A Crucificação (The Crucifixion) - Seguidor de Rogier van der Weyden
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Óleo sobre painel - 32x49 - Circa 1500
The modest dimensions of this tiny triptych indicate that it was intended for the private devotional use of its owner, most probably a pious member of the wealthier burgher class, and its small size would have made it easy for transportation or suitable for a private oratory. The subject of the Crucifixion encouraged meditation on and contemplation of the sufferings of Christ and the Virgin in line with the practice of the Modern Devotion, a religious movement that began in the fourteenth century and lasted until the Reformation.
The compositions of all three panels derive from the much larger triptych of the Crucifixion in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, painted in Brussels around 1440 by the most famous and influential Northern painter of the mid-fifteenth century Rogier van der Weyden. The present triptych differs from that in Vienna in that it omits the pair of donors at the base of the cross, and the distinctive blue angels in the sky above. In place of the donors kneels a single female figure, wearing the rich attire normally associated with the Magdalene before her conversion or a wealthy donor. Similarly, the wings are arranged in the opposite fashion with St Veronica now shown on the left wing holding the cloth with which she mopped Christ’s brow on the path to Calvary and which subsequently bore His image, and Mary Magdalene on the right wing, holding the jar of ointment with which she bathed Christ’s feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee. The colours of their robes have been reversed and two female companions added. Although much changed from Rogier’s original the landscape is similarly a unified whole spread unbroken across all three panels, with a contemporary city representing Jerusalem in the distance.
Rogier van der Weyden was one of the most profound and influential painters of the 15th century. His dramatic, highly emotional paintings influenced every Netherlandish painter of the following generation, and had an international impact far beyond the circles of his large workshop in Brussels. The central panel of the present triptych, for example, recurs with variations in a painting by the late fifteenth-century Bruges Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine now preserved in the Prado in Madrid, and was still being used by Ambrosius Benson in another work a generation later today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The present triptych was probably also painted in that city early in the same century. The distinctive almost calligraphic handling of the foliage in the landscape recalls the work of the so-called ‘Master of the Embroidered Foliage’, a follower of Van der Weyden active there in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.
