With Good Friday almost upon us, this week’s picture is The Descent from the Cross by the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden. This monumental depiction of the deposition is more than eight feet wide, yet every last detail in it has been painted with minute care. A great frieze of death and grief, full almost to overflowing with intense human emotion, the picture is one of the treasures of the Prado in Madrid.
Little is known about Rogier van der Weyden. He was born at Tournai in about 1399, the son of a cutler. He served a five-year apprenticeship under Robert Campin, a leading painter in the city, and became a master of the Tournai Guild of St Luke – the artists’ guild – in 1432. By 1435 he had moved to Brussels, where he created four monumental pictures on the theme of justice for the Town Hall (later destroyed) which helped to earn him an international reputation. The German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa described him as “the greatest of painters”, while Bianca Maria Sforza, Duchess of Milan, was sufficiently impressed by his work to send her own court painter, Zanetto Bugatto, to Brussels to retrain under Rogier’s supervision. (Bugatto argued violently with his new teacher and it required the intervention of the Dauphin of France before Rogier took the volatile Italian back into his workshop – as part of the deal, Bugatto had to agree not to drink any wine for a year.) Rogier van der Weyden died in the summer of 1464, having led an apparently blameless and largely uneventful life. He made gifts of money and paintings to the Charterhouses of Scheut and of Herinnes, where his son was a monk, and he did much to support the charitable work of the Brussels Beguinage.
The...
