UNFOLDING THE RICH HISTORY OF A PAINTING

by Joyce Lovelace

Around 1460, the Flemish master Rogier van der Weyden painted a tenderly maternal Mary holding the infant Jesus, who playfully grasps a clasp of a finely bound volume, probably a Book of Hours. In its present-day home at The Huntington, this exquisite Madonna and Child is a jewel among jewels, and though perhaps not well known to most visitors, it is a highlight of the holdings, on par with such iconic works as Pinkie or Blue Boy.

It has also seemed something of a glorious anomaly here: a masterpiece of 15th-century Netherlandish art in a collection noted for strength in secular British and French art of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Underscoring its contextual isolation, the painting has up to now hung with the rest of the Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Collection in the west wing of the Library, where the display focused on its successful cleaning and conservation by the Getty Museum.

Lately out on loan, however, this significant work has been presented in a richly revealing new light — or more accurately, an old one.

The Huntington’s Madonna and Child, ca.1460, reunited with Philippe de Croÿ.  Huntington Art Collections and
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

Madonna and Child (or Virgin and Child, as it is alternately known) originated as the left half of a diptych--a two-panel painting hinged to open and close like a book. The complete object could stand open on a table or altar in a private chapel, or even in the private chamber of its owner. In the last years of his life, Rogier (1399/1400–1464) developed a type of “devotional” diptych that combined an image of the Virgin Mother and Child with a facing portrait of the patron who had commissioned the painting. Considered among his finest works, they were intended to aid intense prayer.

The Huntington’s picture is an example of this important genre, paired with a likeness of a young Belgian nobleman named Philippe de Croÿ, identifiable by his family arms painted on the reverse of his portrait. As with many multipanel paintings over the centuries, the two halves became separated, probably in the course of trade, and the de Croÿ portrait is today in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Royal Fine Arts Museum) in Antwerp, which acquired it in 1841. Arabella Huntington purchased Madonna and Child in 1907, and two years after her death in 1924 it became part of the memorial collection that her husband Henry established in her name.

Shown together once during the 20th century, in a 1927 exhibition of Flemish and Belgian art at Burlington House, London, the two paintings were recently reunited in “Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych,” which opened in November 2006 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and recently concluded at the Royal Fine Arts Museum. The first exhibition devoted to the subject, it presented 36 diptychs from the 1400s and 1500s by leading artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Michel Sittow.

“Rogier is one of the great painters of the 15th century, and also one of the most influential,” says John Oliver Hand, curator of northern Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery and an organizer of the show. “He is a supremely rational artist, very careful, intricate, wonderfully precise. He’s also a master of composition. He knows what he wants to do, and he does things for a reason. There’s a kind of abstract elegance to the design of his paintings; they’re very linear.” The combination of Madonna and Child and Philippe de Croÿ is, he says, a superb example of the master’s painterly skill. Displayed in a gallery along with other magnificent works, “it’s the star of that room, and one of the stars of the show,” Hand commented during the exhibit’s Washington run. “You walk in, and it grabs you.”

When the renovated Huntington Gallery reopens next year, Madonna and Child will be displayed in a new installation of the Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Collection, hung with other Netherlandish altarpieces and close to Italian altarpieces. In this context viewers will be able to engage with this powerfully realistic work in the way the artist intended, “through empathy with the humanity of God made man — with Mary as a real mother — so that faith becomes part of real life, not something remote and otherworldly,” says John Murdoch, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections at The Huntington. “As with all religious art, it’s important to remember that this is an object of personal devotion, maybe even veneration.  We shall have it with other similar objects, so that you will see it in a much more meaningful, human, and social context — one which I hope will enable people to relate to it as a document of human spirituality as well as of the highest aesthetic interest.”

Joyce Lovelace is a freelance writer on art and design.

“Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych” was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, in association with the Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge.

The Huntington’s Madonna and Child can be viewed when the Huntington Gallery reopens to the public in May 2008. It also will be part of a forthcoming exhibition of Rogier van der Weyden monographs in the artist’s hometown of Tournai, Belgium, in 2010. This second exhibition will look at Rogier’s development as an artist and his place in the crosscurrents of influence between northern and southern Europe during the Renaissance.

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