Biography of the Artist: Giorgio Faggin (1986) first identified what he believed to be the “monogram” LC of the artist in the “Pseudo-Gassel” group at the lower right on a tree trunk in
The Calling of Saint Matthew (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels; see fig. 1 above). Since then, the painter has sometimes been called the Master LC. However, close scrutiny of the “monogram” reveals that instead of letters, these markings are more likely to be the hooks for the painting hanging on the tree trunk. Noting the close relationship between the Brussels painting and The Met’s
Arrival in Bethlehem, Walter Gibson (1989) dubbed the artist the Master of the Brussels-New York Panels. Subsequently, Luc Serck (1990, 2000) assembled a dozen paintings by the same hand that he attributed to the Master of the Brussels Calling of Saint Matthew, an artist he recognized as having been influenced by Herri met de Bles and Lucas Gassel. Going forward, this appellation is the most appropriate for the artist of The Met painting.
In the background of the Brussels
Calling of Saint Matthew is a view of Antwerp as it appeared from the left bank of the river Scheldt. Identifiable among the buildings are the Burchtkerk, the church of Notre-Dame, and Saint-Michel. This indicates that the painter most likely worked in Antwerp, where Lucas Gassel also is thought to have had a studio before moving to Brussels where he died in 1568/69.[1] Further study of the paintings attributed to the Master of the Brussels Calling of Saint Matthew group will help to clarify the development of the artist’s style and contribution to landscape painting in the southern Netherlands around 1540–50.
The Painting: Unfolding as a continuous narrative throughout the vast landscape of this painting is the biblical story of the birth of Christ, based on the Gospel of Luke 2:1–14. At the lower left Joseph and the Virgin Mary, accompanied by an ox and an ass, travel from Nazareth toward Bethlehem, the eventual birth site of Christ. Their voyage was required to satisfy an imperial command that all citizens return to their ancestral towns to be taxed. As Joseph belonged to the house and lineage of David, he went to Bethlehem to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was pregnant. The old man seated with his dog on the wall of the bridge serves as a narrator. He holds an open book from which he relates the story, as if in a dramatic presentation (Koopstra 2020, p. 155 n.10). Over the bridge and a little farther on the winding road, Joseph and Mary reach the door of a fully booked inn where they are refused a night’s lodging. At the far right, the couple gesture in prayer before the Christ Child who has just been born in a makeshift manger. In the field above and to the right, the underdrawing shows the Annunciation to the Shepherds by an angel, but this has been painted over to represent sheep grazing. Finally, toward the center of the painting to the right, a pinkish tent partly conceals an underdrawing most likely of the Adoration of the Magi.
This landscape represents a bird’s-eye view that was still in vogue decades after Joachim Patinir developed it in his first landscape paintings made in Antwerp after he entered the Guild of Saint Luke in 1515 (see
The Penitence of Saint Jerome triptych,
36.14a–c). However, here the painter has somewhat lowered the high horizon line and considerably diminished the scale of the figures, sprinkling them throughout the countryside rather than, as Patinir did, placing the main protagonists at the forefront of the composition.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this painting is that it is unfinished. The completed or nearly completed portions are the mid-left wooded area, the bridge over the river, the castle at the center, the path at the right where white linens are spread out to dry on the grass, and the distant forests that border vast plains in a greenish-blue tone. Here and there, and unrelated to the biblical narrative, incidental figures pepper the landscape (e.g., the hunter and his companion heading through the gate at the lower left, the man and woman on the castle bridge, and figures along the winding route at the right). Half-tones show the initial stages of painting in the sky, the central craggy mountains, and in the village below at the right. However, significant portions of the composition remain at the underdrawn stage, either unpainted or clearly visible through the thinly painted and now more transparent features of the work.
The Attribution and Date: Although acquired in 1916 as a work by Joachim Patinir, doubts soon arose and an attribution to the Antwerp landscape painter Cornelis Massys (1510-1562) ensued (Schmidt 1910, Frankfurter 1931, Burroughs 1934, Weale and Salinger 1947), with some suggesting a contemporary or follower of Massys (Friedländer 1936 and 1975, Dunbar 1972). Brockwell (1956) recognized the relationship to the works of Lucas Gassel (ca. 1488–1568/69), which was supported by others (Puyvelde 1962, Faggin 1968, Bergmans 1969, Dunbar 1981, and Koopstra 2020). Gibson (1989), Serck (1990), Ainsworth (1998) and Koopstra (2020) identified the close stylistic relationship of the
Arrival in Bethlehem with the Brussels
Calling of Saint Matthew, and a small group of panels began to coalesce around the painter who was variously called the Master of the Brussels-New York Panels, the Master of the Brussels Calling of Saint Matthew, and the Master LC.
The
Arrival in Bethlehem belongs to a group of paintings most closely connected with the landscape painter, Lucas Gassel who originated in the North Netherlands, in Helmond, but worked mostly in the southern Netherlands probably in Antwerp and in Brussels (see Koopstra 2020). Gassel’s
Rest on the Flight into Egypt, signed and dated 1542 (Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, fig. 2) shows the compositional conventions, individual landscape motifs, and subtle matte tones assimilated by the painter of The Met’s panel. However, Gassel is linked more closely with the works of Joachim Patinir in featuring the figures in the foreground, with the landscape serving as extended backdrop scenery. The Met painting, on the other hand, more fully integrates the figures into the landscape, convincingly adjusting their scale throughout in order to facilitate the viewer’s virtual wandering into the far distance. Nonetheless, the
Arrival in Bethlehem mimics Gassel’s work by adopting the high horizon line, the use of winding pathways to facilitate progression into the background, and the addition of incidental figures of various types that add a glimpse of daily life and enhance the direction of these landscape paintings toward secular genre works and away from strictly religious scenes.
Like Lucas Gassel, the painter of the The Met’s panel applied his paint layers rather thinly in semitransparent tones, with the pale ochre of the foreground pathways giving way to the blue-green of the hills in the distance. Gassel’s
Flight into Egypt perhaps gives an idea of how the
Arrival in Bethlehem would have looked when completed, with the overlying paint layers easing the transitions from one color area to the next. In both works, a rather limited palette of orange-reds, blues, and browns are used for the figures, and restricted hues of pale ochre and blue-green for the landscape. Characteristic of The Met painting is the artist’s distinctive striated, crisscrossing cloud formations, skyscraper-like craggy mountains, and exotic trees here and there that are also found in the “name painting”—the Brussels
Calling of Saint Matthew (fig. 1).
Both Gassel and the painter of The Met landscape are highly adept at coordinating with a great sense of balance a variety of individually studied motifs. A group of tiny sketches in Berlin attributed to Lucas Gassel show details worked up in pen and brown ink with wash that offer a selection of motifs to be included in any number of landscape scenes: needlelike mountain peaks, castles and villages nestled into hills, forests alternating with stretches of grassy plains, houses seen from different angles, and small figures serving as scale-markers throughout the scenes, just as birds populate the sky, adding a suggestion of atmosphere (Koopstra 2020, pp. 172–74, no 47). Such source material served both artists with endless options for variety and interest when the motifs were composed in a natural way. The successful manner by which Pseudo-Gassel arranged such motifs can be seen in the underdrawing of The Met painting, which is so fully worked up that it appears like an independent drawing (fig. 3). A close comparison of the underdrawing with the painted surface—unfinished as it is—indicates the suppression of some of the elements of the biblical narrative in favor of a more secular approach to landscape painting. For example, above and to the right first planned was the Annunciation to the Shepherds (fig. 4), which was overpainted with green pastures populated by numerous sheep. What appears in the preliminary sketch most likely as an Adoration of the Magi (at the center right, fig. 5) is painted over with a simple pinkish-red tent. Other details in the underdrawing, such as the boaters before the castle in the foreground, or the cattle in the meadow at the lower left were not ultimately painted. The incidental figures added throughout the landscape were not underdrawn but only painted. Without a full study of all the paintings attributed to the Brussels Master of the Calling of Saint Matthew, it is unclear whether one artist made decisions about motifs to include and not to include during the painting process, or whether the initial artist left the painting unfinished only to be picked up again by a second artist who edited out some of the religious episodes in favor of additional genre motifs. Either way, scrutiny of the painting both at the underdrawing stage and the unfinished painted stage indicates alterations to the original plan in the direction of diminished biblical narrative content and increased secular genre details. This example, then, datable to about 1540–50 shows incremental steps toward pure landscape painting that would become an independent genre in the seventeenth century.[2]
Maryan W. Ainsworth 2022
[1] For the most recent discussion of the oeuvre of Lucas Gassel with complete bibliography, see Koopstra 2020.
[2] This dating accords well with the dendrochronology results. "The analyzed panel is made of three oak boards originating from the Baltic/Polish region. The youngest heartwood ring was formed in the year 1523. Regarding the sapwood statistic of Eastern Europe an earliest felling date can be derived for the year 1532, more plausible is a felling date between 1536...1538….1542 + x. With a minimum of 2 years for seasoning the earliest creation of the painting is possible from 1534 upwards. Under the assumption of a median of 15 sapwood rings and a minimum of 2 years for seasoning a creation is plausible from 1540 upwards." Peter Klein report of May 13, 1997 (European Paintings Department files and Paintings Conservation files).
