Rogier van der Weyden: Master of Passions

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Rogier van der Weyden: Master of Passions

Recently at the new Museum Leuven (or Louvain), Belgium

By Scott Walker

The Descent from the Cross
(Click to see a zoomable scan from the Prado Museum website)

The title of a major exhibition organized this past autumn to inaugurate the new Museum in Leuven (Belgium), "Rogier van der Weyden: Master of Passions", may seem incongruous for such a measured artist, a decisive figure of Early Netherlandish painting. While in art the term passion may evoke Mediterranean drama of a Baroque Bernini, Rogier's genius was indeed to portray emotion in a contained state with the total self-mastery of his northern temperament, a singular gift recognized in him already in his own lifetime.

Northern Europe in the 15th century was deeply influenced by the mystical religious movement devotio moderna, exemplified by Thomas à Kempis and his Imitation of Christ, in which emotion and prayerful imagination of scenes from the life of Christ are encouraged in order to enhance one's feelings of being actually present as the sacred mysteries unfold. Rogier's religious figures suffer, mourn, bear witness or simply exist with dignified pathos, their controlled and restrained yet eminently expressive sentiments made real through subtle facial expressions, the dramatic twisting of hands and fingers, even the rhythmic torment of the folds of a garment.

The foremost example of Rogier's passionate pictorial skill can be found in his great early masterpiece, the Descent from the Cross of around 1435, now in Madrid's Prado Museum. Too delicate to be shipped abroad, the painting was represented in Leuven by a specially-made video montage. Rogier has chosen a quietly dramatic moment at the conclusion of Christ's violent passion to evoke a broad expression of the emotions of participants in the drama, stimulating in turn an affective response in the viewer.

Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimethea have removed the body of Christ from the cross and lower it carefully to the ground on a white shroud. Mary his Mother falls into a forlorn faint, supported by Saint John and a holy woman. Mary Magdalen anchors the composition on the right, her hands clasped in disconsolate despair. The figures are crowded into a shallow horizontal plane parallel to the surface before an abstract gold ground reminiscent of medieval icons, which serves to restrict the space further and concentrate the drama of the moment.

The curved forms of John and Mary Magdalen act as parentheses at each extremity of the composition, propelling the focus to the center. The symmetrical shapes of the body of Christ, drooped in a languid S, and his unconscious mother echo in dirgeful rhythm. Other curves repeated across the image unify and harmonize the figures and distill their desperate emotions. Rogier's lush colors are unimaginably rich and expressive; the vigorous details of the golden brocade worn by Nicodemus appear in luxurious contrast to the naked chill of the victim's body. Each pictorial element functions harmoniously to engender the viewer's vivid reaction. The visual language Rogier enunciated in this early work was so eloquent that it would be often imitated and copied, serving as a reference for generations of future artists, as seen in a very early (1443) copy of the work presented in Leuven.

Born in Tournai (Belgium) in 1400, Rogier van der Weyden trained under the most important painter of that city, Robert Campin (1378-1444), where he learned to master the new medium of oil painting. By 1435 Rogier had moved to Brussels. There he was named official city painter, a position created for him that he would hold for the rest of his life.

The Netherlands of Rogier's time was ruled by the Duchy of Burgundy, and Rogier often worked for Duke Philip the Good (d. 1467) and other Burgundian nobility, painting their portraits on command.

Saint Mary Magdalen Reading
(Click for a zoomable scan from the National Gallery, London)

Outstanding in a room filled with such portraits by Rogier and his shop, the diptych of Philippe of Croy from around 1460 is a superb example of the skills that put Rogier in such great demand by nobility from all over Europe. Now in the Royal Museum Antwerp, the portrait is three-quarter image of a thoughtful and prayerful young man. His serious mien endows him with a maturity beyond his years -Philippe of Croy was 25 when this was painted, and the sculptural head, modeled by shadows around the eyesockets and the chin (note the rounded protuberance of his Adam's apple), emerges incisively from the dark background. Around his neck are a series of gold chains, meticulously rendered in liquid light. A string of pearl beads in his joined hands also reflects light, as does the hilt of his sword.

The pendant panel, loaned from the Huntington Library in San Marino CA, pictures a youthful Madonna before an iconic gold background holding the naked Christ child. The infant stands on a brocade cushion and plays with the clasp of a book in his mother's hand. In the same room is a similar diptych with the portrait of Jean Gros praying to the nursing Madonna and her child, of around 1460 and now split between the Chicago Art Institute and the Tournai Museum. The distinctly modeled features of the nobleman's face, chin, eyes, neck captivate the viewer who is readily taken by the economy of Rogier's means to express his subject's character. Such paired devotional images are not merely portraits but are meant as a prayerful inducement for the viewer to enter into real contact with the sacred apparition.

Two stunning fragments presented in this show come from the early Brussels period of the artist's life, an image of Saint Mary Magdalen Reading, loaned from the London National Gallery, and the head of a man, identified as Saint Joseph, from Lisbon. The two wood panels have been sawn out of a larger altarpiece, probably executed for a Brussels church around 1438.

Mary Magdalen is portrayed seated on the floor on a red cushion, fully engrossed in her sacred text. Her acid green robe, highlighted with yellow, gathers around her body in abundant folds and is lined with luxurious grey fur. This outer garment covers a richly bejeweled gold brocade dress seen escaping around her feet. A symbolic alabaster perfume pot waits beside her. Strikingly realistic rows of shiny nails hold the parquet floor in place and add a staccato flourish to the otherwise tranquil image. To the left of the Magdalen is a bit of scarlet robe and one foot from a cropped kneeling figure, lost when the painted wooden panel was sawn apart. Through an open window beyond, a river can be seen flowing through the distant landscape while figures walk its banks.

Just behind the Magdalen is the bottom part of an upright figure holding a cane in one hand and a shiny string of beads in the other other. The second of the two fragments depicts the head of this truncated figure, clothed in red and blue robes. The wrinkled face of this benevolent Saint Joseph, an old man wearing a dark cap, is mottled with a stubbly grey beard. But it is his eloquently expressive eyes, delicately modeled by shadows, that reveal the force of character underlying this stalwart personality who gazes off with attentive sollicitude. From these two suggestive fragments, so vividly present, one can only imagine how the entire altarpiece might have introduced its viewer into fervent dialogue with its broader cast of sacred characters.

A small Pietà from around 1441, today in the Brussels Royal Museum, has been specially restored for this show, and the cleaning has revealed anew Rogier's mastery of color and shading to create atmosphere and mood. The viewer is drawn in close to the scene where an off-centered compact triangle is formed by John, garbed in a bunched red robe, and the mourning Virgin in dark blue who sorrowfully embraces her son's limp body. Her hands and face tenderly touch the corpse in gestures charged with pathos, while the lifeless fingers of Christ's hands dangle inertly in mute eloquence. A prayerful Mary Magdalen kneels in stifled grief to the right balancing the overall composition, joined to the others by the diagonal thrust of Christ's body. The golden glow of a rainbow sunset illuminates the horizon beyond the foot of the central vertical of the cross bestowing a first foreshadowing of Paschal hope on the desolate ambiance.

Saint Joseph
(Click for larger image from Art Knowledge News)

In 1450 Rogier traveled to Italy for the Jubilee year, and after his return to Brussels he painted a Virgin and Child with Four Saints, known as the Medici Virgin, for which he assumed the Italian convention of a Sacred Conversation. Today in Frankfurt at the Staedel Museum, the painting shows the Virgin holding her nursing infant while standing on a raised platform. A round tent, rendered in ghostly white, shields the Virgin, while two grisaille angels hold back the curtains of the ceremonial structure. The intricate gold brocade with a leafy pattern lining the inside of the tabernacle behind the Virgin sets her apart from her saintly visitors.

Descending the steps on the Virgin's right are Saints John the Baptist and Peter, and on her left Saints Cosmas and Damian. Peter holds the keys that are his identifying symbol, while John the Baptist is roughly clad and points to a text in a sacred book, perhaps a prophecy. Cosmas and Damian, physician saints, were patrons of Florence as well as of the Medici family, and they appear frequently in altarpieces for that city. Their faces are realistic, possibly portraits, unlike the stylized features of the other figures. Cosmas holds a beaker of specimen urine and Damian a surgical spatula. All the figures are arranged horizonally in a silent moment of static being, for there is no dynamic emotional interaction between them. Placed against an abstract gold ground, the shallow construction of their sacred conversation has no certain earthly setting. Vegetation and flowers in the foreground, the sole natural elements to the other-worldly apparition, are a painterly tour de force of detail and harmony. Light reflects off the central pewter vase holding irises and lilies, and other luminous reflections create the roundness of the medicinal beaker. The fur hat and cuffs of the physician saints are rendered with meticulous realism. At the bottom of the painted ledge enclosing the vision are three shields intended to identify the painting's destination. Only the central shield has been painted with the symbolic Florentine lily; the other two have been left blank, still awaiting the coat of arms of the painting's new owner.

The exhibition closes with a monumental triptych (three meters wide, two high) representing the Seven Sacraments, painted around 1440-45. The three panels, no longer in their original frame, represent the interior of a great basilica within whose all-engulfing architectural space contemporary figures administer and receive each of the church's seven sacraments. Rogier's visionary prowess has transformed an artistic challenge into a veritable theological treatise: a didactic yet engaging portrayal of the holy rituals, swaying belief by virtue of his dynamic representation. The formally abstract theme is metamorphosed by the compelling illustration of everyday existence. The figures, many of whom are evidently portraits, dress in Fifteenth-century finery as they attend to baptism, confirmation, confession in the left panel; and, on the right panel, ordination, matrimony, extreme unction. The largest central panel presents the eucharist celebrated behind a dramatic Crucifixion scene where a towering crucified Christ dominates the entire vast setting while below, his mother swoons in sorrow, supported by Saint John and accompanied by the holy women. Over each sacrament an angel unfurls a golden banner bearing an identifying inscription. The cool blue and grey of the architecture is dominated by the vivid red and blue hues of the actors in the foreground. The careful eye will delight in the raft of details the painter has offered his viewer to discover: the extravagant coifs of the women of the baptism and the stylishly pointed shoes worn by the godfather, like those of the groom of matrimony; the light reflecting off the shiny golden baptismal basin; a huddle of beggars clustering at the entrance of the church; abstract folds in the robes of the seated woman reading in the lower right panel, reminiscent of the Mary Magdalen image, and those of a minister's alb in extreme unction beside her; graceful pins fixing the white coifs of the women at the foot of the cross.

As Rogier's fame and popularity grew, his artistic influence spread as well, establishing him as one of the most influential artists of his time. Two generations of painters trained under him in his shop. His style became known all over Europe, through examples of his own original work, increasingly accessible thanks to the diffusion abroad of engravings of his paintings, but also from the work of his imitators. Rogier's paintings were still being copied more than a century after his death in 1464. Many such copies were presented in Leuven.

Along with his senior contemporary Jan Van Eyck (1390-1441), Rogier was instrumental in leading the art of painting in the Netherlands from medieval formalism to observant realism. But Master Rogier's unique contribution was his matchless ability to combine color and light, shapes and their arrangement in composition, a dramatic pose and subtle gestures in order to penetrate and expose the imagined passion of his holy characters, inviting his viewer to savor and then become part of a living sacred drama. Six centuries on, a discerning observer - believer or not - will not remain unaffected.

Catalogue: Rogier van der Weyden, 1400-1464, Master of Passions; Lorne Campbell, Jan Van der Stock; Waanders Publishers, Zwolle. With Fourteen essays and full catalogue of all works shown. 592 pages.

Scott Walker, a new contributor to Artcyclopedia, was trained as an art historian and lives in Paris.

Artists mentioned in the article:

Rogier van der Weyden

Gianlorenzo Bernini

Robert Campin

Jan Van Eyck

External links:

Museum Leuven, Belgium

Museum Leuven mini-site for Rogier van der Weyden: Master of Passions