The Painting: The diminutive size of this panel and its doll-like figures remind one immediately of illuminated manuscripts and the imagery that accompanies texts recited during daily devotions. The painting elicits the empathy of the viewer with the agony of Christ on the cross and the sorrow of the Virgin Mary, as she collapses in the arms of Christ’s beloved disciple, John. The Virgin clasps her hands in prayer as she and John look up at Christ, observing his dying moments. Mary Magdalen embraces the cross in her attempt to be near to and share the suffering of her Savior. From her belt hangs a large prayer nut and a rosary for reciting her prayers. Sitting on the hill nearby, an unidentified figure quietly weeps. Christ’s right side has been pierced by the lance of the Roman soldier Longinus, verifying his death, and overhead the sky has suddenly darkened in response to the moment. According to the Gospel of Saint Luke 23:44–46: “It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he took his last breath.”
Soldiers on horseback ride off from the event, and visually separate the foreground from the background where a Flemish town is substituted for Jerusalem, only referenced by the octagonal building meant to represent the Holy Sepulchre. To the right the Annunciation takes place in an open porch. It signals Christ’s Incarnation and the beginning of his life on earth, just as the Crucifixion represents his last moments. However, there is further meaning for this juxtaposition of key episodes from Christ’s life that were thought to have taken place on the same day of the year.[1] As Veronique Sintobin (1998) has pointed out, this pairing of scenes “accords with a medieval tradition that dedicates March 25 to the memory of Adam, the Annunciation, and the death of Christ, thus expressing the connection between the Fall [of man], the Conception of Christ, and the fulfillment of man’s redemption through his death.”
The Attribution and Date: This
Crucifixion was originally assigned to Gerard van der Meire when it appeared in the 1883 Nieuwenhuys sale (see References); but, as it turned out, this was based on two falsely signed works given to an artist who is otherwise undocumented and by whom no works are known (Bauman 1984). Thereafter, when the painting was exhibited in Vienna in 1930 (see Exhibition History), Otto Pächt attributed it to Jan Provoost as an early work. Ludwig Baldass (1930) and Hans Tietze (1930) concurred, the latter not without certain qualms due to the lack of knowledge about Provoost’s nascent career. Nonetheless, Friedländer (1931) embraced the notion of it as exemplary of Provoost’s initial production, dating it between 1490–1500, and comparing it to a
Crucifixion in the St. Louis Art Museum (see fig. 1 above).
Little is known about Provoost’s origins and training. He can be placed in Valenciennes in the late 1480s, since after Simon Marmion’s death in 1489, Provoost married his widow, Johanna de Quarube, in 1491. This has led to speculation that Provoost worked in Marmion’s atelier, completing his training there with this master who worked in both manuscript illumination and panel painting.[2] By 1494, Provoost was a citizen in Bruges, and it is thereafter that his oeuvre can be more reliably reconstructed.[3] He joined the Corporation of Image- and Saddle-makers, holding several prestigious positions in the guild, and receiving important commissions. Thus, the reconstruction of Provoost’s early works has been based on his later oeuvre, with the cautionary appellation “attributed to” added to Provoost’s name in the more recent scholarship concerning The Met’s
Crucifixion (Bauman 1984, Sintobin 1998).
Ron Spronk has reconsidered the oeuvre of Provoost beginning with his 1993 dissertation for Groningen University and subsequently with technical studies of the attributed paintings in preparation for a forthcoming monograph.[4] His investigations, as well as a few earlier studies carried out by Molly Faries and Maryan Ainsworth, have provided additional information about the artist’s working procedures that help to clarify questions of attribution.[5] The St. Louis Art Museum
Crucifixion, one of a trio of diminutive paintings including a
Flagellation and a
Lamentation attributed to Provoost,[6] which Friedländer connected to The Met’s painting, already drew a skeptical response from Nicole Reynaud in a 1975 article.[7] She noted the “tormented and dolorous expressionism” uncharacteristic of Provoost either in his early or later works. Moreover, a direct comparison between the St. Louis and Met Crucifixions shows in the latter a more ambitious composition, with a developed concept of spatial recession and convincing placement of figures within rather than simply at the foreground plane. The figures in The Met painting are portrayed with well-articulated bodies that incorporate a sophisticated treatment of the volumes of forms through convincing modeling of the figures. The St. Louis painting figures, by contrast, appear as flat, cut-out forms against a stage-like backdrop. Moreover, the underdrawing, or initial sketch on the panel of each of these paintings, does not show the same hand at work (compare figs. 2, 3). The Met painting reveals a distinctive underdrawing featuring paperclip-shaped folds and hardly perceptible hatching (for example, in the lower part of the Virgin’s draperies and near the bend of Mary Magdalen’s left knee in her draperies) for the modeling of the figures. The St. Louis panel figures, by contrast, are worked up with straight contour lines for the folds of garments and abundant parallel hatching that suggests the modeling.
However, there are some works that show a closer comparison with The Met’s
Crucifixion, suggesting that it might still be considered within the orbit of Provoost’s production. First of all, there seems to be a connection with Simon Marmion’s illuminations in terms of the compositional scheme. That is to say, there is a shared strategy of placing the figures in the immediate foreground, against overlapping hills—sometimes with a meandering path—in the middle ground, and a cityscape on the horizon. This is readily apparent in Marmion’s Crucifixions of the Korner Hours of the 1470s, a single leaf in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, of the 1460s, and in the Huth Hours of the 1480s (figs. 4, 5, 6),[8] as well as in a panel painting by Marmion, the
Lamentation about 1473 in The Met’s Lehman Collection (
1975.1.128). The St. Louis
Crucifixion and
Lamentation also share this scheme to a less developed degree.
It is worth noting that the
Lamentation at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. —also attributed to Provoost—although not by the same hand as The Met painting, shows similar figure types to those we find in The Met’s painting, particularly the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and to a lesser extent, Christ (figs. 7–10). Both paintings concentrate on the foreground depiction of specific flowering plants, the overlapping hills of the middle-ground, and the Gothic towers on the horizon line. Given these associations of The Met’s painting with works by Simon Marmion, perhaps Provoost’s teacher in Valenciennes, and with another painting within the Provoost group, it is appropriate to consider The Met’s painting as in the circle of or orbit of Provoost in Bruges. In connection with these associated works, it should date about 1495.
Maryan W. Ainsworth 2022
[1] Gertrud Schiller,
Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 1: “The Annunciation to Mary”, Greenwich, Ct., 1971, p. 34; and John Malcolm Russell, “The Iconography of the Friedsam Annunciation,”
Art Bulletin 58 (March 1978), p. 27.
[2] On Marmion’s work and career, see Thomas Kren, ed.,
Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and The Visions of Tondal, J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, 1992.
[3] See Ron Spronk,
Jan Provoost, Art Historical and Technical Examinations, Doctoraalscriptie, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, October 1993; and Ron Spronk in Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, ed.,
Bruges and the Renaissance: Memling to Pourbus, exh. cat. Bruges, Memlingmuseum, Ghent, 1998, pp. 94–108; and in the accompanying volume
Bruges et la Renaissance. De Memling à Pourbus: Notices, Ghent, 1998, pp. 31–48.
[4] Ibid., and the following: Ron Spronk: “An Early Sixteenth-Century Last Judgment by Jan Provoost,” in Roger van Schoute and Hélène Verougstraete, eds.,
Le Dessin sous-jacent et Technologie de la Peinture. Perspectives, Colloque 11, Le Dessin sous-jacent dans la Peinture, 1995, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997, pp. 43–51; “Tracing in the Making of Jan Provoost’s Last Judgment Through Technical Examinations and Digital Imaging,”
Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, no. 72, 1998, pp. 66–79; “The Underdrawing of Jan Provoost’s Crucifixion,” in Hélène Verougstraete and Roger van Schoute, eds.,
Le Peinture dans les Pays-Bas au 16e Siècle, Pratiques d’Atelier Infrarouges et Autres Méthodes d’Investigation, Colloque XII, Le Dessin sous-jacent et la Technologie dans la Peinture, 1997, Leuven, 1999, pp. 37–48; “The Reconstruction of a Triptych by Jan Provoost for the Jerusalem Chapel in Bruges,”
Burlington Magazine, no. 147 (2005), pp. 109–11. Most recently, see Ron Spronk et al.,
Jan Provoost, O Triptico de Nossa Senhora da Misericórdia, exh. cat., Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, September 2012, Lisbon, 2012.
[5] Molly Faries, “The Underdrawings of Jan Provoost’s Last Judgment and Related Paintings,” in Roger van Schoute and Hélène Verougstraete-Marcq, eds.,
Geographie et Chronologie du Dessin sous-jacent, Colloque VII Le Dessin sous-jacent dans la Peinture, 1987, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1989, pp. 137–44. Maryan Wynn Ainsworth and Molly Faries, “Northern Renaissance Paintings, The Discovery of Invention,”
St. Louis Art Museum, Summer Bulletin (1986), pp. 9–10, 38.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Nicole Reynaud, “Une Allégorie sacrée de Jan Provost,”
Revue du Louvre XXV (1975), p. 9 and n. 5.
[8] I am grateful to Thomas Kren for pointing out to me these examples of Marmion’s illuminations.