kunstner: Gerard Seghers
Dato: 1651
Størrelse: 205 x 253 cm
Teknikk: Oil On Canvas
Gerard Seghers’s authorship of this work has not been doubted; it is dated by Bieneck to circa 1640-50/51. Freedberg8 following Knipping9 has discussed the Counter Reformation subject of Christ and the Penitent Sinners, which was developed to enhance the role of penitence in the Catholic confession following the Tridentine debates of the mid-sixteenth century. There was no prescription as to the number of penitents to be depicted. An engraving of an earlier rendering of the subject by Seghers10 depicts penitent sinners, all of whom were described as such in the Bible, though the references in the legend to the print are not always accurate. The same sinners are depicted in the present picture. They are: the Penitent Magdalen with her emblem, the alabastron (Luke 7:37: ‘And, behold, a woman in the city was a sinner … brought an alabaster box of ointment’); King David (2 Samuel 12:13: ‘And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord’); the Publican (Luke 12:13: ‘And the publican standing afar off, would not lift up so much his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner’); the Prodigal Son seated as a pauper (Luke 15:18); St Peter with his emblem, the key (Matthew 26:75); and the Good Thief holding a cross (Luke 23:42). Christ himself carries a banner showing a red cross on a white field, the traditional emblem of the Resurrection. There is a pentiment in one of the tails of the banner to enable the display of the wound in Christ’s hand. As Bieneck noted, the identity of the sinner behind the Publican on the left in the Rijksmuseum picture has yet to be established, but it may be that Judas Iscariot was here intended (Matthew 27:3-5: ‘Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself…’).11 The pose of the Magdalen was probably inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577-1640) half-length penitent Magdalen of circa 1616/17 in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich;12 that of the Good Thief may have been inspired by this personage in Otto van Veen’s (1556-1624) altarpiece of 1606 then in the Antwerp Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk and now in the Landesmuseum, Mainz.13 Gregory Martin, 2022
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