| Died on 18 June 1464:
Rogier de la Pasture van der Weyden, Flemish Northern
Renaissance painter born in 1399 or 1400. — BIOGRAPHY Extensive coverage with commentaries and links to reproductions, in whole and in many details, of: — Deposition — Saint Luke Madonna — Annunciation Triptych — Miraflores Altarpiece (here) — Seven Sacraments Altarpiece — Crucifixion Altarpiece — Bladelin Triptych — Last Judgment Polyptych — Braque Family Triptych — Saint Columba Altarpiece — Saint John Altarpiece — Other altarpieces — Other Crucifixions — Portraits — Other paintings ^ == Miraflores Altarpiece by Rogier van der WEYDEN Rogier's position as town painter left him and his workshop at liberty to supply paintings to many other clients, both in Brussels and further afield. Around 1440 his fame had already spread well beyond the borders of the Netherlands. His name was known as far away as Spain, where King Juan II of Castile had founded the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores near Burgos in 1442, donating an altarpiece on the subject of the Virgin Mary by the hand "of Master Rogier, the great and famous Fleming." These details are mentioned in what is probably a contemporary record from the monastery, extant not in the original but in what seems to be a reliable copy made in the late 18th century. Fortunately, the Miraflores Altarpiece itself has been preserved as well as the record mentioning it. — Mary Altarpiece (Miraflores Altarpiece) (1440, 3 panels 71x43cm each) The three separate but equal panels are side by side, forming a rigid whole, not foldable. The original frame must have been constructed in a similar way to the present one, although probably not gold but the color of the painted architectural arches, so that the real frame seemed like a continuation of the painted architectural framework, thus heightening the illusion, and creating (especially in the upper sections of the altarpiece) a perfect link between the painted archivolts and tracery spandrels and the real frame between them. Such combinations of real and painted framework structures, designed to increase the illusion, had already occurred in several works by Jan van Eyck. In the Miraflores Altarpiece the painted architectural frames represent portals, and with their sculptural construction and tripartite form they are reminiscent of the portals of Gothic church architecture. Convincingly designed as they are in detail, they are not a realistic reproduction of any actual place, but are settings for scenes representing important elements in the relationship between the Virgin Mary and Christ rather than historical events. On the left, the Virgin Mary is praying to the son on her lap; the central panel is a Pietà in which, Christ's body on her lap, she mourns His death and suffering; to the right, the risen Christ appears to her in order to end her grief. The reliefs in the archivolts, showing other events from the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ, accompany and comment on these scenes. They provide much more extensive narrative than the main scenes, showing their context in chronological order, running counterclockwise and beginning at the apex of each archivolt. Color contributes a great deal to the complex programmatic content of the altarpiece. In contemporary painting of the time, and therefore in the work of Rogier, the colors of garments often convey meaning, but seldom so cogently as in the Miraflores Altarpiece. The color of Mary's clothing, which differs from one panel to the next, is not only aesthetically effective and diversified, but also makes a fundamental symbolic statement: white is for the purity of the Virgin, red for her pain, blue for her faith - virtues for which the angels hovering above, as the text on their scrolls indicate, are bringing her crowns. The figures in the Miraflores Altarpiece are slightly more delicate and less powerful than those of the Deposition (Prado, Madrid), an impression reinforced even by comparison of the spandrels in the tracery. This difference may be to do with the much smaller size of the Mary altarpiece, but it corresponds to a general tendency in Rogier's development. Its change in figure style is accompanied by a change in the depiction of faces, which have become slightly more abstract and less lifelike. It seems probable, then, that the Miraflores Altarpiece was painted later than the Deposition. Art historians long assumed that it had been painted before the Werl Altarpiece by the Master of Flémalle, dated 1438, because the gesture of the right hand of John the Baptist in the left-hand wing of that work (Prado, Madrid) was assumed to derive from the depiction of the risen Christ in the Miraflores altarpiece. However, the underdrawing clearly shows that the position of the hands was much altered in both figures during work on the paintings. Consequently, the artists must have been drawing on a common stock of workshop models to come up with their eventual solutions, and no chronological conclusions can be drawn. It seems most probable that King Juan commissioned the Mary altarpiece especially for his foundation of Miraflores, which would suggest that it was painted in the early 1440s — left panel: the Holy Family. — central panel: Mary embraces dead Jesus, just deposed from the Cross. — right panel: The scene on the right panel is the only one in this altarpiece that illustrates two events at once: in the foreground we see Christ appearing to the Virgin Mary, while in the background we can see the immediately preceding event, His resurrection on Easter morning. The artist may have thought it necessary to explain the main scene, which was not often painted. The winding road from the tomb to the building in the foreground makes it clear that Christ went to his mother at once, so that she would be the first to experience the joy of reunion with him. _ foreground detail: harmonious and therefore somewhat rigid facial expression, which goes to emphasize the impression of distinction. The painter's workmanship appears in the subtle reproduction of textures, in particular of the skin with the soft gradations of the flesh colors In short, the artist has modeled the knight on an ideal image, whilst retaining his individuality. |