The Painting: The newborn Christ sits on his mother’s lap and, in a gesture of childlike curiosity, reaches his hand into the opened chalice proffered by the opulently-dressed magus Melchior. Balthasar enters at the right of the scene, the folds of his white robe suggesting movement and emphasizing his contrapposto stance. Saint Joseph and Caspar stand behind the seated Virgin and mark the entrance to an elaborate but dilapidated structure exposed to the elements. In the distance, beyond the black and white tile floor of the broken dwelling, a river runs horizontally across the picture, leading the viewer’s eye to a finely executed castellated wall with tower and drawbridge.
Sixteenth-century Antwerp was a bustling economic hub that hosted a large peripatetic group of international merchants. The
Adoration of the Magi, with its focus on the presentation of glittering riches was an appropriately popular subject in a city so intimately tied to commerce and the trade in luxury items.[1] In composing the Lehman picture, the artist could draw inspiration from a significant corpus of paintings of the
Adoration; as J.P. Filedt Kok points out, "at the beginning of the sixteenth century there were more than two hundred so-called ‘free masters’ and assistants churning out versions of certain models" that would have included their most reproduced subject.[2]
Attribution and Dating: At first glance the scene appears cohesive, an image of worshipful devotion to the newborn savior taking place in a flamboyant but neglected architectural setting that echoes sixteenth-century depictions produced in Antwerp.[3] However, as described by Wolff, "the [Lehman picture’s] essential misunderstanding of the rhythmic interplay of arched setting and kneeling and standing figures that is characteristic of the whole group of possible models" belies an attribution to an artist active in the Antwerp Mannerist milieu.[4] Indeed, the artist responsible for the Lehman composition compressed and recombined motifs found in several paintings of the
Adoration, doing so with rather more the spirit of a copyist than with the pursuit of novelty.[5] There is significant evidence that the Lehman artist was looking back to paintings created at least a hundred years before his own time.
The 1998 entry on the
Adoration divides the most substantive data for a later dating, that is to say the presence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pigments, between the technical notes, the entry body and the footnotes.[6] Drawing together the stylistic analysis of the previous section with technical investigations generates a clearer sense of the picture’s complicated physical history and identifies questions that remain to be answered. Such a strategy allows for a clarification of Wolff’s suggestion that, in all likelihood, ‘the painting is a later recombination of Antwerp Mannerist motifs’.[7]
Dendrochronology tells us that the panel, which has 144 growth rings, originated from the Baltic region and gives us an approximate earliest date of use from 1511 onwards.[8] Thus, the panel on which the Lehman painting was created was available during, what Max J. Friedländer suggested were the Antwerp Mannerists’ most productive years: between approximately 1505 and 1525.[9] Infrared reflectography has, as yet, been unable to detect an underdrawing setting out the composition below the paint and varnish layers.[10] Perhaps the artist’s preponderancy for using existing motifs rendered unnecessary such an initial sketch. X-radiography reveals some losses and a vertical split at the plank’s top, but does not show alterations to the existing composition, although a dark cloudy area in the upper left part of the x-radiograph does not correspond to the painted scene (fig. 1).
A black-and-white photograph of the
Adoration (fig. 2) documents an earlier moment in the painting’s history. At this point the flat haloes surrounding the Holy Family were more intact (covering a delicate series of gold lines that form a nimbus around the Virgin and Child’s heads), the damage caused by the split was more visible, as were several other fine cracks in the area above the heads of Saint Joseph and Caspar, and Balthasar’s face was more convincingly described. Significantly, the photograph includes the simulated crack pattern that was applied primarily in lighter areas and is still visible in the paint surface (fig. 3). As Wolff noted, the somewhat inelegant and poorly adhering haloes were applied over this pattern of cracks.[11] This document tells us that the cracks were created before the simplistic haloes were added and that, at some unknown juncture between the photo and the paintings’ present state, an intervention took place that disguised larger cracks and changed the appearance of Balthasar’s face. Although the presence of the imitation cracks does not rule out the possibility of the painting originating in the sixteenth century, it certainly throws the presence of anachronistic pigments into sharper focus.
According to a report by Christopher McGlinchey, Naples yellow, a pigment that only came into use in oil paintings during the seventeenth century and which was especially popular between 1750 and 1850, was identified in highlights on the Virgin as well as in Balthasar’s gold-embellished robe.[12] McGlinchey also detected, but was unable to confirm, the presence of Prussian blue in the Virgin’s robe, a pigment only created in 1704 in Berlin. However, he was also unable to find blue pigments characteristic of the sixteenth century, namely smalt, azurite and ultramarine. Furthermore, McGlinchey noted a network of hair-line cracks that appear at random and do not conform to the wood grain. He points out that the type of cracks, which can form in panel paintings of the sixteenth century, are not consistent with those created 400 years ago and are instead suggestive of a ‘a brittle paint that dried fast’.[13] These factors establish strong, if ultimately inconclusive evidence that, if the picture’s origins are not eighteenth century, at least at some point in its history, a substantial intervention took place that disguised any sixteenth-century material.
Nenagh Hathaway, 2019
[1] See Dan Ewing, "Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460-1560: Our Lady’s Pand in
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Dec., 1990); p. 581, n. 165.
[2] J. P. Filedt Kok: ‘Antwerp Mannerism: Antwerp and Maastricht’ [exhibition review],
Burlington Magazine, 148 (April 2006), p. 287.
[3] While the frame with its inscription appears to be consistent with fifteenth and early-sixteenth century manufacture, the text of the prayer is an unusual pairing with an image of the
Adoration, as noted by Ainsworth. See written correspondence from Ainsworth to Wolff dated August 20, 1996 in Lehman Collection Curatorial File and also mention in Wolff’s entry, Refs., Wolff, 1998, p. 124.
[4] See Refs., Wolff, 1998, p. 124.
[5] This quality was identified by Friedländer as a significant motivation of this group. See Max J. Friedländer et al.
Early Netherlandish Painting. Vol. 11,
The Antwerp Mannerists, Adriaen Ysenbrant. New York, 1974, p. 12. The dizzying number of
Adoration scenes produced by the Antwerp Mannerists during the sixteenth century provides offer plentiful inspiration for the Lehman picture. Wolff’s entry describes some of the picture’s most significant borrowings. See Refs., Wolff, 1998, pp. 123-234.
[6] See Refs., Wolff, 1998, pp. 123-124.
[7] Ibid., p. 124.
[8] See Robert Lehman Collection curatorial file (1975.1.122), dendrochronology report by Dr. Peter Klein (May 13, 1997). Dr. Klein dated the tree rings between 1494 and 1351, identifying the youngest heartwood ring as being formed in 1494. He gave an earliest felling date of 1503, and more plausibly ‘between 1507..1509….1513 + x.’ Klein gave a minimum of two years for seasoning, arriving at an earliest creation from 1505 upwards. Adding a median of fifteen sapwood rings to the two years seasoning, he finally suggests 1511 as the earliest possible date of creation.
[9] See Max J. Friedländer et al.,
Early Netherlandish Painting, Vol. 11, New York, 1974, p. 13.
[10] This does not rule out the possibility that an underdrawing is present were it applied in a medium that does not contain carbon. See Refs., Wolff, 1998, p. 123, Technical Notes.
[11] Unfortunately, we do not know when the black-and-white photo was taken, nor do we have documentation of any previous conservation treatment. Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 124, n. 4. Technical findings report by Christ McGlinchey, August 7, 1996 in Lehman Collection Curatorial File. For information about pigment history see the MFA Boston’s Conservation and Art Materials Encyclopedia Online. Naples yellow:
CAMEO Naples yellow and Prussian blue:
CAMEO Prussian blue.
[13] Technical findings report by Christ McGlinchey, August 7, 1996 in Lehman Collection Curatorial File.
ReferencesKatharine Baetjer.
European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born in or before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1980, pp. 56-57, ill. p. 357.
Katharine Baetjer.
European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 264, ill.
Martha Wolff in
The Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 2, Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Paintings. New York, 1998, p. 122-124, ill. p. 122.
