Painted around 1480, this powerful and intensely moving Descent from the Cross by Hugo Van der Goes is an emblem of devotional piety and ranks among the most important examples of Early Netherlandish art to appear at auction in the modern era. Painted with tempera on a finely woven piece of linen textile (Tüchlein in German), it is a rare example of a technique employed in the fifteenth century, notably by painters of the southern Netherlands. It originally served as the left wing of a small diptych, the other half of which is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (fig. 1), and its rediscovery in 1950 by the foremost specialist of Netherlandish painting, Max Jakob Friedländer (1867–1958), remains one of the most significant art historical finds of the twentieth century.
Right: Fig. 1: Hugo van der Goes, Lamentation of Christ, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin / Art Resource, NY
Hugo van der Goes was a key figure of the early Northern Renaissance. His distinguished reputation, like those of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden who preceded him, was widespread. Though his career spanned only about fifteen years, his unique and innovative style was enormously influential, impacting both contemporary artists and those of subsequent generations. Born in 1440, he joined the Ghent painter’s guild in 1467 under the sponsorship of Justus van Ghent, a close friend whom he would surpass as the leading artist in his native town by about 1470. Here, his talents were celebrated, and he regularly welcomed private and civic commissions, including decorations for public pageants. His prestige, however, reached far beyond Ghent. In 1468 and around 1475 he received invitations from the towns of Bruges and Leuven, the former so that he might create decorations to celebrate the wedding of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and Margaret of York, and in the second case to assist in the inventorying and perhaps completion of paintings left unfinished in the studio of the recently deceased Dieric Bouts. Around 1475, he entered an Augustinian priory, the Red Cloister (Rood Klooster), near Brussels as a lay brother (frater conversus), giving up many of his worldly possessions to live a more contemplative life. He still enjoyed special privileges and received permission to paint and to welcome distinguished visitors, such as the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. It was also here that he gradually descended into madness, and his daily life was filled with bouts of anxiety and depression. As described by a fellow member of the monastery, Gaspar Ofhuys, Van der Goes tragically died in 1482 following a trip he made to Cologne.
In this vivid, arresting and harrowing image, the lifeless, slumping body of Christ, placed both frontally and diagonally, serves as a visual anchor. Each corporeal feature—his muscular torso and arms, the gaping wounds marking his chest and hands, his partially opened mouth, and the orbits of his half-closed eyes turned upwards—is subtly modeled. Around his head, which is crowned with thorns, is a halo of slender golden rays. Surrounding him are three men who have helped bring him down from the cross on which he expired. At the upper left is probably the Pharisee Nicodemus mentioned in the Gospel of John, and the richly dressed man supporting Christ's lower body and the man with the angular face near Christ's right arm is certainly Joseph of Arimathea, whose vibrant red and green garments contrast with the body’s pale coloring. In the right background, set before a sloping green hillock, is a servant leaning on a rung of the ladder with one hand and with the other clutching the nails from the cross. The balding man in the upper left bears a remarkable resemblance with the Flemish churchman, Joris van der Paele (circa 1370–1443), who commissioned Jan van Eyck's celebrated Virgin and Child with SS. Donatian and George and the Donor, Canon van der Paele, painted circa 1434–1436 and today in the Groeningemuseum, Bruges (fig. 2). After or slightly before his death, the wealthy van der Paele donated the painting to Saint Donatian's Cathedral, the largest place of worship in Bruges during the fifteenth century, where from the t.mes it was displayed it enjoyed great fame. It is almost certain that Van der Goes would have seen it during his visit to the city in the late 1460s. Van der Peale was known throughout the Netherlands, and his likeness appears in paintings by other artists even well into the sixteenth century; painters such as Adriaen Isenbrandt, for example, represented him as a kneeling figure in his Mass of Saint Gregory.1
The present lot was originally the left wing of Van der Goes’ diptych known as the Small Deposition. Its companion is the aforementioned Lamentation (fig. 1) in Berlin.2 That painting, of the same dimensions and executed in the same medium on fine canvas, shows the sorrowful Virgin at the center in blue, facing in the direction of Christ’s body with a down-turned head and hands crossed on her chest. She is surrounded by a group of similarly grieving figures, Saint John and the Three Marys who partake in the mother of Christ’s suffering and balance the composition of the diptych as a complete devotional image. Modern photographic technology has revealed a faint grid pattern on both canvases, suggesting that perhaps a drawing was used to carefully delineate the composition on the pieces of fabric.
Although each canvas can function independently, as a pair they form a visual and integrated whole. Thematically they relate to one of Hugo van der Goes' most replicated images—the Large Deposition known mostly from a surviving fragment and numbers of later copies, and reflected in a drawing in the Albertina in Vienna (fig. 3), which has its compositional roots in Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.3
Like the larger, lost interpretation of the theme, the Small Deposition diptych was relatively popular and gave rise to a number of copies, slavish transcriptions and derivations which provide test.mes nt to the widespread and enduring influence not only of the present image but also of Van der Goes’ works in general. Perhaps the most famous example inspired by the present work and its companion is Hans Memling’s Deposition diptych of circa 1485-1490 (figs. 4 and 5). Even though it is not a point for point copy, Memling’s composition mimics Van der Goes’ close-up, half-length, and innovative rendering in two sections of the sacred subject.
Right: Fig. 5. Hans Memling, The Holy Women and Saint John, right panel from the Deposition Diptych, Royal Chapel of Granada / Bridgeman Images
At some point in their history the two wings of Van der Goes’ Small Deposition were unhinged and went their separate ways. Even though the Berlin canvas was known since the nineteenth century, when in was in the Panciatichi collects ion in Florence, the present painting was thought lost until its rediscovery in the mid-twentieth century. As has been noted, prior to its publication by Friedländer in 1950, its existence was suggested only through copies and scholarly hypotheses. In 1913, Grete Ring was among the first to postulate its existence, basing her argument on a sixteenth-century copy on linen canvas in the Lindenau Museum, Altenburg (fig. 6)4 at one t.mes attributed to Justus van Ghent. Other later copies have been traced to the Bargello in Florence5 and the Harvard Art Museums.6
That the present painting and its pendant survive to this day is remarkable indeed. As indicated above, both are painted in an early Netherlandish technique consisting of distemper laid onto fine woven linen widely available in Flanders at the t.mes of Van der Goes. The canvas was usually prepared with a glue sizing so lightly applied that the threads of the cloth remained clearly visible. While this technique was widespread in the Netherlands, because of its delicacy, surviving examples of it from the fifteenth century are excessively rare. With respect to Hugo van der Goes, apart from the two valves of the Small Deposition (the present work and its companion in Berlin) and the Virgin Mary and St. John in the Christ Church Picture Gallery at Oxford (acc. no. JBS 231), a surviving fragment of the mostly destroyed Large Deposition, few other examples are known by Van der Goes, who seems to have employed this technique regularly.7 Well-known Tüchleins by other early Netherlandish artists include an Adoration of the Magi by Justus van Ghent dated circa 1465 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art8 and The Annunciation by Dieric Bouts dated circa 1450-1455 in the J. Paul Getty Museum.9
The cold and wet climate of northern Europe was not forgiving with respect to these canvases. Van Mander even lamented during his lifet.mes that many such works “have been ruined by damp in the walls, a very common malady here in the Netherlands.”10 Tuchleins that were sent to warmer and drier climes of Southern Europe such as Italy, where there was a great enthusiasm for such pictures (Andrea Mantegna and his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini adopted this technique when painting a number of major works), however, tended to survive in relatively good condition. Such geographical movement could explain the survival of van der Goes’ Descent from the Cross and its companion. The fact that the Berlin canvas was formerly in the Panciatichi collects ion in Florence would suggest that both paintings traveled south as a diptych before they were separated.
In terms of style, the painting under discussion can be dated to circa 1480, thus placing it in the last years of the artist’s life. Even though it is difficult to formulate a precise chronology for Van der Goes’ output, as there are no signed and dated paintings or drawings on which to base it, there are a few core examples of the work he produced during his brief career that can serve as benchmarks. The first is the artist’s Adoration of the Magi, also known as the Montforte Altarpiece, which dates to about 1470,11 followed by his Adoration of the Shepherds, also known as the Portinari Triptych, which was painted in the mid-1470s. Both of these masterpieces point to the possibility that Van der Goes made a trip to Italy at some earlier point of his career.12 The last in this group is his famed Death of the Virgin, which can be chronologically situated around 1481-1482 (fig. 7);13 in that work the faces of the Apostles can be likened to the figure in the upper right background of the present painting. When associating these examples, Van der Goes' stylistic progression comes more clearly into focus. As his career advanced, he turns away from Italianate influences and a more finished and fluid style inspired by Van Eyck and moves toward a more planar treatment of space, and a more summarized narrative, immediate in its impact. All these characteristics are exemplified in The Descent from the Cross; in it, superfluous details are discarded in favor of nearly abstracted form and intense emotion, a visual interpretation had already been explored by Rogier van der Weyden in his diptych of the Crucifixion with the Mourning Saint John the Evangelist Mourning in Philadelphia (fig. 8).14 Neither painting exhibits extreme movements or gestures, the background is suggested by areas of black, green and gray, and the narration is essentially restricted to the weight of the Savior’s traumatized body before or after it is lowered and, in the case of The Descent, to the presence of the ladder.
Supporting a later dating within Van der Goes' relatively small oeuvre is the account of his years as a lay brother in the Red Cloister, a monastery in which the austere rules of self-abnegation and piety were predicated on such texts as Thomas à Kempis’ Prayers and Meditations on the Life of Christ. This modern form of collects ive or private devotion encouraged a direct communion with the Son of God through fervent prayer and self-abnegation. Often, images assisted in eliciting such an experience, as exemplified in the present work, the composition of which removes all inconsequential details so as not to distract from what is essential in the final episode of Christ’s Passion requiring an intimate complicity on the part of the viewers,15 who are meant to participate in the scene as if they find themselves at the base of the cross. Additionally, the use of relatively inexpensive pigments and supports lent themselves to a more sober color scheme and matte surface texture that was entirely suited to the solemn subject matter which in turn accorded with the austerity of Hugo van der Goes’ life in the priory and the psychological pain he was enduring as his life was coming to a close.
Please note this painting has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition 'Hugo van der Goes' to be held at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin from April - July 2022 and the Groeningemuseum, Bruges from September - December 2022.
1. Oil on panel, 72 by 56 cm, circa 1515-1530, Madrid, Museo del Prado, inv. no. P001943.
2. Tempera on canvas, 53.6 by 38.7 cm, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, inv. no. 1622.
3. Oil on panel, 204.5 by 261.5 cm, before 1443, Madrid, Museo del Prado, inv. no. P002825.
4. Canvas, 57 by 36.5 cm, Altenburg, Lindenau-Museum.
5. Ring 1913, p. 87, reproduced.
6. Oil on panel, 26.7 by 21 cm, Cambridge, Harvard Art Museums, inv. no. 1939.99.
7. Wolfthal 1989, p. 34. She records a surviving seven canvases by Hugo van der Goes.
8. Distemper on canvas, 109.2 by 160 cm, circa 1465, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 41.190.21.
9. Distemper on linen, 90by 74.6 cm, circa 1450-1455, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 85.PA.24.
10. Wolfthal 1989, p. 34.
11. Oil on panel, 147.2 by 241.4 cm, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, inv. no. 1718.
12. Oil on panel, 253 by 586 cm, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, inv. no. 3191-3193.
13. Oil on panel, 147.8 by 122.5 cm, Bruges, Groeningemuseum, inv. no. 0.204
14. For further discussion of this comparison, see Marrow 1986, p. 156-157.
15. Wolfthal 1989, p. 35.