Hugo van der Goes (c.1440–1482/83), Portrait of a Man with John the Baptist, c.1475–80. Oil on wood, 23.2 × 22.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, on short-term loan from The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
A party of Augustinian brothers was riding home to Brussels from Cologne, probably in 1481, when one of them broke down on the road. He said he was a lost soul and eternally damned. He tried to injure himself, and the others had to restrain him. The man was Hugo van der Goes, the most sought-after painter in the southern Netherlands. At Brussels the prior of their house came out to see him and concluded that the illness was the one that had tormented Saul. Music was ordered, and entertainments, on the model of David and his harp. Nothing worked. The painter went on calling himself the son of Perdition. He died at the priory within a year or so, in 1482 or early 1483.
That scene comes to us through a single manuscript, and its author was not there. Gaspar Ofhuys (1456–1523) belonged to the same house and wrote up the episode some thirty years later, between about 1509 and 1513 (Dolev, 1999). Hugo’s half-brother Nicolaas had been in the travelling party and was presumably one of the sources. What Ofhuys produced was a lesson rather than a report. His subject is a celebrated man of whom people said ‘he had no equal this side of the Alps’ (Grove Art Online, n.d.), undone by the privileges his fame had brought him, the wine and the distinguished visitors included. He offers several possible causes, among them an anxiety any working artist would recognise: the painter was ‘deeply troubled by the thought of how he would ever finish’ the pictures he had promised, and nine years were reckoned scarcely enough for them (Ofhuys, translated in Stechow, 1966).
No other Netherlandish painter of the period has left anything like it. There are no letters, no recorded conversations, no self-portraits with commentary. What survives elsewhere is dry: guild registers, rent books, payments for civic decoration. So the chronicle has become the loudest thing in the room, and it is talking about a man’s mind.
The rest of the evidence for Hugo is unusually poor, which has let the chronicle expand into the space. The archives record what he did without preserving what he made, since most of his paid work was heraldic and festival painting that was dismantled once the ceremony ended. The paintings that survive carry no documents in return: roughly thirteen panels and two drawings, none signed, with only the Portinari altarpiece tied to his name by early outside testimony, in Vasari’s garbled Ugo d’Anversa (Brine, 2023). Attribution therefore depends on the eye. Before the Berlin retrospective of 2023 its curators observed that every exhibit could in principle be labelled attributed to (Kemperdick, quoted in Munz, 2024). This Baltimore panel came through that exhibition as autograph; three male heads lent from New York did not fare so well though (Brine, 2023).
The consequences are audible in the way his pictures are still described. They are called meditative, sombre, unsettling. The Berlin show took its subtitle from the language of pain and blessedness, though it was careful to let the paintings make their own case. Scholars have been arguing against his dramatic biographical reading for over thirty years without much changing how these heads are seen .
The Baltimore panel is in no state to resist a strong story, because half of it is missing. Diptychs of this size were made to be held and opened like a book, so that the owner met the holy figures at the fold (Hand, Metzger and Spronk, 2006). The wing with the Virgin and Child has gone. What remains is the man, kneeling with his hands joined, looking across an empty gap, with John the Baptist behind him in a red mantle to make the introduction. The panel was also cut down at the top and bottom (Walters Art Museum, n.d.). Hinge marks, framing and any inscription went with those edges, and that is usually where a sitter’s identity survives. Only the saint is left as a clue. He normally stands for the owner’s baptismal name, which points to a man called Jan, and in fifteenth-century Flanders that narrows the field to about half the male population.
Look closely at the face and the means are small and quite deliberate. One raised brow. A tightening of the muscles around the mouth. A stillness in the hands that registers as effort rather than rest. Devotional portraiture required absorption without display, and this is what that looks like when a first-rate painter carries it off. The pose comes from Rogier van der Weyden, whose designs Hugo clearly studied; the modelling of the head goes after an individuality that Rogier never wanted here. Hugo left no certain independent portrait. Every head we have by him was painted to look at something holy.
Set the chronicle aside and the documented life looks nothing like a breakdown waiting to happen. From May 1473 Hugo rented a large house near the Blandijnberg in Ghent, appearing in his landlords’ accounts as Hughe de scildre. He once advanced money on the family’s behalf to a colleague leaving for Italy and took it off his rent. He was elected deacon of the painters’ guild three years running, and the city paid him for decorations at a ducal entry and for blazons at a ducal funeral (Flemish Art Collection, n.d.). At the priory he kept the right to travel, to accept commissions and to drink wine, and he received visitors as grand as the future Emperor Maximilian I. In 1482 the magistrates of Leuven asked him to value panels left unfinished by Dieric Bouts and paid him in Rhenish wine (Flemish Art Collection, n.d.).
Two of the three kinds of evidence say nothing at all about his mind, and the third is a sermon. The melancholy so reliably found in these heads comes from that imbalance. Had the chronicle stayed in its manuscript, the concentration in this face would read as what the commission required, a merchant kneeling before a Virgin that only he can see, done with an economy no one else in Ghent could match. The panel records professional decorum, held at a pitch fine enough that later readers took it for confession.
References
Brine, D. (2023) ‘Hugo van der Goes: Between Pain and Bliss’, Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews, September. Available at: https://hnanews.org/hnar/reviews/hugo-van-der-goes-between-pain-and-bliss/ (Accessed: 8 June 2023).
Dolev, N. (1999) ‘Gaspar Ofhuys’ chronicle and Hugo van der Goes’, Assaph B: Studies in Art History, 4, pp. 125–137.
Flemish Art Collection (n.d.) Hugo van der Goes. Available at: https://vlaamseprimitieven.vlaamsekunstcollectie.be/en/biographies/hugo-van-der-goes/ (Accessed: 8 June 2023).
Grove Art Online (n.d.) Goes, Hugo van der. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hand, J.O., Metzger, C.A. and Spronk, R. (2006) Prayers and Portraits. Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych. Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Kemperdick, S. and Eising, E. (eds.) (2023) Hugo van der Goes. Zwischen Schmerz und Seligkeit [Hugo van der Goes. Between Pain and Bliss]. Exhibition catalogue, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 31 March – 16 July 2023. Munich: Hirmer
Koslow, S. (1979) ‘The impact of Hugo van der Goes’s mental illness and late-medieval religious attitudes on the Death of the Virgin’, in Rosenberg, C.E. (ed.) Healing and History. Essays for George Rosen. New York: Neale Watson, pp. 27–50.
Koster, M. (2008) Hugo van der Goes and the Procedures of Art and Salvation. London: Harvey Miller.
Munz (2024) Review of Hugo van der Goes. Between Pain and Bliss, Renaissance Studies. doi:10.1111/rest.12920.
Panofsky, E. (1953) Early Netherlandish Painting. Its Origins and Character. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Ridderbos, B. (1991) De melancholie van de kunstenaar. Hugo van der Goes en de oudnederlandse schilderkunst [The Melancholy of the Artist. Hugo van der Goes and Early Netherlandish Painting]. ‘s-Gravenhage: Sdu
Ridderbos, B. (2007) ‘Hugo van der Goes’s Death of the Virgin and the Modern Devotion. An analysis of a creative process’, Oud Holland, 120(1/2), pp. 1–30.
Sander, J. (1992) Hugo van der Goes. Stilentwicklung und Chronologie [Hugo van der Goes. Stylistic Development and Chronology]. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern.
Stechow, W. (1966) Northern Renaissance Art 1400–1600. Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, pp. 15–18.
Thompson, C. and Campbell, L. (1974) Hugo van der Goes and the Trinity Panels in Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland.
Walters Art Museum (n.d.) Portrait of a Man at Prayer with Saint John the Baptist, acc. no. 37.296. Available at: https://art.thewalters.org/object/37.296/ (Accessed: 8 June 2023).