929 - Prague School

Prague School C. 1600 je 103 x 35 cm Two panels, parts of a triptych, painted on both sides; the inner panels depict Abraham and Isaac, the Good Samaritan, and the Resurrection of Christ, the outer panels with Adam and Eve. The central panel is missing. Lit.: Prag um 1600, exhibition catalogue, Essen 1988; pp. 174. Fiamminghi a Roma, exhibition catalogue, Brussels and Rome 1995. Memling und seine Zeit, Brügge und die Renaissance, exhibition catalogue, Bruges 1998. The narrow oak panels, painted on both sides, came in a neo-Baroque gilded frame divided by a central bar. It was not immediately apparent that these were two well-preserved panels, still with their original painted edges intact, showing hardly any craquelure or signs of ageing. They are undoubtedly the wings of a domestic altarpiece, although the central section - the central panel (or central shrine) - is missing. It is unclear what was depicted on the central panel as the iconographic centre, given the two biblical scenes on the left (Abraham and Isaac at the top, the story of the merciful knight (?) at the bottom) and on the right (the Resurrection of Christ). When closed, Adam and Eve are depicted as highly mannered nude figures, surmounted by the very impasto-painted foliage of a tree. The painter must have been directly inspired by copperplate engravings, such as those by Jan Muller (1571-1628) - ‘Mercury and Psyche’ or ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’ (Budapest, MbK) - which are based on bronze sculptures by the contemporary artist Adrian de Vries. The artist would have been familiar with nude depictions by Hans von Aachen (1552-1615) and Bartholomäus Spranger (1546-1611), going back as far as the masculine female figures of Michelangelo Buonarroti - at least in the form of copperplate engravings. In certain details of our fragmentary triptych - such as the figure, particularly the head, of Abraham, the soldiers fleeing from Jesus’s tomb with their robes billowing, and, not least, the depiction of Eve - the influences of 15th- and 16th-century Italian painting are unmistakable.