Introducing Painting of the Week: Mabuse
February 12th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
From now on, Iconia will post and dissect one painting a week. The paintings will carry some relevance to religion and art.
This week’s painting is Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin by Mabuse. Wood, 109.5 x 82 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. I saw the painting at a show at the Metropolitan Museum, so I am borrowing from a previous post I wrote.
Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557)
March 23, 2004–July 4, 2004
Special Exhibition Galleries, The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://metmuseum.org/home.asp
The Metropolitan’s current exhibit, “Byzantium: Faith and Power” is the best one I have ever seen engage this period. For an exhibit so comprehensive and huge (it takes up many rooms, each stuffed with painting after icon after tapestry), it has an embarrassingly small press kit, but here is the gist of it. The exhibit is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the Palaiologan period’s aesthetic developments, and the way that aesthetics unfolded over time with the ensuing power shifts, says Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Michael VIII Palaiologos was the Byzantine general, who upon successfully taking Constantinople on August 15, 1261, bore an icon of the Virgin Hodegetria (the city’s “eternal protector”). This launched an “artistic and intellectual flowering in Byzantium,” thus the press release.
If you explore the Met’s website, you will find a lot of supplementary material as well as an online tour, (although I would caution you to see “Choros” which is a huge mobile sculpture from the 13th–14th century) but I intend to focus specifically on one of the final pieces in the exhibit, “St. Luke drawing the Virgin,” (1520-25) by Jan Gossaert called Mabuse. Mabuse is largely credited as one of the first of the Netherlandish “Romanists.”
Mabuse shows Saint Luke kneeling on the right in his red robe, as an angel (Gabriel?) guides his hand. The two draw the Madonna and child, flanked by five angels. The most interesting point, though is that in the top right of the painting, a statue of Moses sits on a shelf, and Moses (with horns to be sure) points to the Ten Commandments. Clearly, Moses insists on “4: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth,” (Exodus xx: iv) but Gabriel reinterprets the text, and allows for religious iconography.
Leaving aside the fact that the Virgin looks like Felicity, this image really serves as a wonderful piece to really epitomize the Byzantine exhibit. Here we have strict Biblical interpretation at odds with a visual explication, and after one round, Art is still standing.
