Category: Antoon van Dyck

Antoon Van Dyck (1599 – 1641) and Studio, Portrait of King Charles I (1600–1649), circa 1635–1637, Oil on canvas, 121 x 94.6 cm, Ham House, Surrey

Of the surviving versions of Van Dyck’s three-quarter-length portrait of Charles I in black, the painting at Ham House is particularly interesting because of the context of its commission. Its recipient, William Murray, future 1st Earl of Dysart, had been brought to court as a child to be educated alongside Prince Charles and, by the convention of the day, to serve as his ‘whipping boy’, absorbing in his place the corporal punishments that no tutor could lawfully administer to a future monarch. The portrait, given perhaps thirty years after that first encounter, is in this sense a gift from one childhood companion to another, dressed in the formal language of Caroline kingship.

The composition itself was developed in London between 1635 and 1637, during the most productive years of Van Dyck’s English period. Charles is shown three-quarter length, turned slightly to the left, his head pivoting back over the shoulder to meet the spectator. He wears plain black, relieved only by the white linen collar at his throat and the blue ribbon and Lesser George of the Order of the Garter. His right hand rests lightly on a table at his side; his left holds a glove. There is no allegory, no military attribute, no architectural setting. The image works through reduction, an idiom that recent scholarship has read as central to Van Dyck’s redefinition of English royal portraiture, in which authority is established through stillness, costume and a sustained meeting of the eyes rather than through emblematic apparatus.

The prototype Van Dyck devised for this design no longer exists. It is generally believed to have been the version recorded in the Royal Collection and lost when fire broke out at Whitehall Palace on the afternoon of 4 January 1698 and burned, with brief interruption, for some fifteen hours, leaving little more than Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House standing. What does survive is the design itself, in repetitions ranging from substantially autograph to substantially studio-produced. The most polished is the canvas now in the Gemäldegalerie at Dresden, dated 1637 and painted for the king’s nephew Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, who at that moment was attempting to recover his territories from his exile in England. Its precision of finish, particularly in the costume and insignia, is consistent with its function as a dynastic gift intended for display abroad. Other versions, including those at the National Portrait Gallery and at Kedleston Hall, are more economical in handling, with softer faces and drier passages of drapery. The variation reflects the practical economy of a workshop operating at considerable pressure: assistants laid in the costume, drapery and ground, while Van Dyck reserved for himself the passages where likeness and decorum had to be earned.

Recent technical scholarship, examining a series of unfinished and partially finished Van Dycks, has identified a faint “rough halo” of underpainting around the head of many sitters, marking the boundary between the master’s brushwork and that of the studio. The same logic of selective intervention can be observed in the hands. Where assistants could plausibly produce a passage of black satin or a neutral background, the slow accumulation of light over the joints of a finger, or the sense of weight registered in a wrist, lay beyond their fluency. In Van Dyck’s hierarchy of authorship, the head and the hands were the master’s territory.

The Ham House version belongs to this category of personal investment. Its provenance is unusually well documented. It corresponds, almost certainly, to the entry “Le Roi vestu de noir … avec sa mollure” in the bill, written in French, that Van Dyck submitted to Charles I in the autumn of 1638, listing pictures supplied with their frames and approved by the king himself, who reduced some of the prices in his own hand. The phrasing places the painting in the king’s possession at that moment, in its present frame, before passing to Murray. Murray’s career gives the gift unusual weight. He had been brought to court by his uncle Thomas Murray, tutor and later secretary to the prince. Following Charles’s accession in 1625, he became a Groom of the Bedchamber, an office that required daily personal attendance on the monarch and gave him a degree of intimate access matched by few at court. The royal grant of the manors of Ham and Petersham in 1636/7, around the time the Van Dyck design was being formulated, was already understood as a mark of singular favour; the picture followed soon after.

In the Ham canvas, the face is built up in Van Dyck’s characteristic thin glazes, the flesh luminous, the gaze quietly melancholy. The lace collar is laid in with shimmering delicacy. But it is the hands that carry the painting, and they deserve the closest attention.

Van Dyck’s hands are not anatomical records. They are, on every aristocratic sitter who passed through his English studio, slightly elongated beyond nature, the fingers tapered, the wrists narrow, the palms pale and lightly veined. The fashion for what came to be called the ‘Van Dyck hand’ entered English portraiture as a quiet manifesto: long fingers signalled a body unmarked by labour, a person whose authority was inherited rather than earned through exertion. Contemporary observers commented on the elegance of his hands, and his successors, from Lely to Reynolds, retained the formula long after the costumes around them had changed. Technically the hands are constructed in much the same way as the face, by a slow layering of translucent glazes over a paler underlayer, allowing the warm tone of the flesh to emerge through cooler shadows in the knuckles and along the tendons. Opaque highlights are reserved for the upper edge of a finger or the small ridge of a nail; the rest is built up in a graduated half-light. This is exactly the kind of work that resists delegation. An assistant copying the master’s design could match a contour, but not the rhythm by which one passage of glaze is allowed to settle before the next is laid over it.

In the Ham portrait both hands carry this rhythm. The right rests on the table with a poised half-pressure, the index finger slightly lifted, the others barely resting on the surface, as if the king’s weight were carried elsewhere. It is a hand that touches without leaning. The left, meanwhile, holds the glove with the slightly mannered ease that became Van Dyck’s signature: the glove falls between thumb and forefinger, the remaining fingers curve loosely below it, and the wrist turns inward in a gesture closer to handling a bird than gripping an object. Veins are faintly indicated along the back of the hand, and the knuckles are softly modelled rather than outlined.

The contrast with the related versions sharpens the observation. In the Dresden canvas the hands are elegant, but firmer in outline and cooler in colour, the modelling more uniform, suited to the picture’s role as a diplomatic object. In the National Portrait Gallery and Kedleston versions the hands are correctly placed and decorously held but feel set down rather than discovered, the fingers more even in length, the lighting flatter across the knuckles. In the Ham picture the hands are something else: lyrical, supple, conversational. They give the portrait a quietly private quality at odds with the austere pose, as if the king were addressing not a foreign court but a man who had known him since boyhood.

Read this way, the Ham House Charles I is more than a competent variant of a successful design. It records a particular friendship, fixed in paint, between a king who governed in large part through image and a courtier who had once stood in for him under the rod. The framework is the official idiom of Caroline kingship: black silk, Garter ribbon, the studied half-turn of the head. The interior is private, and it is in the hands, more than anywhere else, that Van Dyck makes the distinction visible.

References

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H. (2004) Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Hearn, K. (ed.) (2009) Van Dyck and Britain. London: Tate Publishing

Sharpe, K. (2009) ‘Van Dyck, the Royal Image and the Caroline Court’, in Hearn, K. (ed.) Van Dyck and Britain. London: Tate Publishing.

Peacock, J. (1995) ‘The Politics of Portraiture’, in Sharpe, K. and Lake, P. (eds.) Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England. Stanford: Stanford University Press

National Trust Collections (n.d.) King Charles I (1600–1649), by Sir Anthony Van Dyck and Studio, c.1635/7, Ham House, The Dysart Collection. Available at: https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1139944 (Accessed: 3 September 2025)

 Antoon van Dyck (1599-1641), Abraham and Isaac, c. 1617, Oil on canvas, 119 x 178 cm, Schwarzenberg Palace, Prague

Sometime around 1617, in a rented house in Antwerp’s Lange Minderbroedersstraat known as the Dom van Keulen, two teenagers were running their own painters’ workshop. Antoon van Dyck, then seventeen, and his slightly younger friend Jan Brueghel the Younger had set up an independent practice well before either had been formally admitted to the Guild of Saint Luke, an arrangement the city’s regulators tolerated rather than sanctioned. Van Dyck would not be received as a free master until 11 February 1618, at the age of eighteen, a precocity almost without parallel in seventeenth-century Antwerp, where most painters of his age were still apprentices or journeymen in another master’s workshop. Abraham and Isaac belongs to this brief, anomalous moment of self-directed early production.

Antwerp at this date was still adjusting to the religious and political reordering that had followed the Spanish reconquest of 1585. Catholic devotional painting had been re-established as the dominant idiom of public commission, and altarpieces, large narrative biblical scenes and meditational images circulated continuously through the workshops of Rubens, of Hendrick van Balen (Van Dyck’s first teacher), and of the network of figures around them. The young Van Dyck’s religious works belong squarely within this milieu and bear its marks: tight diagonal compositions, concentrated light falling on faces and exposed flesh, and an inherited Rubensian appetite for physical scale.

What distinguishes the Prague picture, and what tends to occupy its commentators, is its emotional register. Abraham and Isaac do not gesture, plead or struggle. The patriarch’s face turns inward in something closer to private grief than to dramatic horror, and the boy submits in silence, his throat exposed without resistance. The pathos is carried by stillness rather than action, a choice that already separates Van Dyck from the more rhetorical mode of much Antwerp narrative painting around 1617.

The face given to Isaac has long attracted attention. Several writers have noted its resemblance to Van Dyck’s earliest known self-portrait, the panel in the Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, datable c. 1613–15, which shows a long-faced youth with comparable hair and features. A related Head Study of a Youth of c. 1615–17 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, generally regarded as a tronie based on Van Dyck’s own face and reused in his history paintings, makes the practice of importing his own features into narrative figures more than hypothetical for this period. The identification of Isaac as a self-image nonetheless remains conjectural. No document supports it, and any reading of authorial self-projection into the figure of the bound son must be advanced as interpretation rather than fact. If the resemblance is intended, it places the picture within a wider seventeenth-century practice of using one’s own face as a convenient model, a habit shared with Rubens, Rembrandt and many others. To read it instead as an act of devotional self-implication, of the painter writing himself into the akedah (the Binding of Isaac), is a further interpretive step, suggestive but unverifiable.

The painting’s present condition somehow complicates aesthetic judgement. The greens have darkened considerably through the oxidation of copper-based pigments, a problem widely documented in seventeenth-century Flemish paintings using verdigris and copper resinate glazes, and the modulation of landscape and drapery has flattened as a result. Final-stage glazes and surface refinements, characteristic of Van Dyck’s early Antwerp practice more generally, are likely to have been compromised by historical cleaning, though without a published technical examination of this specific canvas the precise extent of loss cannot be stated with confidence. What remains is a picture whose compositional architecture and psychological calibration survive intact, even where the chromatic relationships originally intended by a painter still in his late teens have been substantially altered by time.

References

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H. (2004) Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press / Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Vlieghe, H. (1998) Flemish Art and Architecture, 1585–1700. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of a Woman, possibly Isabella Cattaneo Della Volta Imperiale, c. 1625–27, Oil on canvas, 74 × 60.4 cm, The National Gallery, London

Van Dyck arrived in Genoa in 1621, already highly regarded in Antwerp but still forging a personal style. While he had briefly worked in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens, Van Dyck was never his pupil in the traditional sense. Rather than continuing in Rubens’s monumental, Flemish Baroque mode, he absorbed the legacy of Titian and other Venetian Renaissance masters. In Genoa, he refined his style marked by luminous colour, elegant restraint, and psychological sensitivity. Genoa’s merchant aristocracy, with their taste for opulence tempered by self-discipline, responded to this approach with enthusiasm. Van Dyck’s portraits offered them not only likeness, but a sense of elevated timelessness, aligning them with romanticism of imperial Rome and the aristocratic refinement of Renaissance Venice.

The sitter has been identified as Isabella Cattaneo Della Volta Imperiale, who married Francesco Imperiale di Nicolò in 1619. The Cattaneo and Imperiale families were among Van Dyck’s most influential patrons. Their commissions placed him at the centre of Genoa’s sophisticated culture. Her depiction—youthful, assured, and adorned with understated elegance—is an emblem of the values that sustained Genoa’s elite: lineage, wealth, discretion, and taste.

Framed by a deep red curtain, the figure is rendered with exquisite naturalism. Her auburn hair and soft gaze are warmed by the background, while her hand gestures towards a gold necklace-perhaps an allusion to her family name, Cattaneo, recalling ‘catena’, the Italian for chain. A rose behind her ear subtly suggests her married status. Although the condition of the painting has compromised the visibility of the original metallic embroidery, Van Dyck’s handling of flesh, light, and fabric still conveys the opulence that once defined 

References

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H., 2004. Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

The National Gallery, London (n.d.) Portrait of a Woman, possibly Isabella Cattaneo Della Volta Imperiale, c. 1625–27. NG2144. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/anthony-van-dyck-portrait-of-a-woman (Accessed: 18 May 2025).

Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Carlo and Ubaldo See Rinaldo Conquered by Love for Armida, 1634–5, Oil on wood, 57 x 41.5 cm, The National Gallery, London

Van Dyck painted this work shortly before his permanent move to England. What he took from Rubens was not style but strategy: the understanding that myth could serve politics, and that careful ambiguity could carry force without giving offence. Rubens showed him how to move within courts; Van Dyck learned to speak their language through restraint, allegory, and a beauty that was never merely decorative.

The subject comes from Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata (1581), an epic of Christian warfare, erotic entrapment, and spiritual crisis. Rinaldo, the young crusader, lies asleep in Armida’s arms. His mission in the First Crusade, the recapture of Jerusalem, has been forgotten under the spell of pleasure. Sent to destroy him, she has instead fallen in love, turning her task into a kind of willing captivity. Van Dyck captures the moment just before interruption: Rinaldo still entirely seduced, while Carlo and Ubaldo, his fellow knights, emerge quietly through the brush, signalled only by the glint of polished iron on the left.

Tasso’s poem has often been read as a clash between East and West, or as a morality tale of seduction and rescue. Van Dyck is not interested in either. He paints something closer to drift: how purpose slips away, how resolve softens, how a man forgets what he set out to do. The painting sits in delay, not decision, and asks to be taken in slowly. What matters is the held moment, the spell not yet broken, and the viewer caught, like Rinaldo, between staying and turning back.

There is no exoticism here, no theatrical East. Rinaldo is passive, still; he has given up not only his arms but his will. Armida is no simple seductress. Her touch is tender, not cruel, and the real danger lies in what is withheld: time, duty, the promises he has stopped remembering.

References

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H., 2004. Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of François Langlois (1589 – 1647), early 1630s, Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 80 cm, The National Gallery, London

Despite his fame at court and eventual knighthood, Van Dyck always maintained his ties to the broader world of painters, printmakers, and musicians. These were men whose likenesses would often be engraved and circulated—not confined to palaces but appearing in books, albums, and the collections of the intellectuals. These portraits of fellow artists may not have brought him the power or wealth that aristocratic and royal commissions did. Still, they formed a different kind of magnum opus—one rooted in camaraderie, artistic legacy, and a desire to be remembered as one of the liberati.

This portrait, painted in London in the early 1630s, is not merely a charming fantasy but a coded gesture toward a different kind of legacy. Langlois—an engraver, art dealer, publisher, and accomplished amateur musician—was part of the artistic network Van Dyck moved within long before he rose to court painter for Charles I. Their friendship began in Italy, likely in Rome or Florence in the 1620s, and continued through the years as Langlois became an agent for English collectors.

In this painting, Van Dyck abandons the courtly flattery and formal pomp. Instead, he presents Langlois as a savoyard, a wandering shepherd and musician—a playful nod to Arcadian fashion and a disguise allowing greater intimacy. The musette de cour he holds, aristocratic in origin yet pastoral in its symbolism, hints at shared artistic language. The dog at his feet and the theatrical costume do not reduce him to fancy; they animate him as a participant in a living cultural conversation.

References

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H., 2004. Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Ecce Homo, ca. 1622-1625, Oil sketch  on paper mounted on canvas, 71x 54 cm, The Courtauld Gallery, London 

Van Dyck’s repeated engagement with this composition, three very similar versions all executed in Genoa, suggests a sustained theological preoccupation. He was working for a patron family closely connected to the Jesuits, and the paintings participate in a contemporary discourse on sacrifice and presence. The old iconographical formula of Christ mocked is retained, yet its function has shifted. The words Ecce Homo confront the viewer directly.

The image offers a site for meditation on human suffering and the apparent silence of God. The figure of Christ is displayed, held up before the beholder as a single, unprotected man, without office, without insignia. His suffering is presented as continuing.
For the Jesuit imagination, formed by the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola and by a practice of inward meditation, such an image was intended to function as something living. It asks the viewer for recognition, and poses, implicitly, the Ignatian question of how one carries one’s own suffering in the ordinary contradictions of daily life. The pain in the painting is composed for contemplation.

The Reformation and the religious wars that followed ended the possibility of a unified Western Christendom. The Catholic response, particularly as articulated through the Jesuits, was a reconstruction of religious presence by intellectual and aesthetic means, a way of speaking from within the altered landscape.

References

RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.), Antoon van Dyck, A. (c. 1622–25), Ecce Homo, The Courtauld Gallery, London, Inv. no. P.1978.PG.104, RKDimages record 50684, Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/50684 (Accessed: 15 March 2025)

Martin, J.R. and Feigenbaum, G. (1979) Van Dyck as a Religious Artist. Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University; Princeton University Press

Antoon van Dyck (1599-1641), Portrait of the Artist Marten Pepijn (1575-1643), 1632, Oil on oak, 72 x 56 cm, KMSKA, Antwerp

Painted in the last months before Van Dyck crossed the Channel to serve Charles I, this portrait occupies a singular place within the unfinished ‘Iconography’ series, conceived as a gallery of Antwerp’s leading minds and makers. It is not a commission in the usual sense but an act of homage, a deliberate inscription of memory. In choosing Marten Pepijn—an elder painter remembered for his large-scale Mannerist historia compositions—Van Dyck acknowledges both continuity and inheritance. The fact that the engraving after this likeness was only published two decades after Van Dyck’s death confirms its role as testament rather than as instrument of immediate ambition.

The portrait itself achieves a striking balance between candour and dignity. There is no softening of age, no veil of idealisation, yet the image carries a quiet respect. Pepijn’s features appear lived in and composed, bearing the weight of long practice. The carefully shaped beard, modest yet deliberate, steadies the expression and reinforces its sense of authority. This is not a courtly display but a meditation on the calling of the artist, whom Van Dyck elevates by presenting thoughtfulness as its truest emblem.

In this respect, the Pepijn portrait differs entirely from the ceremonial likenesses Van Dyck would soon paint in England. Those portraits were made to project status before the public eye; this one speaks instead to a circle of connoisseurs and fellow artists within Antwerp. Its atmosphere reflects Van Dyck’s Italian years, when the study of Titian taught him to merge precision with a subtler play of tone and air. The result is an image that is both personal and strategic. It honours Pepijn, but it also asserts Van Dyck’s role as interpreter of artistic merit, shaping how his city remembered its painters.

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References

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H., 2004. Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Antoon van Dyck (1599-1641), Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1635, Oil on canvas, 115 cm × 208 cm, KMSKA, Antwerp

In late 1622 or early 1623, Antoon van Dyck passed through Turin during the Italian journey he had begun the previous year from his base in Genoa. Cesare Alessandro Scaglia (1592–1641), a Savoyard diplomat who had been serving as his duchy’s ambassador to the papal court, was home between postings at around the same time. Whether the two actually met on that occasion is not certain. No document confirms it. But it is the earliest point at which a connection becomes plausible, and Van Dyck is known to have made contact with members of the ruling House of Savoy during this visit.

By the mid-1630s, Scaglia had become one of Van Dyck’s most committed patrons. His will would eventually list at least seven paintings by Van Dyck, possibly as many as ten: portraits, religious subjects and a mythological scene. The relationship lasted until both men died in 1641. In its final phase it produced one of the most telling signs of personal closeness. After Van Dyck’s marriage to Mary Ruthven (c. 1622–1645), which took place in 1639 or early 1640 (the sources differ), Scaglia acquired a quadruple portrait showing Charles I and Henrietta Maria alongside Van Dyck and his new wife. The picture does not survive. But a patron does not place his painter beside the English king and queen in a single composition unless the relationship goes well beyond the transactional.

Scaglia had spent his career moving between diplomacy and espionage. He served the House of Savoy in Rome, Paris and London. He brokered alliances and undermined them in roughly equal measure. He used gifts of paintings to open doors at foreign courts, and built friendships with figures like the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I that served political ends as much as personal ones. Rubens (1577–1640), himself a diplomat, called him a man of the keenest intellect. In 1632, Scaglia moved to Brussels and entered the service of Spain, a shift that put him at odds with the new Duke of Savoy. In 1635 he fell seriously ill and barely survived. By 1637 he had joined the Franciscan order in Antwerp, drawn to the community of the Friars Minor, also known as the Recollects, and he began preparing for a retirement that would end with his burial among them.

It was during these years that Scaglia asked Van Dyck to paint a Lamentation for his tomb. The painting is generally dated to around 1635, though the KMSKA, which holds it, gives a date of c. 1640, and a preparatory drawing in the Morgan Library is catalogued as c. 1635–40. Scaglia was still alive when the commission was placed, and fully aware of what he was asking for: an image of Christ’s dead body to hang in the Chapel of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin in the Franciscan church in Antwerp, above the marble tomb he had ordered for himself.

Van Dyck keeps the scene spare. Christ lies across a stone slab, heavy and slack. The Virgin stands behind him, her arms outspread in a gesture that echoes the Crucifixion. It is a pose of open grief, but there is no cry, no collapse. Saint John and two angels are present. John shows the angels the wound left by the nails. The mourning is quiet throughout. The palette reinforces this. Cool, muted fabrics and a dark background set off the warmer tones of skin, so that the body becomes the single point to which everything else gives way.

In another late Scaglia commission, the Abbé Scaglia Adoring the Virgin and Child (National Gallery, London), technical analysis has shown that the blue pigment contains a high proportion of lapis lazuli, among the most expensive materials a painter could use. Scaglia, it seems, wanted no economy in works made for his spiritual account. Whether the same applies to the Lamentation is not clear, but the care Van Dyck has taken with the picture, its restraint, its refusal to reach for easy effect, suggests a commission that mattered to both men.

The two angels lift the scene beyond a purely earthly setting. Whether they promise resurrection or simply witness death is left open. For a painting meant to sit above a tomb, that openness feels deliberate. Scaglia was commissioning an image of Christ’s dead body while preparing for his own death. He must have understood the echo.

What is striking is how far the Lamentation stands from the court portraits that had made Van Dyck wealthy and famous by the mid-1630s. The painting draws on what Van Dyck had absorbed during his years in Italy between 1621 and 1627: the gravity and stillness of Italian devotional tradition, brought back to Antwerp and cooled. It suggests where his deeper commitments as a painter lay, once the obligations of courtly portraiture were set aside. Whether that is a fair reading or a sentimental one is worth asking. But the picture invites it.

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References

Martin, J.R. and Feigenbaum, G. (1979) Van Dyck as a Religious Artist. Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University; Princeton University Press

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H. (2004) Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press.

KMSKA – Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (n.d.) The Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Available at: https://kmska.be/en/masterpiece/lamentation-over-dead-christ-2 (Accessed: 10 March 2025).

National Gallery, London (n.d.) Anthony van Dyck, The Abbé Scaglia Adoring the Virgin and Child, NG4889. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/anthony-van-dyck-the-abbe-scaglia-adoring-the-virgin-and-child (Accessed: 17 May 2026).

Cifani, A. and Monetti, F. (1992) ‘New light on the Abbé Scaglia and Van Dyck’, The Burlington Magazine, 134(1073), pp. 506–514.

National Gallery, London (n.d.) Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of the Abbot Scaglia, NG6575. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/anthony-van-dyck-portrait-of-the-abbot-scaglia (Accessed: 10 March 2025).

Osborne, T. (2002) Dynasty and Diplomacy in the Court of Savoy: Political Culture and the Thirty Years’ War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Osborne, T. (2007) ‘Van Dyck, Alessandro Scaglia and the Caroline court: friendship, collecting and diplomacy in the early seventeenth century’, The Seventeenth Century, 22(1), pp. 24–41. Available at, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/30053318_Van_Dyck_Alessandro_Scaglia_and_the_Caroline_Court_Friendship_Collecting_and_Diplomacy_in_the_Early_Seventeenth_Century ( Accessed 9 March 2025)

RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Anthony van Dyck, Bewening van Christus [The Lamentation over the Dead Christ], c. 1635–40. RKDimages, image no. 48543. Available at: https://rkd.nl/explore/images/48543 (Accessed: 10 March 2025).

Roy, A. (1999) ‘The National Gallery Van Dycks: technique and development’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 20, pp. 50–83.Available at , https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/publications/technical-bulletin/technical-bulletin-volume-20 (Accessed 10 March 2025)

Vlaamse Kunstcollectie (n.d.) Anthony van Dyck, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1635, KMSKA. Available at: https://vlaamsekunstcollectie.be/en/news/anthony-van-dyck-the-lamentation-of-christ-kmska (Accessed: 9 March 2025).

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.

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References

Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H. (2004) Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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 ).