The Virgin Crowned by the Infant Christ, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, in or after c. 1646 – (Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert

Date: 1646

Size: 138 x 113 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

The wax-lined support of this painting is made up of three horizontally joined strips of canvas of different weaves. The strip at the top is made up of two pieces vertically joined, measuring 14.5-15.0 cm in height. They are joined together and to the main, middle canvas by lining. The central canvas is a near square, 105.7-107 cm high. The tacking edges at the left, right and bottom have been cut away. It is stitched to the bottom strip, which is 14-15.5 cm high. The central canvas has a double ground of a layer of chalk, and above, one of lead white mixed with black and earth pigments. The upper piece has a single ground of a layer of chalk. There is cusping towards all the edges of the central canvas apart from at the top. The imprint of the original strainer, about 6-8 cm wide, is evident at all its edges except the top where it is only 3-4.5 cm wide, indicating that the canvas has been reduced by 2-3 cm. No underdrawing has been detected. Dilute, brown undermodelling is present beneath the sleeve of the Virgin with sketchy, white brushstrokes to indicate the folds. The composition was built up working from the back using reserves. The paint surface is smooth and opaque, yet applied thinly with passages of wet-in-wet blending. There are a good many pentiments discernible in infrared reflectography; most likely these were not all made during the same campaign. A) Pentiments made during the initial campaign: the Virgin’s forehead was enlarged; the cloth on which the Christ Child stands was extended at its base; the instrument-playing angel’s profile, proper left arm and right shoulder have been adjusted, and the foreshortening of his proper right arm has been reduced; the fall of drapery on his back was lowered. B) Pentiments made at a subsequent stage: the fall of the Virgin’s veil was reduced; her lowered look to the left was altered to a frontal gaze; more of her chest and bosom was displayed; the fingers of her proper right hand were extended, where more of the white cloth was first depicted; the extent of Christ’s hair and that of the instrument-playing angel was enlarged. The red drapery below and to the left of the viola da gamba was overpainted when the lower strip of canvas was added, at which point, too, the clouds were expanded without reserves.5 Three main issues concerning the present painting have been the cause of confusion, and clarification is set out in the following order. The iconography unusually combines at least two separate aspects of Christian belief. The attribution of the work, which has been in the Rijksmuseum collection since the early nineteenth century, has only been settled in recent decades. Conservation has exposed the problematic character of its composition due to old interventions; however, this does not jeopardize the essential integrity of this physically complex work inspired as it most probably was by a lost painting by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). The description in the 1818 sale catalogue confined itself to an account of the image, and in the early years at the museum, the painting was described as the Holy Family. From 1858, the subject was given as the Glorification of Mary, although there is no such subject derived from the Bible or scriptural exegesis.6 The 1976 museum catalogue described it as the Apothesis [sic] of the Virgin. The key to the main intended meaning lies in the rubric to Schelte Adamsz Bolswert’s (1584/88-1659) engraving after a lost painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).7 This engraving shows the crowned Virgin with her Child in her arms, trampling on a serpent coiled round the globe of the world. Christ points down to the serpent. The rubric to the print reads ‘Ipsa conteret caput tuum. genesis 3’, this is a reference to the sentence (in the Vulgate) in Genesis 3:15, in which God admonishes the serpent for beguiling Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and states that ‘she will bruise your head’. As Mâle relates, the gender of the pronoun was disputed between Catholics and Protestants. The former favoured the feminine reading, which was taken to refer to the ‘new Eve’, the Virgin, whereas Protestants opted for the masculine, which was understood to allude to Christ.8 Rubens’s interpretation depended on the feminine reading, while Van Dyck opted for the alternative.9 In the museum picture the now faint serpent on the globe is not actually suppressed. But it may be understood that the Virgin and Child participate in subduing it, though not, for instance, as deliberately and specifically as is shown in Caravaggio’s Palafrenieri altarpiece (Galleria Borghese), in which the serpent is trampled on.10 In the Rijksmuseum painting it may seem that as much emphasis, if not more, is placed on the second intended meaning conveyed by the Christ Child crowning the Virgin with a wreath of white and red roses. In Rubens’s paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin,11 angels offer her wreaths, and in the unused modello at St P../..