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Hugo Van Der Goes
( Originally Published Early 1900's )IN the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, founded by Folco Portinari, the father of Dante's Beatrice, is preserved a large altar-piece by Hugo Van der Goes.
Tommaso Portinari, agent at Bruges for the house of the Medici and the most influential foreigner in that Flemish trading city, cherished a warm affection for his native Florence, and, among other generous acts, presented this votive picture to the hospital. It is in three sections, the central panel representing the adoration of the infant Christ by the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and three shepherds, and a numerous company of angels. The left wing of the picture shows the donor, behind whom are his two boys, with St. Anthony and St. Thomas ; and the right wing presents his wife and daughter with their patron saints, Margaret and Magdalen.
Of all the works produced by this able but unfamiliar painter, the St. Maria Nuova altar-piece, which is mentioned by Vasari, is the only authenticated one remaining.
Conway says of this triptych :
This picture of Master Hugo's would be of untold value for one thing alone, even if it possessed no other virtues : it is the first picture that really makes us acquainted with the mediaeval peasantry. Nothing is more obvious than that the three shepherds are drawn from life. They are no ideal shepherds ; their horny hands, rough features, and gaping mouths, are proofs of a perfect veracity. The three men in this Nativity, or at all events two of them, are not creations issuing from the moral consciousness of any one. They are reflections of actual persons. Their bent figures tell of their laboring battle with the earth. Their hardened faces have been beaten into that rugged form by nights of exposure, frost, and storm. Whilst the world was going along in its noisy fashion with wars and revolutions, setting up of kings, political intrigues, and tremblings of hope and fear in the hearts of conspicuous but now for the most part forgotten men, peasants such as these were the real heat that kept the whole surface bubbling on the go. But for their careless and continuous labor, kings and feudal systems would have faded in a few days. Yet they are as unrecorded and unobserved (expect for some tyrannous statute of laborers or another) as if the fine gentry, the monks, and the merchants had really been the life at the heart of the whole body politic. Among the multitude of Golden Fleeced heroes, Hanseatic merchants, lords, counts, dukes, and popes, whose likenesses we possess, whose sayings we can know if we care to hunt them up, whose manner of living is recorded in minute detail, these three old shepherds are the only representatives of the far larger and more important body of "silent sufferers and silent workers who kept the world a-going."
Van der Goes, probably born at Ghent about 1405, and a pupil of the Van Eycks, appears to have labored mostly in that city and at Bruges. At one time in his life he was afflicted with attacks of insanity, — caused, according to one account, by an unrequited love, according to another, by religious melancholy, — and retired to a monastery in or near Brussels. One of his fellow monks has left the following account of this episode in the artist's life.
He says : "I was a novice when Van der Goes entered the convent. He was so famous as a painter that men said his like was not to be found this side of the Alps. In his worldly days he did not belong to the upper classes ; nevertheless, after his reception into the con-vent, and during his novitiate, the prior permitted him many relaxations more suggestive of worldly pleasure than of penance and humiliation, and thus awakened jealousy in many of our brothers.
Frequently noble lords, and amongst others the Archduke Maximilian, came to visit him and admire his pictures. At their request he received per-mission to remain and dine with them in the guest-chamber. He was often cast down by attacks of melancholy, especially when he thought of the number of works he still had to finish ; his love of wine, however, was his greatest enemy, and for that at the stranger's table there was no restraint. In the fifth or sixth year after he had taken the habit, he undertook a journey to Cologne with his brother Nicolas and others.
On his return journey he had such an attack of melancholy that he would have Iaid violent hands on him-self had he not been forcibly restrained by his friends. They brought him under restraint to Brussels, and so back to the convent. The prior was called in, and he sought by the sounds of music to lessen Hugo's passion. For a long time all was useless ; he suffered under the dread that he was a son of dam-nation. At length his condition improved. Thenceforward of his own will he gave up the habit of visiting the guest-chamber and took his meals with the lay brothers."
Hugo died in 1482, his insanity having disappeared in the meantime.
The picture of the mad painter which we reproduce was painted by Emile Wauters in t872, and exhibited at the Brussels Salon, where it made an immediate sensation, and was purchased by the State for the Brussels museum.
Wauters, who is a pupil of Portaels and Gerome, was born at Brussels in 1846, and has devoted himself to the painting of portraits and of history. The museum of Liege possesses his " Mary of Burgundy entreating the sheriffs of Ghent to pardon her councillors ; " while on the staircase of the Brussels Hotel de Ville may be seen his " Mary of Burgundy swearing to respect the commercial rights of Brussels, 1477," and "The armed citizens of Brussels demanding the charter from Duke John IV. of Brabant." An enormous panorama of "Cairo and the Banks of the Nile," " Sobieski and his Staff at the Siege of Vienna," Serpent-charmers of Sokko," "The Battle of Hastings," and many other works, attest the talent and the industry of Wauters, whose extraordinary gifts have won him a multiplicity of medals and honors of various kinds.
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Stranger than paradiseNaughty shepherds, lifelike angels, a mysterious vase of flowers ... there's nothing conventional about the Portinari AltarpieceJonathan Jones
Monday December 23, 2002
The GuardianChristmas is a time for nativity scenes, and this is the story of one of the greatest ever painted. But what Christmas tale would be complete without suicide, attempted suicide and madness?
The monks tried everything to soothe the famous artist who had come to live among them as a lay brother. Hugo van der Goes retired to the Red Cloister, an Augustinian monastery near Brussels, in 1475. He spent the rest of his life there, praying, painting and suffering. He was treated as a special case; he was allowed to paint, even to travel. But, according to the chronicler Gaspar Ofhuis, nothing calmed him. Van der Goes descended into deep melancholia and tried to kill himself. The monks attributed his death in 1482 to the curse of melancholy.
In the 19th century, Van der Goes had a gothic appeal for Romantic students of art. In Emile Wauters's 1872 painting The Madness of Hugo van der Goes, choirboys sing to him, while the abbot, conducting, watches the nervous, darting expression on the artist's face and the ceaseless motion of his hands. "I myself have become especially haggard of late, almost like Hugo van der Goes in the famous painting by Emile Wauters," wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo from Arles in 1888. "Except that, having had all my beard carefully shaved off, I'm as much the very placid abbot in that picture."
Van Gogh was kidding himself. Later that year he would tell Theo that obsessive painting had left him "reduced once more to the deranged state of Hugo van der Goes in the painting by Emile Wauters", and on Christmas Eve 1888 he acted threateningly towards his friend Paul Gauguin, cut off part of his own ear, and presented it to a prostitute. Van Gogh spent Christmas in hospital. His Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, in London's Courtauld Gallery, was painted on his return in January 1889.
The image that Van Gogh most often referred to when he wanted to discuss, at a remove, art and madness was that of Van der Goes. In his letters, he harps on about Wauters's painting - the first mention is just a year after the painting was executed - and, over the years, his allusions to the picture become more confessional.
Van Gogh and Van der Goes were similar, not just in their mental fragility, but in the intensity of their art. The reason Van der Goes was treated with such respect by the monks, that royalty visited him in his seclusion, that he is remembered as one of the greatest artists of the 15th century, is because he painted one of the most universal and glorious of nativity scenes. Except there is something almost too energetic and abundant about the Portinari Altarpiece.
It is a stranger in paradise, or at least, an outsider in the Uffizi. Van der Goes's masterpiece has been in Florence since 1483, when a boat brought it up the Arno after a hard journey from Flanders. It was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, the Medici bank's representative in Bruges, for the church in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, back home in Florence. It was a way for Tommaso, so far away on business, to remind people not just of his existence, but of his civic loyalty.
The triptych consists of a large central panel with two wings. At the centre is a nativity scene intensely poised between joy and gravity, stillness and horror. Mary, in dark blue, prays to the newborn child on the ground. Joseph, to the left, is old, sombre, joining her in prayer. The shepherds seem almost to be leaping forward, their figures are so robust and elated as they squat and pray; they are very different in mood from the stately angels, whose faces are long and grave as they kneel and float all around. The setting is in the ruins of King David's palace - there is no glass in the gothic windows - where animals are stabled. They join in, too, expressing meditative devotion.
On the left-hand panel, the kneeling, plain-robed Tommaso Portinari and his little sons Antonio and Pigello participate in adoring Christ; St Thomas and St Anthony Abbot stand over them. On the right-hand panel, Tommaso's wife Maria Maddalena Baroncelli Portinari and their daughter Margherita pray with St Mary Magdalene and St Margaret.
The bare details are traditional - but there is nothing conventional about the ways in which Van der Goes brings this painting to stormy life. For a start, while the rich donor and his family are praying neatly, the shepherds are smiling, gesticulating, leaning forward to get a better look. They resemble slightly indisciplined actors in a nativity play staged by peasants. Van der Goes explicitly alludes to popular religious theatre; the whole composition of the central scene is theatrical.
In radical contrast, the angels are uncanny creatures. They have flattened, elongated, very serious faces; they are wise angels rather than happy ones. But most of all, they are real. The fusion of their coloured wings and almost drably humanoid bodies is so matter of fact, so convincing. Van der Goes can see them. He makes this emphatic by including, in the foreground, two vases of flowers, painted with the meticulous naturalism for which Dutch painters were to be revered centuries later. The detail of petals, leaves, ceramic and transparent glass placed at the centre of the painting, in front of Mary and between the angels, implies something about observation and fact: it implies that Van der Goes can "see" this vision just as surely as he can see those flowers.
This is a painting dense with personality and originality. Today's accounts of Renaissance art tend to put huge emphasis on patrons, on religious and communal commissioning. But a stunning new book, Gothic and Renaissance Altarpieces, in which the Portinari is reproduced, reveals that religious art was a territory of frenzied individualism. Altarpieces let the artist go crazy: Bosch painted The Garden of Earthly Delights as an altar triptych; similarly extreme are Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece and Bouts's wings from a Last Judgment altarpiece.
Big, folding, multi-layered, multi-scened altarpieces are some of the most ambitious paintings that exist, and they offered immense scope for bizarre invention, to delight and awe the illiterate churchgoer. The shepherds in Van der Goes's altarpiece represent the humble people to themselves.
Van der Goes is mysteriously fervent. His painting wants to say everything. In the background, the rest of the story is played out with magical concision. Mary and Joseph make their way through rocky hills to Bethlehem; the shepherds are visited by the angel; the Magi journey out of the east.
It is the northern, winter landscape that sets the emotional tone of the entire painting. The trees are bare and black against a sky whose chill brings a cold blast of winter to Bethlehem. What it tells you, unmistakably, is that the religious vision of Van der Goes is hard won; it is fraught with fear and the knowledge of death. That is why the angels are so serious; this newborn baby is death-bound. The warm little theatre of the nativity is surrounded by winter; mortal ravens perch on the trees.
In the Red Cloister, in Wauters's painting, they try to comfort him. The choir sing heartily. The abbot looks on caringly. But Hugo van der Goes is inconsolable.
· Gothic and Renaissance Altarpieces by Caterina Limentani Virdis and Mari Pietrogiovanna is published by Thames and Hudson, priced £65.
