Catalogue entry no. 55 by William W. Robinson:
Hailed by a contemporary as the “prince of illumination,” Simon Marmion produced altarpieces and portraits on panel as well as paintings in books. Born and trained in Amiens, Marmion worked there until he settled, by 1458, in Valenciennes, which then belonged to the Duchy of Burgundy. Marmion enjoyed the patronage of the ducal court and fulfilled commissions for paintings in Amiens and Cambrai. While his career is amply attested to in documents and the early literature, the establishment of Marmion’s oeuvre of panel paintings rests primarily on circumstantial evidence that identifies him as the probable author of an altarpiece completed in 1459 for the abbey of Saint Bertin in Saint-Omer. Two illuminated leaves that most likely came from a documented breviary begun by Marmion in 1467 for Duke Philip the Good and completed in 1470 for Philip’s son Charles the Bold provide the point of departure for the attribution to him of a large oeuvre of illuminated manuscripts.
Harvard’s Pietà is the only drawing on paper securely associated with Marmion’s workshop. It probably originated as a record of a work by the master (which is now lost) and then served as a model for miniatures and at least one panel painting. Maryan Ainsworth, who examined the sheet with infrared reflectography, wrote that the metalpoint work is over a detailed, somewhat mechanical preliminary drawing, probably in black chalk, of the contours of the image. Ainsworth suggested that these outlines were transferred from a template before the modeling was added in metalpoint. However, microscopic examination has shown that some of the work in black chalk is over the metalpoint modeling, indicating that the two media were used simultaneously rather than in succession.
None of Marmion’s surviving paintings or miniatures reproduce the Harvard composition in its entirety. As a workshop pattern, it could have been variably adjusted in response to the iconographic or design requirements of the project at hand. In a Lamentation of Christ painted around 1470 for Margaret of York, wife of Duke Charles the Bold, several details—the narrow, heavily lidded eyes, long waist, and slender limbs of the dead Christ, and the distinctive tubular folds of the Virgin’s drapery—generally resemble corresponding passages in the drawing, while Jesus’s head, hair, neck, shoulders, and torso follow the model quite precisely (Fig. 1). Additionally, as Ainsworth discovered, in the underdrawing on the Lamentation panel, Marmion (or a workshop assistant) reproduced the Virgin’s clasped hands and cocked head from the Harvard sheet. These details were revised in the finished painting, as evident in Figure 1, where she holds her head higher and crosses her hands over her heart.
Miniatures by Marmion that are variants of the Harvard model include a Pietà from a manuscript datable to the second half of the 1470s where the Virgin’s face, head covering, and hands are comparable to those features in the drawing (Fig. 2), as well as related half-length images in the Huth Hours and La Flora Hours. A drawing from the workshop or circle of Hugo van der Goes, which reproduces a figure from a lost painting by the master, similarly functioned as a model for painters and illuminators.
The inscription Peter Van Lint written in brown ink at the lower left might refer to the seventeenth-century Antwerp painter Pieter van Lint. If so, the annotation could hardly be an attribution, but may record that Van Lint once owned the drawing.
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