The Birth and Naming of Saint John the Baptist; (reverse) Trompe-l'oeil with Painting of The Man of Sorrows

The Artist: For a biography of Bernard van Orley, see the Catalogue Entry for Virgin and Child with Angels (14.40.632).

The Subject of the Painting: This panel and The Martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist (Promised Gift of Hester Diamond; see fig. 1 above)–the left and right wings of a triptych—depict episodes from the life of Saint John the Baptist, namely the birth and naming of Saint John and his martyrdom. In the former, the story begins at the upper left corner where an angel appears to Zechariah, kneeling at an altar, to announce the birth of his son, to be named John (Luke 1:5–25). Because of his wife Elizabeth’s advanced age, Zechariah was incredulous at this news and as a result was rendered mute by the angel. Indeed Elizabeth, shown lying in her bed, did give birth to a son. Three women bathe the infant John in the foreground; among them is the Virgin Mary in a simple fur-lined blue dress. It is Mary who then presents the child to his father in the middle ground, where Zechariah reads the prophesy of the angel from a scroll, and dutifully names him John.

The right wing relates the story of the martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1–12; Mark 6:14–28; Luke 3:19–20 and 9:7–9). King Herod had married Herodias, the wife of his brother, Philip, thereby breaking the law for which John the Baptist openly rebuked him. Consequently, John was thrown into prison (at the far left), and Herodias began to campaign for the death of the preacher. She schemed with her daughter Salome, who danced for Herod at his birthday banquet in order to seduce him and exact from him her mother’s greatest desire: the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The scene of Salome dancing before her father in a wild frenzy takes place at the upper right, where the head of the saint is already on a platter, being stabbed by Herodias (as discussed in apocryphal fourth century accounts; see the Catalogue Entry for Aelbert Bouts, Head of Saint John the Baptist on a Platter, 60.55.2). In the foreground the executioner places the severed head of the Baptist on a platter held by one of two reticent female courtiers. Two musicians from the banquet gawk at the horrific event. In the far left background, the bones of John the Baptist are burned by pagans in order to stop the miracles taking place at the Baptist’s gravesite (according to Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend).[1] Balancing the two wings at far left and right are, respectively, a live peacock and a bronze statue of a lion.

The Patron and Commission: On the reverse of the two paintings, superimposed on faux marble backgrounds, were painted a banderole with the motto FINIS CORONAT, passing behind a crozier, and a trompe-l’oeil painting of the Man of Sorrows (at left), and a portrait of a cleric facing left with hands clasped in prayer (formerly at right; fig. 2). The subsequently detached portrait was apparently preserved and sold independently by Parke-Bernet Galleries at an auction in January 1947, where it was listed as a portrait of "S. Bernard of Clairvaux by Bernart van Orley" (whereabouts unknown; fig. 3).[2] A veiled crozier is the sign of office of an abbot and distinguishes an abbot’s crozier from that of a bishop. The veil attached to the node of the crozier’s stem allowed the abbot to touch the crozier through the veil, as only a bishop was permitted to wear gloves. The link between the motto FINIS CORONAT and the abbot Jacques Coëne was made possible by the research of Jean Buzelin, who published the epitaph, citing the motto of Jacques Coëne in Douai in 1624–25 (Van Gelder 1973, pp. 170–72).[3] FINIS CORONAT is a shortened version of Finis coronat opus (the end crowns the work), a proverb that appears to have come into usage in the Middle Ages and thereafter was known in various versions.[4] The “end” presumably refers to death, and the “work” (implied here, but missing) to the life lived. Thus, Coëne would have aspired to a good death as the crowning achievement of a well-lived life, as in the tradition of the Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), a popular fifteenth-century manual that related how to “die well” according to Christian precepts.

Originally from Bruges, Coëne served as abbot at the Benedictine abbey church of Marchiennes, France, from 1501 to 1542.[5] A well-known patron of the arts, Coëne early on commissioned several paintings from Bernard van Orley, including Christ Among the Doctors and the Marriage of the Virgin (ca. 1506, National Gallery of Art, Washington), which were once part of a polyptych.[6] Consecrated in the abbey church of Marchiennes in 1515 were two separate altarpieces. One comprises the Saint John panels discussed here, and the other is devoted to Saint Martin, representing The Knighting of Saint Martin (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) and The Adoration of the Virgin and Child by Saint Martin with Saints Peter, Paul, Agnes, and Thelka (private collection, The Netherlands; see Dunbar 2005, pp. 204–5, 207, 209). Following Max J. Friedländer (1937), Ludwig Baldass (1944) originally thought that the Saint John panels and the Saint Martin panels were part of the same altarpiece, the latter superimposing the former. However, as Van Gelder (1973) noted, they are mentioned separately in 1546 and 1555 inventories of the abbey church at Marchiennes (see Refs.) and were not installed in the same chapel. Furthermore, it would make little sense to encounter the FINIS CORONAT motto four times, as well as two portraits of Coëne, on the reverses of these two sets of panels when closed in triptych form.

The closed reverses of the Saint John the Baptist panels would have shown the portrait of Jacques Coëne in prayer, facing the devotional image of the Man of Sorrows (fig. 2). As in the stylistically related wings with scenes from the life of Saint Martin, the central element of the Saint John the Baptist ensemble is missing. In terms of Saint John the Baptist’s life, the major and subsidiary scenes respectively unaccounted for here are the Baptism of Christ and Saint John Preaching in the Wilderness. For the altarpiece of Saint Martin it is Saint Martin dividing his cloak for the poor. The fact that the key episodes from both saints’s lives are missing is a coincidence, and it is equally likely that such scenes were sculpted as painted. There was a thriving production in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Antwerp and Brussels of sculpted retables with painted wings, a collaboration to which Brussels painters Colyn de Coter and the Master of the View of Sainte-Gudule contributed, as well as possibly Bernard van Orley.[7] Just when the Saint John and Saint Martin wings were detached from their centerpieces is unknown. By 1817 the Marchiennes church had been demolished, but most of its paintings had long since been dispersed. A 1792 French Revolution confiscation inventory lists the five panels of a Jan van Scorel altarpiece of Saint Stephen, but these were the only ones on the list also commissioned by Jacques Coëne that were still remaining.[8] Triangular portions are present on the upper portions of both the Saint John and the Saint Martin panels (see Technical Notes and Dunbar 2005, p. 201), and it is likely that these were added to eliminate the curved portions of an ogee-arched panel in order to convert these into independent paintings—unrelated to a triptych—for sale. An example of how the triptych may have looked, before being dismembered and the wings cut down, is the Passion Retable of Averbode (fig. 4).

The Attribution and Date: The Saint John the Baptist paintings are neither signed nor dated, and no documentary evidence confirms their attribution. However, just like The Met’s Virgin and Child with Angels (14.40.632), they can be related closely to the style of Bernard van Orley’s earliest signed work of about 1515–20, the Scenes from the Legends of Saint Thomas and Saint Matthew (the Brussels Joiners’ and Coopers’ Altarpiece). Comparing The Met’s Birth and Naming of Saint John the Baptist to the inside left wing of the Saints Thomas and Matthew altarpiece (fig. 5), one can see an identical pictorial strategy in play. Van Orley established open architectural structures and porches parallel to and at angles to the picture plane, within which he grouped his figures in distinct episodes of an extended narrative. He described spatial recession by establishing a few key figures in the foreground whose draperies spill over in exaggerated folds into the viewer’s space, and then strategically placed additional figures behind columns, and further in subsidiary scenes in gradually smaller sizes in the distance. Van Orley’s favored palette at this early stage was primary colors of red, blue, and green. The earlier date of the Saint John panels in relationship to the Saints Thomas and Matthew paintings is clear from several salient features. There is a less sophisticated description of space, a more restrained sense of ornamentation and decoration, less distinctively individualized faces that appear here more naïve in expression, and figural poses and gestures that are not as graceful or boldly animated as in the later work. This suggestion of an earlier date is also supported by the differences in the underdrawing on the panels (figs. 6–9). The Saint John paintings are a far less ambitious commission than the Scenes from the Legends of Saint Thomas and Saint Matthew and are considerably smaller in scale. Nonetheless, they also show a less refined sense of modeling of the figures and their draperies, and a more abbreviated, shorthand technique for indicating the features of the faces (see Technical Notes and Galand 2013, pp. 110–11 and fig. 79 with figs. 80–81). Abbey records show that the altars dedicated to Saints John the Baptist and Martin were consecrated in 1515. The altarpieces are thus likely to have been completed sometime between 1514 and 1515.

Maryan W. Ainsworth 2018

[1] Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, trans. and adapted by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger, New York, 1969, pp. 504–05.
[2] Sale, Art of Four Centuries, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, January 23–24, 1947, no. 228.
[3] Jean Buzelin, Gallo-Flandria sacra et profana, in qua urbes, oppida […] et pagi and […] gallo-flandrici tractus describuntur […] dein annals Gallo-Flandriae, Douai, 1624–25 as in Van Gelder 1973, and “Jan van Scorel in Frankrijk en Vlaanderen,” Simiolus 1/1, (1966–67), pp. 33–34.
[4] See undated research notes of Joshua Waterman in European Paintings Department curatorial files.
[5] On the life of the patron, see Charles De Lisas, Étude sur Dom Jacques Coëne, Abbé de Marchiennes 1501–1542, Amiens, 1856.
[6] Formerly thought to be a diptych; see Hendrikman 1999, and Hand and Christensen in Galand 2013, pp. 142–43. Documents also state that Coëne commissioned works from Jean Bellegambe, Jan van Scorel, and Anthonis Mor (see van Gelder 1973, pp. 156–75).
[7] See Catheline Périer-d’Ieteren, “Les volets peints des retables brabançons,” in Retables flamands et brabançons dans les monuments belges, M. Buyle and C. Vanthillo, eds., Brussels, 2000, pp. 37–52; and Lars Hendrikman, “Christian II als Scandinavische Constantijn,” Millenium 15, no. 1 (2001), p. 56 n. 122.
[8] J. Guillouet, “Un polyptych de Jan van Scorel peint pour l’Abbaye de Marchiennes,” Oud Holland 89 (1964), pp. 89–98.

Support: The support was constructed from three boards, with the grain oriented vertically. The boards were originally held in place with two dowels per join, as evident in the x-radiograph (see fig. 10 above). The double-sided panel measures 1/4 inch (0.6 cm) thick, on average. The panel has not been analyzed with dendrochronology. A barbe is present on left, bottom, and right, indicating that the original edges are preserved. The top edge was almost entirely cut, but about 1 3/16 inch of the curved original edge remains at the far right, which curves downward toward the right side, suggesting that the top was not originally a straight edge but an asymmetrical shape. At some point, the shaped top was cut to make the panel square and a very small triangular piece of wood, measuring 3/16 x 1 3/16 in. (0.5 x 3 cm), was inserted at upper right to square off the panel. Furthermore, the location of the dowels along the joins suggests that the left side would be taller: the dowels are more closely spaced on the left as if to allow for a third.

The related panel, The Martyrdom of Saint John (Promised Gift of Hester Diamond, New York), has a nearly identical triangle of unpainted wood at upper left, suggesting that the two panels were similarly shaped and were mirror images of each other. When closed they would have followed the shape of a central panel. Physical evidence from the two panels belonging to the Saint Martin altarpiece—close in dimensions, and commissioned for the same church (see Catalogue Entry)—sheds further light on the original shapes of the Saint John panels. The Knighting of Saint Martin by the Emperor Constantine panel (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) and the Saint Martin Adoring the Virgin and Child with Saints panel (private collection, The Netherlands) also have triangular inserts, in the upper right of the former and upper left of the latter, suggesting that the Saint Martin panels originally had similarly shaped tops.

The Saint Martin panels, though nearly identical in widths to the Saint John panels and having a very similar placement of compositional elements on front and back, are taller, measuring 29 15/16 x 27 3/8 in. (75.9 x 69.5 cm; Kansas City) and 29 1/8 x 26 3/4 in. (74 x 68 cm; private collection, The Netherlands).[1] The triangular inserts are also larger, (Kansas City measures 4.4 x 29.8 cm; the private collection panel is reportedly similar).[2] Taken together measurements suggest that all four panels were originally the same sizes, but that the Saint John panels have been cut to a greater degree, around 1 1/2 inches (4 cm), at the top.

Preparation: The panel was prepared with a white ground. Examination with infrared reflectography revealed the presence of an extensive underdrawing executed with a liquid medium (figs. 6–9).[3] The loose underdrawing set out the figures with spare but expressive lines. The artist drew the eyes with simple circles and created the faces with only a few strokes, which manage to suggest both individualized features and emotion. The Virgin, shown in profile as she presents the infant to Zechariah, is a good example of his minimal yet dramatic drawing, as in the curve of her brow and the set of her mouth. The occasional flourish, in keeping with Van Orley’s expressive style of underdrawing, is smoothed out in the final painting. The artist also added some shading to the underdrawing, mainly straight parallel lines with a few curving hatchmarks, such as in the bodice of the splendidly dressed attendant to the left of the infant John. The reflectogram also revealed minor changes; shifts to contours and the simplification of decoration, for example, in the pillar at upper left.

Paint Layers: The handling of the rather thick and occasionally impasted paint throughout the composition is impressively fluid. The reclining figure of Elizabeth is the most notable example of this approach, with the paint quite built up in both face and her white dress. The artist created highlights by adding zones of fine white brushstrokes, which blend together at a normal viewing distance. These dramatic white highlights accentuate the planes of the face in a masklike way, reminiscent of the technique of The Met’s Virgin and Child with Angels of ca. 1518 (14.40.632). Van Orley also added white strokes as final highlights to the often rather tubular fingers.

The technique of the reverse is difficult to judge due to its compromised state: it has suffered much damage, not surprising for the more vulnerable outer wing of a folding altarpiece. The fleshtones of Christ are quite rubbed, but the buildup of paint in the x-radiograph (fig. 10) gives a sense of the original modeling. The upper left of the reverse is particularly rubbed. By contrast, the obverse remains in very good condition; losses are restricted to the joins, with minimal retouching.

The attendant’s dress, which is now a very pale blue, has traces of a red lake that would have originally rendered the robe violet, a more pleasing contrast with the Virgin’s blue robe. Passages of green have discolored to brown as is characteristic of copper-containing glazes, for example, in the robes and the peacock’s feathers.

Sophie Scully 2018

[1] Dunbar 2005, p. 207.
[2] Dunbar 2005, p. 201.
[3] Infrared reflectography completed with a Merlin Indigo InGaAs near-infrared camera with a StingRay macro lens customized for the wavelengths covered by the camera, 0.9 to 1.7 microns, September 2011.

Inscription: Inscribed (reverse, on scroll): FInIS COROnAT [Crowned at the end (motto of Jacques Coëne, Abbot of Marchiennes)]

Benedictine abbey church of Marchiennes (about 1515–at least 1555; commissioned by Jacques Coëne, abbot of Marchiennes, for the altar in honor of John the Baptist, first consecrated in 1515 and reconsecrated in 1541; listed in the Abbey's inventories of 1546 and 1555); Broleman, London; [P. de Boer, Amsterdam, in 1937]; George and Hertha Katz, Great Neck, N.Y.; Hertha Katz, Great Neck (by 1981–d. 2000)

Amsterdam. Kunsthandel P. de Boer. "Tableaux anciens," July–August 1937, no. 2.

Brussels. Palais des Beaux-Arts. "Bernard van Orley: Bruxelles et la Renaissance," February 20–May 26, 2019, no. 3.

Marchiennes abbey inventory. 1546 [Archives départementales du Nord, Lille, 10 H 271, Mobilier, reliques et trésor de l'abbaye de Marchiennes (1546–1754), no. 4132; see Ref. Gelder 1973, p. 157 n. 6, p. 171], lists the altars for Saint John the Baptist and Saint Martin separately [the altarpiece presumably made for the Saint John altar included this panel and 2020.233].

Marchiennes abbey inventory. 1555 [Archives départementales du Nord, Lille, 10 H 271, Mobilier, reliques et trésor de l'abbaye de Marchiennes (1546–1754), no. 4133; see Ref. Gelder 1973, p. 157 n. 6, p. 171], the altars for Saint John the Baptist and Saint Martin are listed separately in this inventory.

Charles de Linas. Étude sur Dom Jacques Coëne, Abbé de Marchiennes, 1501–1542. Amiens, 1856, pp. 15–16 n. 3, lists the altars erected by Jacques Coëne in the abbey of Marchiennes and reports that five were consecrated when John, Bishop of Beirut, was in Marchiennes in 1515: to Saints Andreas, Nicasius, John the Baptist, Martin, and Sebastian; believes that three of these altars, including the one dedicated to Saint John, were reconsecrated in 1541 because they were destroyed [and rebuilt] during the reconstruction of the choir; adds that the altar dedicated to Saint John is cited at the time of its reconsecration in 1541 as ". . . 4º one, in honor of Saint John the Baptist, with the relics of Saints Sebastian, Quentin, Adrian, martyrs, and the prophets Elisha and Abdias, with a piece of the sepulcher of our Lord" .

Max J. Friedländer. Die altniederländische Malerei. Vol. 14, Pieter Bruegel und Nachträge zu den früheren Bänden. Leiden, 1937, p. 112, ascribes to Van Orley a scene with the birth of the Baptist [this panel], with de Boer in Amsterdam, and his beheading, with a dealer in New York [2020.233] and associates them with a pair of altar shutters in the Schiff collection [scenes from the legend of Saint Martin; see Friedländer, Die altniederländische Malerei, vol. 8, 1930, p. 168, no. 92, where he dates them about 1514 and identifies them as two altar shutters, including the knighting of a young saint]; assumes all four panels were part of the same complex.

Catalogue de tableaux anciens. Exh. cat., Kunsthandel P. de Boer, Amsterdam. Amsterdam, 1937, unpaginated, no. 2, as by Van Orley, from the Broleman collection, London.

Ludwig Baldass. "Die Entwicklung des Bernart van Orley." Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, n.s., 13 (1944), pp. 152–54, figs. 132, 134 (obverse and reverse), supports Friedländer's view [Ref. 1937] that the Saint John panels were originally part of an altarpiece with the Schiff panels, which he describes as scenes from the life of Saint Martin of Tours; believes the scenes of Saint Martin were mounted above those of Saint John.

Art of Four Centuries. Park-Bernet, New York. January 23–25, 1947, pp. 55, 66, mistakenly identifies a painting of Saint Helena in Rome [rather than the present work] as the companion to lot 237, Van Orley's panel with the beheading of John the Baptist, and notes that other panels from the same altarpiece were with Mortimer Schiff in New York.

Luís Reis-Santos. Masterpieces of Flemish Painting of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries in Portugal. Lisbon, 1962, pp. 99–100 [Portuguese ed., 1953], is not convinced by Baldass's [Ref. 1944] reconstruction of the altarpiece.

Max J. Friedländer et al. Early Netherlandish Painting. Vol. 8, Jan Gossart and Bernart van Orley. New York, 1972, p. 103, no. 92, pl. 90 (obverse and reverse).

J. G. van Gelder. "Scorel, Mor, Bellegambe und Orley in Marchiennes." Oud Holland 87, no. 4 (1973), pp. 170–72, fig. 14 (reverse), identifies "finis coronat" as the device of Jacques Coëne, abbot of Marchiennes; rejects reconstruction of an altarpiece that includes the scenes with Saint John the Baptist along with those of Saint Martin, noting that they are mentioned separately in the 1546 and 1555 inventories of the abbey church of Marchiennes [see Ref. 1546 and 1555] and were clearly not installed in the same chapel; dates these distinct altarpieces about 1514/1515, as the altars for Saint John the Baptist and Saint Martin were both consecrated in 1515 [see Ref. Linas 1856]; supports Linas's view that the three altars consecrated in 1515 and reconsecrated on March 27 and 28, 1541, including the altar for John the Baptist, were probably damaged during construction of the choir; notes that the description of the Saint John altar at the time of its rededication [see Ref. Linas 1856] reveals that it contained no relics of Saint Martin .

John David Farmer. "Bernard van Orley of Brussels." PhD diss., Princeton University, 1981, pp. 99–103, 119 nn. 33–34, calls the two Saint John panels "largely a workshop labor" produced about 1517 probably for private worship; rejects proposed reconstructions of an altarpiece including both the Saint Martin and Saint John panels, noting that the donor's portrait and device would appear twice in such a configuration; also believes the difference in quality makes it more likely that these sets of panels were separate commissions; notes that our panel has been cut down at the top and bottom and believes it was conceived as a folding diptych with the scene of the saint's beheading.

John Oliver Hand in John Oliver Hand and Martha Wolff. Early Netherlandish Painting. Washington, 1986, pp. 222–23 n. 16, believes this panel and 2020.233 were conceived as a diptych.

Lars Hendrikman. "Bernard van Orley's Washington Diptych. Art Historical and Technical Observations." La peinture dans les Pays-Bas au 16e siècle: Pratiques d'atelier, infrarouges et autres méthodes d'investigation. Ed. Hélène Verougstraete et al. Colloque 12, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1999, p. 64.

Burton L. Dunbar. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: German and Netherlandish Paintings, 1450–1600. Kansas City, Mo., 2005, pp. 204–5, 207, 209, figs. 15f, 15h (obverse and reverse), associates Van Orley's Knighting of Saint Martin by Emperor Constantine (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) with the altarpiece dedicated to Saint Martin, and the MMA picture with the one dedicated to Saint John, both of which were recorded in Marchiennes; notes that the words "FINIS CORONAT," the motto of Jacques Coëne, on the reverse of the MMA panel were once on the verso of the Kansas City panel and are visible in an old photograph; dates both altarpieces about 1514; remarks that Van Orley's Christ among the Doctors and Marriage of the Virgin, also made for Coëne, form yet another pendant pair lacking a central panel, which appears to him to be "a self-contained devotional unit suitable for private workship"; agrees with Refs. Van Gelder [1973] and Hand [1986] that there never was a central panel for the two pictures in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Christ Among the Doctors and The Marriage of the Virgin), but finds this conclusion hard to accept for the Saint Martin and Saint John panels.

John Oliver Hand et al. Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych. Exh. cat., National Gallery of Art. Washington, 2006, pp. 9, 306 nn. 19–21, 23, figs. 5A, 5C, reviews the various hypothetical reconstructions of the original altarpiece(s).

Old Master Paintings. Sotheby's, London. July 9, 2008, pp. 24, 26–27, figs. 2–3. (obverse and reverse), discusses this panel in relation to 2020.233 ("presumed to have been bought in Paris by the father of the present owners") and in relation to the two panels with scenes from the life of Saint Martin; reports results of dendrochronological analysis by Ian Tyers for two of the three panels used in the Beheading: ("conjectural usage date of 1492–1524").

Alexis Donetzkoff in La renaissance de Jan van Scorel: Les retables de Marchiennes. Exh. cat., Institut Néerlandais. Paris, 2011, pp. 42–43, 49 n. 39, figs. 13, 15 (color, obverse and reverse).

Alexandre Galand. The Flemish Primitives: Catalogue of Early Netherlandish Painting in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Vol. 6, The Bernard van Orley Group. Brussels, 2013, pp. 51–52.

Véronique Bücken in Bernard van Orley. Exh. cat., Palais des Beaux-Arts. Brussels, 2019, pp. 29, 106, 116.

Maryan W. Ainsworth in Bernard van Orley. Exh. cat., Palais des Beaux-Arts. Brussels, 2019, p. 45, figs. 6, 7 (infrared reflectogram details).

Alexandre Galand in Bernard van Orley. Exh. cat., Palais des Beaux-Arts. Brussels, 2019, pp. 80, 86–88, 90, 102, no. 3, ill. p. 86 and fig. 1 (color, obverse and reverse).