Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1628, Oil on canvas, 303 cm × 225 cm, KMSKA, Antwerp
On 6 March 1628, Antoon van Dyck drew up a will in which he expressed the wish to be buried in the choir of the Begijnhof church in Antwerp. Three of his sisters, Cornelia, Susanna, and Anna, lived there as beguines, members of the lay religious community that had occupied the site since the thirteenth century. Cornelia had died the previous year, in 1627, and it is generally presumed that the large altarpiece Van Dyck painted for the high altar of the Begijnhof church, this Lamentation over the Dead Christ, was conceived at least in part as a memorial to her and as a marker for his own eventual resting place. The painting was therefore not simply a commission. It was personal in a way that most altarpieces, however emotionally charged, are not: an image of mourning made by a man who was himself in mourning, intended to hang above the place where he expected to lie.
Van Dyck had returned to Antwerp from Italy in 1627 after six years spent primarily in Genoa, which was at that time the banking capital of Europe and, as a consequence, home to one of the most concentrated accumulations of Venetian Renaissance painting anywhere outside Venice itself. The great Genoese banking families, the Balbi, the Brignole-Sale, the Durazzo, the Pallavicini, had been acquiring works by Titian (c.1488–1576), Veronese (1528–1588), and Tintoretto (1518–1594) for their palazzi throughout the sixteenth century, and by the time Van Dyck arrived in the early 1620s an artist working in Genoa could study the Venetian colourists at first hand without ever setting foot in Venice. It was in these private collections, not in churches, that Van Dyck absorbed the warm saturated palette, the loose handling of flesh, and the feeling for compositional breadth that transformed his manner so decisively. That Venetian legacy is visible everywhere in this painting. Christ’s body is rendered with a softness that owes more to Titian’s late manner than to anything in the Flemish tradition, the skin tones cool and slightly grey, the limbs heavy with the particular heaviness of a body that is no longer holding itself up. The Virgin supports her son beneath the arms and raises her eyes upward, her mouth open in a gesture that borrows from the established iconography of the Mater Dolorosa but is painted with an intensity that makes it feel unreharsed. Mary Magdalene sits at Christ’s feet. An angel holds his right hand and draws attention to the nail wound. The apostle John stands in the left background, hands clasped, his face half-lost against the near-black rock behind him. Nicodemus, also praying, is almost entirely hidden behind the angel’s wing.
The composition is deliberately compressed. Five figures fill the canvas from edge to edge, and the vertical format, at just over three metres tall, would have forced the viewer in the Begijnhof church to look upward, encountering Christ’s body at something close to life scale. The effect is intimate despite the monumental dimensions, which is not easy to achieve and is one of the things that separates Van Dyck’s religious paintings from those of Rubens (1577–1640). Rubens, who was away from Antwerp on diplomatic missions for much of 1628 to 1630, worked in religious subjects with a physical dynamism and a compositional complexity that pulled the viewer through the narrative. Van Dyck does the opposite here. He slows everything down. The figures grieve quietly, and the palette, built on muted browns, blues, and greys, refuses to excite the eye. It asks for contemplation rather than astonishment, which is exactly what the Jesuit-influenced devotional culture of Counter-Reformation Antwerp prized most highly. Van Dyck had joined the Sodaliteit van de bejaerde Jongmans, the Jesuit Confraternity of Bachelors, in 1628, and his religious paintings from this period are steeped in the Ignatian emphasis on personal, emotional meditation on the Passion.
What is remarkable about this composition is not just its quality but its reach. Van Dyck himself produced a smaller replica, now in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid (inv. 1475, c.1628–1629, 114 × 100 cm), which introduced minor variations: Christ acquires a halo, hanging plants appear on the rocks to the left, and the nails from the cross are repositioned further from the basin in the foreground. It was this smaller version, not the monumental Begijnhof canvas, that the engraver Paulus Pontius (1603–1658) used as the basis for his reproductive print in the 1630s, reversing the composition in the process, as was standard in engraving. At least two further engravings followed: one by Hendrick Snyers (active 1635–1647) and another by an anonymous printmaker. These prints were the primary mechanism by which Van Dyck’s Lamentation compositions travelled beyond Antwerp. A reproductive engraving could be purchased for a fraction of the cost of a painting, shipped easily, pinned to a studio wall, and studied by artists who would never see the original. The print did not replace the painting, but it created a portable, widely distributed version of the image that could serve as a model for new works, and it did so for decades.
The German-Danish painter Jürgen Ovens (1623–1678), for instance, painted his own Lamentation of Christ for the Lutheran church of Sankt Christophorus in Friedrichstadt, Schleswig-Holstein, in 1675, nearly half a century after Van Dyck’s original. Ovens had visited the Begijnhof church in Antwerp and studied the altarpiece in person, but the Pontius engraving would also have been available to him, and the question of which source he relied upon more heavily has been the subject of scholarly discussion. The positioning of Christ’s lance wound on the right side of the torso in Ovens’s version, rather than the left as in the reversed Pontius print, suggests he worked primarily from the painting or from his own earlier drawing after it, now in Copenhagen. But the very fact that these two transmission routes, painted original and printed reproduction, coexisted and could be used independently of one another is what made Van Dyck’s compositions so persistent. Painted copies by workshop followers and later imitators also circulated, satisfying a market of collectors and ecclesiastical patrons who wanted their own version of a composition that had by then acquired a devotional authority of its own.
Van Dyck returned to the Lamentation theme repeatedly. His most developed treatment of the subject, painted between 1629 and 1630, measured 220 by 166 centimetres and entered the collection of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. It was among the approximately 430 paintings stored in the Friedrichshain flak tower that were lost in two fires in May 1945.
The Begijnhof altarpiece itself remained on the high altar of the church until 1794, when the French Revolutionary suppression of religious houses in the Southern Netherlands brought it into state hands and eventually to the KMSKA. Van Dyck never was buried beneath it. He died in London in December 1641, far from Antwerp and from the sisters who had lived and died at the Begijnhof, and was interred at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, a building that would itself be destroyed by fire twenty-five years later. The painting outlasted all of them, which is what paintings are supposed to do, though it is worth pausing over the fact that Van Dyck made it not as a public statement but as something closer to a private act, a gift to a community of women to which his own family belonged, placed above the spot where he intended his body to rest.
References
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Glen, T.L. (1983) ‘Observations on van Dyck as a Religious Painter’, RACAR: revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, 10(1), pp. 45–52. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42630976 (Accessed: 7 March 2024).
Depauw, C. and Luijten, G. (eds.) (1999) Anthony van Dyck as a Printmaker. Antwerp: Antwerpen Open/Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.
Köster, O. (2017) Jürgen Ovens (1623–1678): Maler in Schleswig-Holstein und Amsterdam. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag
New Hollstein et al. (1993–) The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Anthony van Dyck. Part VII. Rotterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive
Martin, J.R. and Feigenbaum, G. (1979) Van Dyck as Religious Artist. Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (n.d.) Lost Masterpieces. Gemäldegalerie. Available at: https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/research/lost-masterpieces/ (Accessed: 7 March 2024).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Anthony van Dyck, Bewening van Christus [Lamentation of Christ], c.1628. KMSKA, Antwerp, inv. 403. RKDimages, image no. 293416. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/293416 (Accessed: 8 March 29024 ).