2003.153: Christ's Descent into Hell

The production of glass roundels developed by the early sixteenth century into a major artistic industry in the Netherlands, where far more were created than elsewhere in Europe. The small panels of clear glass painted with glass paint and silver stain could be oval, elliptical, rectangular, or square, although most, as the term implies, are circular. Decorated with figural or armorial imagery, roundels were installed in windows in intimate spaces, such as a private home or the cloister or living quarters in a religious community. Glass painters who executed their own designs, such as Dirck Crabeth (2013.41) and Dirck Vellert, were exceptions. Most adapted their compositions from prints or designs commissioned from a master painter. Since roundels were small and best seen at close range, they lent themselves to sequential viewing, and many belonged to series of multiple panels that depicted religious cycles or secular narratives.¹

Christ’s Descent into Hell belongs to a group of fifteen finished designs for a suite of roundels illustrating scenes from the Passion.² In Christian theology, through his death on the cross Jesus enabled the souls of the righteous who had died before him to gain admission to Heaven. Between his crucifixion and resurrection he descended into the realm of the dead, forcing open the gates of Hell. Represented in European and Byzantine art from the eighth century onward, the subject figures in many medieval and Renaissance Passion cycles.³ In images of Christ’s Descent into Hell, the first to be liberated is Adam, whose wrist Jesus grasps in the Harvard drawing. Jesus’s gesture and pose, and the type of the demon hovering above his head are among the numerous details in the series adapted from Albrecht Dürer’s three influential series of prints of the Passion.⁴ Of the fifteen known models for this group, the earliest in the sequence of the biblical narrative depicts the Last Supper and the latest shows the Incredulity of Thomas. The suite might have included additional designs, since certain canonical subjects are not illustrated among those known today.⁵ No roundels related to these designs have been identified.

Most of the drawings in the series are executed primarily in black or dark brown ink with brownish gray wash, in several instances over black chalk. All are virtually identical in size: 330 mm—give or take 2–3 mm—in diameter. This is significantly larger than the standard sixteenth-century roundel, which measures about 220 mm.⁶ All the supports are made up of two, three, or more pieces of paper. More than half of them have been prepared overall with a pink or reddish wash or have been partially tinted by selective rubbing with powdered red chalk. Eight of the designs were formerly mounted back-to-back to other drawings in the series, as if they were the recto and verso of the same sheet. Most have been detached and are now preserved as two separate sheets. On the verso of the Agony in the Garden, the artist sketched revisions to the design on the recto, and a first draft of the Crucifixion appears on the verso of the Morgan Deposition, but no subject occurs twice among the fifteen finished models in the group.⁷ This, when taken with the common provenance of several sheets, their unusual size, and similar styles and techniques, attests that they all belong to a single series.⁸

The challenge of identifying the author of the Passion designs and the three other studies for roundels assigned to the same hand has exercised art historians since the 1920s, but no one has proposed a convincing attribution.⁹ The works were first associated with the Leiden master Aertgen Claesz. van Leyden (c. 1498–1564). While their technique and figural style generally recall drawings of the 1550s ascribed to Aertgen, the roundels are not by his hand.¹⁰ In 1969, Karel G. Boon argued that they are the work of Nicolaas (Nicolaus) Hogenberg (d. 1539), a printmaker and painter of Netherlandish ancestry, who was born in Munich and who settled in Mechelen in the 1520s. Boon compared the rectangular heads and the line work used to describe the anatomy in the drawings to details in Hogenberg’s graphic works.¹¹ However, the resemblance is merely superficial, and Boon’s dating of the series before 1527 seems far too early for the style of the drawings.¹² The late Hans Mielke, after evaluating the evidence, judiciously concluded, “Yet, it is difficult in the end to attribute the roundels and Hogenberg’s engraving to the same artist. The problem has probably not yet been finally solved.”¹³

Notes

¹ William Cole, A Catalogue of Netherlandish and North European Roundels in Britain: Great Britain; Summary Catalogue 1, in UNESCO–ICOM Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Project series, 1953–[ongoing] (Oxford and New York, 1993), pp. xix–xxii; Timothy Husband, The Luminous Image: Painted Glass in the Lowlands, 1480–1560 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), pp. 10–14.

² The fifteen designs are: The Last Supper, ink and gray wash on two joined pieces of pink-washed paper, 332 mm diam., Cambridge, U.K., Fitzwilliam Museum, PDP, 734*3a; The Agony in the Garden, ink and gray wash on two joined pieces of pink-washed paper, 332 mm diam., Cambridge, U.K., Fitzwilliam Museum, PDP, 734*3b; The Betrayal of Christ, ink and gray wash on two joined pieces of pink-washed paper, 330 mm diam., London, British Museum, 1920,420.6; Christ before Pilate, ink and gray wash on two joined pieces of pink-washed paper, 330 mm diam., London, British Museum, 1920,420.7; The Flagellation, dark brown ink, gray wash, on paper partly tinted in red chalk, rubbed over, 333 mm diam. with a 75 mm (maximum) segment added at top, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, 7884; Crowning with Thorns, dark brown ink, gray wash, on paper partly tinted in red chalk, rubbed over, 332 mm diam. with a 68 mm (max.) segment added at top, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, 7885; Christ Seated on the Cross, black ink, wash, traces of black chalk, on four pieces of joined pink-gray-washed paper, 332 mm diam., formerly Amsterdam, Heirs of I. Q. van Regteren Altena. This drawing is on the recto of the drawing mentioned below and was included in the sale at Christie’s, London, 10 July 2014, lot 1; The Crucifixion, brown ink, brown wash, and black chalk, on several pieces of joined paper, 332 mm diam., Amsterdam, formerly Heirs of I. Q. van Regteren Altena, sale, Christie’s, London, 10 July 2014, lot 1; Deposition (verso: Crucifixion, preliminary draft for the final design in the former Van Regteren Altena collection), black chalk, black and brown ink, brown wash on three joined pieces of paper, New York, Morgan Library and Museum, 1990.9; Christ at the Foot of the Cross, Mourned by Mary and John, brown ink, light grayish brown wash, traces of black chalk, on three joined sheets of paper, verso: black chalk, 328 mm diam., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002.422; Entombment, brown ink, traces of red chalk (recto), red and black chalk sketches of a female nude and architecture (verso), on three joined pieces of paper, 332 mm diam., sale, Sotheby’s, London, 3 July 2013, lot 11; Christ’s Descent into Hell, brown ink and brown wash over black chalk on three joined pieces of cream antique laid paper; some (later?) gray wash on Adam’s crotch (recto), faint black chalk sketches of architectural motifs (verso), 328 mm diam., Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 2003.153; Christ and the Magdalene (Noli me tangere), black ink, brown wash on five joined pieces of paper randomly rubbed with red chalk concentrated at the joins, 333 mm diam., New York, Morgan Library and Museum, 1974.51; The Resurrection, gray ink, brownish gray wash, on light-red prepared paper, 334 mm diam., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1996-61; The Incredulity of Thomas, brown ink and gray wash, the lines indicating the linear perspective in brown ink, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1968-84.

³ Anna D. Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton, 1986), pp. 4–39 and 67–81.

⁴ In the Harvard drawing, the stance and gesture of Christ derive from the figure of Jesus in Dürer’s “Small Passion” of 1509 (see Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, Munich, 2001–4, vol. 2, p. 211), while the devil and the arched doorway were adapted from Christ’s Descent into Hell in the “Large Passion” of 1510 (idem, p. 164).

⁵ Not included in the series of drawings are, among other subjects: Christ Shown to the People, Pilate Washing His Hands, the Carrying of the Cross, the Ascension, and Pentecost.

⁶ Cole, p. xx.

⁷ On the verso of the Morgan Deposition, the artist sketched in black chalk a study of the Crucifixion with Mary and John beneath the cross, elaborating the figures of Mary and John in gray ink. This appears to be a first draft of the Crucifixion developed in the finished drawing formerly in the I. Q. van Regteren Altena collection. Between the two standing figures he then added another female form, perhaps an alternative version of Mary. This composition has been interpreted as the Three Marys at the Tomb, but the right-hand figure is definitely a male, and the outlines of the cross and the head and torso of Christ are clearly visible.

⁸ The eight designs mounted back-to-back obviously share a common early provenance; their pairings were The Last Supper and the Agony in the Garden (Fitzwilliam Museum); Christ Seated on the Cross and The Crucifixion (heirs of I. Q. van Regteren Altena, sold Christie’s, London, 10 July 2014, lot 1, still adhered); The Entombment (sold Sotheby’s, London, 3 July 2013, lot 11) and Christ’s Descent into Hell (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum); and the Deposition (Morgan Library and Museum) and Christ at the Foot of the Cross, Mourned by Mary and John (Metropolitan Museum of Art). The Fitzwilliam Agony in the Garden and four others bear inscriptions in the same (eighteenth-century?) hand, also bearing out a common history. The drawings inscribed by this hand are The Flagellation (No 330), The Crowning with Thorns (Lot 426– ), The Agony in the Garden, and Christ before Pilate (No 321) (Karel G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German Drawings of the XVth and XVIth Centuries of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1992, vol. 1, p. 226, n. 1), and, although not noted by Boon, the Morgan Noli me tangere (No 319).

⁹ The three additional drawings attributed to Nicolaas Hogenberg are: The Judgment of Solomon, brown ink, brown wash, on brownish paper, 234 mm diam., Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, 8967 (Boon, vol. 1, cat. 126, pp. 227–28, repr. vol. 2, pl. 22); Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Z 968 (idem, under cat. 126, pp. 227–28, repr. vol. 2, fig. 70); and The Mocking of Job, brown ink and brown wash over touches of black chalk on antique laid paper, toned with red wash and white opaque watercolor, 255/250 mm diam., Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 1977.44

¹⁰ Campbell Dodgson, “Two Drawings by Aert Claesz,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 38, no. 214 (January 1921): 25–27 (as Aert Claesz.); Arthur Ewart Popham, “Aert Claesz (1498–1562), (attributed to),” Old Master Drawings, vol. 2, no. 7 (Dec. 1927): 37–39 (as attributed to Aert Claesz.); Arthur Ewart Popham, Dutch and Flemish Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries, vol. 5 in Catalogue of Drawings by Dutch and Flemish Artists Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (London, 1932), under cat. 2, pp. 7–8 (as Aert Claesz.); I. Q. van Regteren Altena, “Aertgen van Leyden,” Oud Holland, vol. 56 (1939): 17–25, 74–87, 129–38, and 222–35, part 1, pp. 17–18 and 25, part 3, pp. 137–38, and part 4, pp. 224–25, 232–33, and p. 235 (as Aertgen [Claesz.] van Leyden). The far less plausible attribution to the obscure German Abraham Schöpfer (Friedrich Winkler, “Abraham Schöpfer oder Aertgen van Leyden?” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, vol. 56, 1935, 117–30, pp. 117–19, 124, and 129–30; Binder in Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, with Hans Vollmer, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig, 1907–50, vol. 30, p. 237) has been abandoned. On Aertgen Claesz. van Leyden’s drawings of the 1550s, see Winkler, pp. 124–28, Hilbert Lootsma in Thomas Ketelsen, Oliver Hahn, and Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick, eds., Zeichnen im Zeitalter Bruegels: Die niederländischen Zeichnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts im Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett; Beiträge zu einer Typologie (Cologne, 2011), pp. 146–51, and Judith Niessen in Yvonne Bleyerveld, Albert J. Elen, Judith Niessen, et al., Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam: Artists born before 1581 (Rotterdam, 2012), under MB 1699 (PK). Consulted 22 April 2014.

¹¹ Karel G. Boon, “Rondom Aertgen,” Miscellanea I. Q. van Regteren Altena (1969): 55–60, and 271–76, pp. 57–58.

¹² For his dating of the series, see Karel G. Boon, Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Catalogue of Dutch and Flemish Drawings in the Rijksmuseum (The Hague, 1978), vol. 1, under cat. 323, p. 114.

¹³ Hans Mielke, “[Review] L’époque de Lucas de Leyde et Pierre Bruegel: Dessins des Anciens Pays-Bas: Collection Frits Lugt. Exh. cat. by Karel G. Boon, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection,” Master Drawings, vol. 23/24, no. 1 (1985–86): 75–90, p. 88.