Unidentified Brussels Workshop, The Three Fates, early 16th century, Silk, wool, and linen (fragment from a larger tapestry), 304.8 × 259.1 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Unidentified Brussels Workshop, The Three Fates, early 16th century. Silk, wool, and linen, fragment from a larger tapestry, 304.8 × 259.1 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This imposing tapestry fragment, woven in Brussels in the early sixteenth century, represents the Three Fates, the ancient personifications of destiny. At the centre of the scene Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures its length, and Atropos, holding her shears, prepares to sever it. Beneath them lies the fallen figure of Chastity, overpowered by forces beyond human control. The subject draws on Petrarch’s I Trionfi, in which the triumph of Chastity is overturned by the greater triumph of Time and, ultimately, of Eternity. The indifferent female figures in the background heighten the contrast, suggesting the fragility of virtue when set against the inexorable power of fate.
The tapestry embodies the intellectual and artistic climate of the Renaissance, where classical mythology was reinterpreted as a vehicle for moral reflection. Produced in a Brussels workshop, it would originally have formed part of a much larger hanging, conceived for a princely interior. Tapestries of this kind were luxury objects, demanding collaboration between designers who prepared the cartoons and highly skilled weavers who translated them into richly coloured textiles.
In the early sixteenth century, tapestry occupied a central place in European courtly culture. Mythological themes such as this, once confined to intimate humanist contexts, were reimagined for large-scale decorative cycles. They acted not only as expressions of wealth and magnificence but also as vehicles for disseminating learned imagery, circulating across Europe through diplomatic gift-giving and dynastic exchange. Alongside antiquities, wedding chests, and other objects adorned with classical subjects, such hangings contributed to the transformation of iconography in the Renaissance, bridging the gap between humanist erudition and the visual languages of painting, sculpture, and decorative art.
Christopher Weiditz (c.1500–c.1560), Hercules Removing a Thorn from his Foot, c.1540–50. Ivory sculpture, 15.3 × 10 × 10.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Christopher Weiditz (c.1500–c.1560), Hercules Removing a Thorn from his Foot, c.1540–50. Ivory sculpture, 15.3 × 10 × 10.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Christopher Weiditz, active in Strasbourg and southern Germany, was among the more inventive sculptors of the German Renaissance. His travels with Emperor Charles V’s court allowed him to study antique models and the most celebrated art collections of his age, experiences that shaped the blend of classical reference and naturalistic observation visible in his work.
This small, partly damaged ivory statuette was once almost certainly part of a princely Kunstkammer, intended to be handled and admired as a curiosity of art and erudition. A companion piece representing Cleopatra, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, suggests it originally formed part of a pair. The figure adapts the celebrated antique prototype of the Spinario—the boy plucking a thorn from his foot—yet transforms it into an image of Hercules. The hero sits cross-legged on a tree trunk draped with the skin of the Nemean lion, the first of his Labours, whose defeat became one of his most recognisable attributes.
Here Hercules appears not as the bearded strongman of later legend but as a youthful, clean-shaven figure, his body still echoing the antique Spinario. The modelling of the head, however, moves towards a greater naturalism and may reflect a study from life. The ivory thus embodies a Renaissance play between the ancient and the modern: a classical pose reinterpreted through the lens of myth, reimagined by a sculptor alive to the possibilities of direct observation.
Jan Gossaert (c.1478–1532), Adam and Eve, c.1520. Oil on oak, 166.5 × 109 cm. The Royal Collection, on long-term loan to The National Gallery, London
Jan Gossaert (c.1478–1532), Adam and Eve, c.1520. Oil on oak, 166.5 × 109 cm. The Royal Collection, on long-term loan to The National Gallery, London
Gossaert’s Adam and Eve belongs to a long Northern tradition in which the unclothed human body was framed less as a celebration of beauty than as a vehicle for moral instruction. Since the fifteenth century, artists in the Low Countries and Germany had developed a visual language in which nudity was bound to the Fall, serving to articulate themes of sin, desire and human frailty. This work, painted around 1520, engages directly with that tradition while also introducing new Italianate elements derived from Gossaert’s exposure to Renaissance art during his travels to Italy in the entourage of Philip of Burgundy.
The composition is rich in symbolic detail. The Tree of Knowledge rises at the centre, its branches twined with the serpent, while Adam reaches for the fruit held out by Eve. Beneath them grow columbine, associated with the fear of God, and sea holly, prized for its aphrodisiac qualities—a juxtaposition that crystallises the tension between reverence and sensual appetite. The setting expands into a landscape of Eden, with the Fountain of Life as its focal point, anchoring the figures within a theological geography of paradise and loss.
The influence of Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve engraving of 1504 is evident, as is Gossaert’s awareness of Marcantonio Raimondi’s prints after Raphael. Yet the result is not a mere adaptation. Gossaert’s nudes, though often described as awkward in their proportions, possess a sculptural weight and a heightened expressiveness in their faces that distinguish them from both Italian prototypes and the smoother idealisations of his Netherlandish contemporaries.
In this way the painting fuses Northern moral didacticism with Italian notions of the antique body. The nude here is neither purely classical nor wholly medieval in conception, but a hybrid form through which Gossaert explored the human condition: vulnerable, fallible, and suspended between physical desire and divine command.
Bibliography
Ainsworth, M.W. (ed.) (2010) Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bass, M.A. (2016) Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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
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.
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).
Workshop of Michael Sittow (1469–1525), The Holy Kinship, early 16th century, produced in Tallinn (then Reval), the Niguliste Museum, Tallinn, on loan from Bollnäs Church, Sweden
