Catalogue entry no. 21 by William W. Robinson:
The brothers Dirck and Wouter Crabeth dominated the art of glass painting in the northern Netherlands during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. They carried out most of the glazing installed from 1555 to 1572 in the great ensemble of painted glass in the Church of Saint John (Sint-Janskerk) in Gouda, and Dirck executed monumental windows for churches in Utrecht, the Hague, Amsterdam, and Delft, among others.
Several drawings and small glass panels attest that Dirck Crabeth also produced glazing for more intimate spaces. A sumptuous and sophisticated work he completed in 1543 for a private house in Leiden is a rare instance of a sixteenth-century domestic decoration from the Netherlands that survives nearly intact and with a known provenance (Fig. 1). Set in carved, mullioned frames arrayed on two levels, each of the twelve panes of the Leiden window included a vertical field for a narrative composition, surrounded by a painted Italianate architecture festooned with swags, friezes, vases, reliefs, cavorting boys, and armorial shields. The historiated panels in the upper level, framed in aediculae of columns and pediments, represent episodes from the Book of Samuel, while those in the bottom register, enclosed by the arches of an arcade, illustrate scenes from the life of Saint Paul. Figure 1 reproduces one pane in the upper register. Eight of the twelve original panes survive, and the other four are documented in copies drawn by Gerardus Bos in 1846, when the glass was still in situ. One historiated panel, already removed when Bos copied the window, now belongs to a parish church in Buckinghamshire.
Five drawings by Crabeth that served as models for the biblical illustrations have been identified. The Philistines Carry the Ark through Their Land, published here for the first time, may be added to the group. Its pen work unmistakably resembles the technique of the other five studies, and its composition corresponds precisely to that of one of the lost glass panels recorded in Bos’s copies (Fig. 2). Four of the six models measure 256/258 × 190/200 mm, nearly identical to the size of the narrative panels (260 × 200 mm). Such a composition might have been transferred directly to the support by laying the piece of clear glass over the drawing and tracing the emphatic contours of the model onto its surface. The handling and figure style of the six studies reflect Crabeth’s debt to the drawings of Jan Swart van Groningen, a prolific designer of small glass panels, who, according to Karel van Mander, was the teacher of Dirck’s older brother Adriaen Pietersz. Crabeth.
The Harvard drawing depicts a tale of punishments that God visited on the Philistines after they defeated the Israelites in battle and took the Ark of the Covenant. At upper left, the idol of Dagon at Ashdod, which fell and smashed when the Ark was left beside it, lies in pieces on the floor (I Samuel 5:1–4). In the foreground, the Philistines carry the Ark through the city of Gath. For this irreverence, the Lord “smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts” (I Samuel 5:8–9). Stricken with these hemorrhoids, the Philistines quickly resolved to return the Ark, and in the distance at right, a cart drawn by two cows carries it toward Beth-shemesh, where the Israelites repossessed it (I Samuel 6:10–13). In the Leiden window, this Old Testament scene of retribution for a sacrilege was paired with a New Testament analogue. The narrative panel directly beneath it in the lower register depicted God’s blinding of Elymas the sorcerer, who contradicted Apostle Paul of Tarsus when he spoke to the Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, at Paphos (Acts of the Apostles 13:11).
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