of the Virgin as the mystic rose, the rose without thorns; she is both the rosa candida (white rose) and the rosa rubicunda (red rose). The chaplet alludes to the Crown of Thorns and the Virgin’s grief at Christ’s sacrifice.¹³ McGrath’s interpretation differs; in her view Christ crowns the Virgin as a bride as she enters heaven.¹⁴ Rubens introduced a choir of music-making angels in the St Petersburg modello; an example such as this and the Netherlandish tradition, referred to by Vey,¹⁵ of the Virgin and Child accompanied by music-making angels, would have been a reason for Willeboirts Bosschaert’s introduction of the angel playing the viola da gamba and his singing companion.

Cardinal-Archbishop Federico Borromeo (1564-1631) suggested that the Virgin Immaculate should be depicted ‘seated in some great brilliance’ (in magno aliquo splendore sedente).¹⁶ And in the present work the Virgin and Child are set against the brightness of Christ’s radiance. Healy points out the association of a related composition with the Immaculate Conception,¹⁷ and no doubt this was in the mind of certain devout viewers, though this is not the subject of the Rijksmuseum picture.¹⁸

The museum was doubtful about the painting’s early ascription to Van Dyck, with which appellation it had been a gift from King Willem I. The 1853 museum catalogue first associated the painting with the Spanish School; but it was Bredius, some thirty years later, who proposed the Madrid artist José Antolinez (1635-1675) as the painter, which attribution has been retained in all the museum’s printed catalogues. Some art historians concerned with Antolinez have accepted the attribution,¹⁹ although Angulo Iñiguez omitted it from his monograph of 1957,²⁰ perhaps because he accepted Salazar’s earlier attribution to Miguel Manrique that was followed by Gaya Nuño in 1958.²¹ Ten years later Diáz Padrón recognized it as the work of Willeboirts Bosschaert,²² and was to publish a version in the Prague National Gallery as also by him.²³ Heinrich, in his recent monograph on the artist, accepts the Rijksmuseum picture as the prime original, and describes the Prague picture as a workshop replica.²⁴ In fact there are differences between the two paintings and weaknesses in the Amsterdam picture that point to later interventions. Two other likely workshop replicas are recorded in the RKD.²⁵

Conservation undertaken in 2001-03 revealed many pentiments in the Rijksmuseum painting. The support was not assembled as a whole before it was painted. X-radiographs of the two pieces of canvas, which make up the upper strip (showing only ‘sky’), show that they are fragments from another painting. They are fixed to the central canvas by lining, and thus subsequent to the artist’s work. The bottom strip (showing lower part of globe and of the angel’s leg) was stitched to the central canvas; as the paint along the latter’s edge was already dry, it broke up during the process, from which it can be inferred that the stitching took place sometime after the paint was applied.²⁶ These additions would thus have been made at different times.

Wallert and Tauber believe that the outlines of the figures in both the Amsterdam and Prague pictures result from tracing from the same cartoon.²⁷ It may be that the Rijksmuseum support bore much of the beginnings of Willeboirts Bosschaert’s painting campaign, which included the major alteration to the white cloth on which Christ stands. Then, it may be surmised, after having turned to a second support, and completing the Prague version (in which no pentiments are visible to the naked eye), he returned to his first version and made small alterations to it (including bestowing a frontal gaze to the Virgin and reducing the fall of her veil).²⁸ The other studio variants might have been made at about the same time. At some later stage, perhaps even after the artist's death, the lower part of the Rijksmuseum painting may well have been damaged and then replaced by stitching on the replacement strip of canvas, on which the design was repeated although allowing for a simplified rendering of the red drapery. The additional strip at the top would have been applied at a later stage.

As Heinrich suggests, the composition was inspired by Van Dyck. Vey believes that his original is lost; he identifies it with the large picture Matthijs Musson offered Princess Amalia van Solms in 1645: ‘A Madonna painting by Anthony van Dyck with two angels; one plays a lute the other a violin, high 5 feet one inch, wide 4 feet and a half [145 x 128 cm] without a frame.’²⁹ Extant are two versions that accord with this description, neither of which is accepted by Vey; Stewart believes that one of these, with more or less the same dimensions, is by Willeboirts Bosschaert.³⁰ Both versions show prominently the globe of the world and the serpent. The Rijksmuseum composition is far more compact; nevertheless, Van Dyck’s lost composition, or the extant derivations – including the prints after it³¹ – could well have been influential in its creation.

Heinrich dates the Amsterdam picture between 1646 and 1648 which, in view of what happened to the support, should be taken as referring to the central component. The face of the singing angel is similar to that of the singing nymph in the Aschaffenburg Rinaldo and Armida, as he observed.³² Christ’s gesture of crowning is similar, but in reverse, to the putto crowning Amor in Willeboirts Bosschaert’s Love Triumphant, ex-Mauritshuis.³³

Gregory Martin, 2022