Virgin and Child, Adriaen Isenbrant (attributed to), c. 1530 - c. 1540 – (Adriaen Isenbrant) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Adriaen Isenbrant

Date: 1540

Size: 61 x 43 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

The Virgin, seated in a niche that fills the picture surface and is lavishly decorated with Renaissance motifs, is supporting the almost nude Christ Child on her right arm. He has wrapped his left arm around her neck and is cupping her chin with his right hand as he presses his face up against hers. The poses and interaction of the Virgin and Child are a late reflection of the so-called Madonna of Cambrai, a Byzantine type known as the Elousa, or Virgin of Tenderness, which was regarded as a work by St Luke himself in the second half of the 15th century.11 Before acquiring its present attribution to Isenbrant the panel went under the name of Hans Memling when it was in the Baring collection.12 Waagen then gave it to Jan Jansz Mostaert,13 whom he also believed to have painted the Diptych with Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows of 1521,14 which was made the core work of Isenbrant’s oeuvre in 1902. Around 1900, when the panel belonged to the Earl of Northbrook, it was loaned out to several exhibitions of old masters and displayed under different names. Weale labelled it as anonymous in the important exhibition of Flemish Primitives in Bruges in 1902,15 which is when Hulin de Loo first attributed the diptych and the Rijksmuseum panel to Isenbrant.16 Friedländer considered that the painting belonged to the core of Isenbrant’s oeuvre,17 remarking that the artist was at his best with such a restricted formal idiom and general iconographic theme. Wilson alone questions the attribution to Isenbrant, along with that of the rest of the oeuvre given to him.18 The painting has the distinctive soft but rather expressionless figure types, with a manner tending towards sfumato that is found in the works attributed to Isenbrant. Another typical feature is the detailed, decorative Renaissance ornamentation. As regards the archaistic or Renaissance formal vocabulary, reference has been made both to possible classical sources,19 as well as to possible models in Lombardic Renaissance architecture.20 Although the individual ornamental motifs in the Rijksmuseum painting - candelabra, medallions, ram’s heads and horns - can be associated with that building, there are no direct models in Italian prints.21 There are three closely related variants of the Amsterdam Virgin and Child. One is slightly larger, measuring 77.5 x 56 cm,22 but the other two are much smaller.23 The architecture is very similar in these versions, but the Virgin is of a different type, since she is suckling the Child.24 The underdrawings of the variants in Switzerland and Madrid have punched dots that betray the use of pricked cartoons,25 but these are absent in the Amsterdam underdrawing. However, the angular contours and thin lines in the underdrawing of the Virgin’s gown (fig. a) could point to the use of a traced cartoon. The architecture and the ornaments, however, appear to have been drawn freehand (fig. b), unlike the similar ornamentation and ram’s heads on the Virgin’s throne in the panel with The Virgin of the Seven Sorrows from the 1521 diptych. There, as in the rest of the painting, one sees the dotted lines characteristic of the use of a pricked cartoon.26 As Friedländer had already remarked, the Amsterdam Virgin and Child is qualitatively one of the best of all the paintings attributed to Adriaen Isenbrant. The Virgin has the refinement and monumental qualities of her counterpart in the 1521 diptych, and is placed convincingly within the Renaissance architecture. That is not the case with the smaller repetitions mentioned above, in which her rather wooden figure has been pasted into the scene. These are hackwork from the artist’s studio. The date of the painting is always placed around 1520-30 on stylistic grounds, but the dendrochronology would permit a date in the following decade.27 (Lars Hendrikman/Jan Piet Filedt Kok)