Date: 04-04-2004
Owning Institution:
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Middle Ages & Earlier        

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 Descent from the Cross was painted early in Rogier’s career, between 1435 and 1443, by which date it was in the Chapel of Our Lady Without the Walls in Louvain. It was probably commissioned by the Great Archers’ Guild, who had founded the chapel. The tracery in the corners of the painting, which must once have continued the shape of its original frame (now lost), has been shaped to model little crossbows. The setting is highly artificial. The feet of those who mourn Christ are set on real, cracked earth, from which grass and flowers grow, and where a skull lies – indicating that this is Golgotha, “the place of the skull” – but they also inhabit what appears to be a painted wooden box. Its gilded back wall confines the action to the shallowest of spaces. It seems that Rogier intended to imitate the painted polychrome groups of statues in similar boxes, which were produced throughout the Netherlands and during the fifteenth century as altarpieces. No one knows exactly why he did this, although it is possible that he wanted to call attention to the extraordinary, breathing realism of his art and in the process assert its superiority over sculpture. Painting in oils was still a relatively unfamiliar medium in the mid-fifteenth century and these figures, so brilliantly observed and depicted (doubtless from living models) would once have seemed almost uncannily present.

Tears glisten on the faces of the mourners, trembling pearls of water that hold and reflect light, grief made palpable. The blood that flowed straight down Christ’s feet when he was on the cross has altered direction now that he has been lifted down, deviating from its original course by some ninety degrees. His limp and pale body is echoed by that of Mary, slumped in a dead faint. His hand, which has been pierced by one of the cruelly long nails held by the servant on the ladder, is placed poignantly close to her own. They might almost be reaching out to touch one another. But death has torn her son from Mary and the energies of the painting – which has her fainting in one direction and Christ being taken in the other – dramatise the agony of their parting. This is a group which is being pulled asunder. The rhyme of Mary’s pose with that of Christ may also have been intended to symbolise the deeply empathetic nature of her suffering, and her role as co-redeemer of humanity.

Rogier van der Weyden lived at a time when affective piety was on the rise in Northern Europe – a brand of piety which encouraged extreme identification with the suffering Christ, and emulation of his example. The Imitation of Christ, a book of devotional exercises written by Thomas a Kempis in the early fifteenth century, was one of the key texts of the so-called “New Devotion”; and Rogier van der Weyden’s painting strikes me as being conceived in a very similar spirit. Thomas a Kempis encouraged his readers to try to see Christ’s suffering in their mind’s eye, the better to sympathise with it and thereby the closer to come to God. The painter shows that suffering with the unparalleled realism of his art, embodies it unforgettably; and in the figures of those who grieve at Christ’s death he offers his audience a group of role models, so to speak, for their own responses. The faces of John (to the left) and Joseph of Arimathea (under the cross in the centre) are filled with solemn contemplation, as is that of the splendidly dressed man holding Christ’s feet. The Magdalen, to the extreme right, is in a paroxysm of grief, staring at those same bloodied feet and clenching her hands together in a way that suggests her  crying is also a form of prayer. They are part of the scene and yet also detached from it, in the sense that they seem to feel this moment, of their separation from Christ, as the beginning of a new stage in their lives – almost as a kind of alienation. They are like sleepwalkers caught in an oppressively claustrophobic dream. Perhaps this was Rogier van der Weyden’s way of indicating his belief that the consequences of Christ’s death can never be escaped from, or forgotten. The eternity of grief, atonement and contemplation that he depicts is, for him, the essence of mortal existence.