Download Baldwin Memlings Martin van Nieuwenhove and the Devotional

Memling, Madonna and Martin van Nieuwenhove and the Devotional Diptych, 1487, Bruges,
Hospital Museum.
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
[email protected]
(This essay was written in 2009.)
The Ivory Devotional Diptych of the 13th and 14th Centuries
Diptychs, or hinged pairs of art works, were common in late medieval art, especially in the form
of small ivory carvings displaying religious themes. Thousands of such diptychs were carved
between 1250 and 1450. Small pairs of hinged, portable paintings were also painted from time to
time in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Such ivory diptychs arose at the same
historical moment as devotional literature in the vernacular, in the 13th and 14th centuries, at a
time when ordinary lay Christians in the growing cities patronized a down-to-earth, humanized
spirituality they could literally carry with them in small devotional books, illuminated Books of
Hours, and diptychs (also small single images and triptychs).
The popularity of diptychs depended on their practicality and ease of display. Unlike a single
piece of carved ivory, two hinged pieces of ivory could stand up for easy viewing on any flat
surface while folding up for travel, each side serving as a protective cover for the other.
The Devotional Format and the Principal Subjects (Madonna, Suffering Christ)
Starting with Jan van Eyck’s tiny Madonna in a Cathedral, fifteenth-century Northern artists
transformed the late medieval diptych into the early Renaissance devotional diptych by placing a
portrait in the right side of the diptych. (Van Eyck’s portrait has been lost but two later Flemish
artists copied his Madonna and updated the portrait.) The portrait was usually placed on the right
because this was the left or lesser side in heraldry where sitters could display Christian humility
and reverence.
The devotional diptych achieved a certain popularity only in the mid-century thanks to the
influence of the leading painter, Rogier van der Weyden, who painted a handful of examples
featuring the Madonna and Child facing a well-dressed nobleman. Most devotional diptychs
chose the Madonna as the chief intercessor for all mankind with Christ transformed from the
potentially wrathful, masculine judge of the Last Judgment into and sweet and harmless baby.
The portraits of the Madonna doubled down on feminine compassion by showing an unusual
preference for the nursing Madonna who nurtured the salvational hopes of the donor with the
“milk” of human love and kindness, even the “milk of Paradise”.
The second most common subject was the suffering Christ, most frequently shown as the Ecce
Homo, Man of Sorrows, or Christ Carrying the Cross. In all of this focus on the suffering Christ,
we see the typical Passion piety and Imitation Christi of the late Middle Ages and Early
Renaissance. Some devotional diptychs avoided portraiture altogether in favor of two religious
themes, especially the Ecce Homo and the Mater Dolorosa (Grieving Madonna) – two suffering
faces, male and female facing each other in a neat symmetry.
The Devotional Diptych as Perpetual Prayer
The late middle ages and early Renaissance was a time of quantitative piety. The more relics one
collected or visited, the more prayers one said, the more candles one lit, the more rituals one
performed, the better one’s chances for salvation. This was a period when prayers were counted
out with rosaries and repeated hundreds of times and when the wealthiest citizens endowed
weekly or monthly masses for their souls in perpetuity in private chapels throughout Europe.
With this in mind, we can see how the Devotional Diptych worked as a kind of permanent
prayer. Some diptychs even depicted Mary or Christ on one side and a prayer on the other. The
theme of prayer is particularly vivid in diptychs where Christ or Mary responds to the donor’s
prayers by looking across or by offering blessings and other encouraging gestures. In Memling’s
diptych, the Virgin’s robe reaches into the donor’s image and lies reassuringly under his prayer
book a little like her famously sheltering mantle in the popular Madonna of Mercy theme.
The Devotional Diptych as Affective Piety Defined in Individual Terms
On might object that prayers are ubiquitous to donor portraiture in the much larger category of
fifteenth-century church art as a whole and that all such portraits perpetuated and commemorated
donor piety and prayer. While this is true, the grand altarpieces such as the Ghent Alter did so
much more by expressing a wide range of liturgical, theological, historical, social, economic,
political, and spiritual values. In contrast, the devotional diptych was much more limited in scope
with a focus on a few simple themes tied to affective piety, especially Mary as a loving mother
and intercessor and the Passion piety of a suffering Christ (Imitatio Christi).
Other differences are noteworthy. In contrast to the large cast of characters served up in many
altarpieces, the devotional diptych usually offered a single religious figure (or figure strikingly
singled out) presented in a portrait-like, half length format to match the facing donor portrait.
Some subjects like the Ecce Homo and the Man of Sorrows were already well defined as
portrait-like images and were particular favored in devotional diptychs. Others, such as Christ
Carrying the Cross, were converted into “devotional close-ups” removing the principal figure
from narrative time and space into a more timeless yet personal image. Some of these frames
were even painted as trompe l’oeil windows to maximize the physical immediacy and emotional
impact. All such devotional diptychs allowed the donor to see the sacred “not through a glass
darkly but face to face” (to use the Scriptural language of Paul in describing the resurrected
soul’s direct experience of God). It is this individualized spirituality, converting religious
subjects into highly individualized “portraits” placed opposite donor portraits, which marks the
modernity of the devotional diptych. The traditional medieval monastic distance between
celestial and worldly, sacred and profane, shrinks down to a few inches between two persons
enjoying a face to face meeting. At the same time as the donor displays an exemplary Imitatio
Christi, the sacred takes on an Imitatio Humanorum.
Everything said above about the rise of the ivory diptychs as late medieval personal piety also
applies to the devotional diptych of the fifteenth century. The portability of these objects
connects them closely to the “do it yourself” portable spirituality of late medieval private
devotions, in general, and to the Devotio Moderna, in particular. These images shift the focus
away from outward church ceremony and institutional piety to the solitary, individual heart
searching for meaningful intercession while perfecting the imitation of Christ and Mary.
Compared to the collective piety seen in a more traditional altarpiece such as van Eyck’s
Adoration of the Lamb (Ghent Altar), the devotional diptych is one more signpost of a new
individualized consciousness and spiritual practice developing slowly between 1200 and 1700.
Put simply, the devotional diptych is a kind of altarpiece without the altar as if church art had
departed from the church and took up a new residence in the private homes and hearts of the
meditating self. This makes van Eyck’s early devotional diptych of the Madonna in a Church
particularly interesting because it shrinks a giant cathedral down to a small object just twelve
inches tall. The 1499 copy of Van Eyck’s diptych executed by an unknown Flemish painter is
even more interesting by showing the donor in his private quarters, far from the very church in
which the painted Madonna stands and toward whom he looks in perpetual prayer. Although the
donor, Christiaan de Hondt, was a high-ranking church official as Abbot of a Cistercian
monastery near Bruges, he has invested in a small devotional diptych portraying him happily
ensconced in a comfortable, well appointed home. Among its fine furnishings is a splendid bed
in which hangs over the pillows a small devotional diptych the same size as the real diptych
itself. To find a second devotional diptych owned by the abbot tucked away in the most private
space in his home, hanging over the interior of his bed like a guardian angel is to confirm the
distance between the grand spaces of official church art and the interior spaces of the home and
heart and the new art which serves it. Safeguarding his sleep, the devotional diptych greatly adds
to the cozy domestic tranquility of this scene while suggesting another kind of sleepy bliss not
unlike that enjoyed on a lower sphere by the lap dog at his feet.
The presence of grand ecclesiastical imagery in such a tiny devotional image reminds us that
official church values have not been completely replaced by private feeling. On the contrary, the
miniaturizing of the cathedral allows the donor to carry official church piety around with him
into the smallest and most private spaces of everyday living. Rather than replacing official piety,
the devotional diptych emerged as a flexible alterative geared toward a different kind of setting
and to different needs and priorities. In short, domestic religious art coexisted with church art
just as private devotions supplemented rather than replaced attendance at masses, liturgical
observances, and official prayers to church images, relics, and sacred tombs.
For all the new individualized spiritual expressed in the new imagery, formats and compositional
principles of the devotional image and the devotional diptych, it goes without saying that the
individual piety of the fifteenth century has nothing to do with the fragmented, isolated,
“liberated” self of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The religious figures and donors in all
devotional diptychs are as decorous, proper, and stiff as the figures seen elsewhere in fifteenthcentury church art and express impersonal, socially-defined norms and identities.
The Patron
Martin van Nieuwenhove came from a leading family in Bruges which held high offices in town
and in the Burgundian court. Martin was appointed a city councilor five years after this portrait
in 1492 and again in 1494. In 1495 and 1498, he was elected captain of the Bruges civic guard.
And in 1498 at the age of 34, he finally became burgomaster or mayor, just two years before his
death.
Imagery within the Panels
The original frames survive carrying two inscriptions announcing that Martin van Nieuwenhove
had the diptych made in 1487n (frame of Madonna). And the sitter’s age of 23 (frame of
portrait). In the upper left of the Madonna, Memling painted the Nieuwenhove coat of arms with
Martin’s French motto, “Il ya cause” (“Not without reason). Mottos were brief sayings allowing
courtly elites to display an individualized wisdom, virtue, or sanctity while adhering to sociallydefined norms. They were fashionable in late medieval court culture and commonly appeared on
clothing, heraldry, and other emblematic imagery. As with other courtly pretensions, they were
also taken up by burghers and even court artists such as Van Eyck whose humble personal motto
was “als ich kan” (“as I am able” or “to my ability”) and appeared on four of the frames of his
paintings.
The four emblematic roundrels flanking the coat of arms behind the Madonna show a hand
emerging from clouds to scatter golden seeds upon the earth. This allegory imaged the family
name Niuewenhove which means “new garden”. The lush landscape imagery outside the
building presumably continued this garden theme.
In the stained glass window behind and to the right of Mary, Memling painted St George and St
Christopher. As the knightly saint who sanctified late medieval chivalric ideals, St. George was
an appropriate figure to highlight the secular and religious virtues of Martin van Nieuwenhove as
a “Christian knight”. St. Christopher may have had some personal meaning for the patron which
has not yet been discovered. As the patron saint of travel, he may have appealed to the
aristocracy as a mobile, worldly, equestrian class. Courtly values also appear in the splendid
clothing worn by both figures.
The Significance of St. Martin
Behind Martin is the patron saint after whom he was named, St. Martin of Tours, a fourthcentury missionary, organizer of monasteries, and bishop in what is now France. One of the most
important early Christian saints, Martin was an officer in the Roman army when he saw Christ in
a half-naked beggar and gave him half his cloak. After converting to Christianity, he renounced
the army and became the principal organizers of monasteries in Gaul (France) and was soon
made bishop of Tours. He also spent years living as a hermit.
Although I don’t yet know if Martin had any special following in Bruges or in the Burgundian
Netherlands, I can make two comments to explain his new popularity between 1300 and 1650.
Like St. George, who was conjured up out of thin air, and some less popular saints such as St.
Hubert and St. Eustace, St. Martin was a knightly saint and was almost always shown as such.
That is, his monastic organizing, official duties as bishop, and monastic seclusion were generally
ignored by patrons and artists in favor of the dramatic episode when he shared his cloak with a
beggar. In most representations, Martin appeared as a sumptuously dressed officer or nobleman
high on his horse, looking down at the wretched beggar. In short, the new popularity of St.
Martin came hand in hand with the rise of chivalry. Needless to say, he was particularly popular
among aristocrats. The focus on the episode of the cloak also resonated with the new penitential
piety, piety of poverty, and concern with poor relief of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.
All of these trends emerged from the social stew of the growing cities which heightened
concerns about extreme economic disparities and produced new begging orders (Franciscans,
Dominicans). St. Martin was the perfect saint for wealthy noblemen, especially because he
remained splendidly dressed, high on his horse even as he displayed his compassion and charity
for the sanctified poor.