Christ on the Way to Calvary, Jacques Jordaens, c. 1655 - c. 1660 – (Jacob Jordaens) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Jacob Jordaens

Date: 1660

Size: 243 x 176 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

Christ’s ascent to Calvary is briefly told in all four Gospels: Matthew 27:31-32; Mark 15:20-21; Luke 23:26, 28, 32; and John 19:16-17. Following a by then well-established tradition, Jacob Jordaens shows Christ beneath the cross, the base of which is held by Simon of Cyrene. The Saviour passes by St Veronica, who proffers the holy handkerchief or veil, as the Virgin weeps nearby.5 The painting was offered for sale in 1969 by the Dutch Province of the Society of Jesus, as coming from the Sint-Franciscus Xaveriuskerk, otherwise known as the Krijtberg, in Amsterdam. The Krijtberg was in fact the name of the foremost of a row of three houses on the Singel which was bought for the Jesuits in 1650, and converted into a hidden church; it opened 1 January 1654. The general assumption has been that Jordaens’s painting was commissioned to occupy the space above the high altar of this hidden church, although it was apparently first recorded there only in 1936 when it was published as the work of Jordaens.6 This provenance has now been questioned by Schillemans7 and Van Eck8 on the grounds that it is smaller than the three other altarpieces of 1656 and 1657, all of the same size, which came from the Krijtberg,9 and which, following Jesuit practice, would have been rotated above the high altar in accordance with the liturgical year.10 The Rijksmuseum picture has generally been dated between 1655 and 1660 on stylistic grounds. In 1656 Father Thomas Dekens, Provincial of the Flemish-Belgian Province, listed four Jesuit missionaries in Amsterdam.11 Other sources allow us to identify the hidden churches at which three of them officiated: Peeter Laurensz (1588-1664) at the Krijtberg; Hendrik Alckemade van Nydenborch (1613-1680) at the Keyserskroon Zaaier and August van Teijlingen (d. 1669) at the Paapegaai. Before all of these were officially shut in 1708, the Paapegaai on the Kalverstraat was transferred to the regular clergy on Father Van Teijlingen’s death in 1669.12 Van Eck, presumably following Allard,13 believed that the Jordaens was painted for the Zaaier and proposed that it was transferred from there to the Krijtberg when the Zaaier was wrested from the Jesuits in 1669. In support of Van Eck’s hypothesis is the fact that, according to De Bruyn, the Krijtberg Quellinus came from the Zaaier14 (having fortuitously had the correct measurements for its new home). But it has to be said that in our present state of knowledge there is no means of knowing if the early history of the Jordaens was similar. This might be the case, but of the four Jesuits discussed by Dekens only the building activity of Laurensz at the Krijtberg is mentioned – it was criticized for its extravagance. A discrepancy in size of 27 and 16 cm in height and width could have been made good by a framing element, and could be explained by – a remote possibility – human error. Laurensz came from Mechelen and was one of the most prominent Jesuit fathers in the northern Netherlands. He had been active in Amsterdam since 1628, following three years spent at the Jesuit church in Breda.15 Only one of the Krijtberg altarpieces can perhaps be associated with him. The Vision of St Ignatius at Storta, apparently signed and dated 1656 by the otherwise unknown P.N. Bosch, derives from Abraham Bloemaert’s lost altarpiece for the Jesuit College at ’s-Hertogenbosch,16 which Laurensz might have known when he was at nearby Breda. The commission to Jordaens could have come direct from Amsterdam or via the Jesuits in Antwerp. The Father Superior of the Dutch Jesuit mission in 1652 was Frans van der Meersch, followed in 1656 by Adriaan Cools. The Provincials at the Flemish-Belgian Province in the 1650s, all Antwerp born, were Joan Engelgrave, appointed 1652, Thomas Dekens from 1654, and Johan van Renterghem from 1657.17 From Jordaens’s standpoint it can be said that while he worked extensively for Catholic religious orders, the Ascent to Calvary is seemingly his only known Jesuit commission. He had had contact with the United Provinces since at least his first documented visit there in 1632. By 1649 work on his most important Dutch commission – for the Oranjezaal in the Huis ten Bosch – was in contemplation. In 1661 he received a commission to execute a painting for the Amsterdam Town Hall. The Rijksmuseum picture, of which there is a studio variant in reverse in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam,18 appears to be Jordaens’s only treatment of the subject. It was carefully planned with the components reserved and apparently only one pentiment (in the base of the yellow garment of the horseman) and one unexplained shape beneath Christ’s robe and the soldier’s arm. A drawing in the Pushkin Museum19 may be his earliest extant consideration of the composition. It concentrates on the suffering of Christ as the cross is pressed down on his stumbling body by a Roman soldier and a Jew. A second compositional drawing in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (Mass.),20 shows Jordaen../..