Virgin And Child (maria Lactans) – Flemish School, Around 1560, Follower Of Gérard David

Oil on copper. Flemish school, around 1560, follower of Gérard David (c. 1460 – 1523).
In this gentle representation, the Virgin delicately tilts her head towards her son who is about to take her breast. With a rattle in his hand, the latter looks into the distance while his mother observes him with a concerned look. Would she already be considering the many torments that her son will have to endure? Despite its sacred character, the tenderness that emanates from this scene anchors it in daily life and allows each faithful to project themselves into it. This iconography echoes the dual nature of Christ, both divine and human, and recalls the nurturing and protective role of the Virgin, extended to all of humanity. Arousing spontaneous piety, this work retains an element of medieval sensitivity to which the Northern Renaissance succeeds smoothly. Our painting can be compared to the corpus of Gérard David whose representations of the Virgin in small formats had great success in the context of devotio moderna. Thus, his Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) painted in the 1510s shows very similar figures. However, his Virgin and Child painted in 1520 (also kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) offers an even more convincing analogy, except that our version transports the characters to a more intimate setting. However, the execution of our painting on a copper plate places us after 1560, the date from which the use of this type of support became widespread. By this yardstick, the more vibrant colors of our painting, both in the skin tones and in the fabrics, corroborate work from the second half of the 16th century. Red dress and blue mantle were in fact the colors with which Flemish painters of the mid-16th century, such as Ambrosius Benson, dressed the Virgin, unlike the primitives whose palette was colder.

We have chosen to present this delicate maternity in a luxurious ebonized and gilded wood cassette frame custom made by a master Italian craftsman. Dimensions: 29.5 x 22 cm when viewed – 55 x 46 cm with the frame
Sold with invoice and certificate of expertise.

Biography: Gérard David (Oudewater c. 1460 – Bruges, August 13, 1523) is the last of the Flemish primitives, often considered the successor of Jan van Eyck and Hugo van der Goes. Little is known about his youth, other than that he was originally from the Northern Netherlands and trained in Haarlem. It was in 1484 that he joined the guild of image makers and saddlers of Bruges. Despite the decline of this city at the end of the 15th century, he had a prosperous workshop there from 1495 where several journeymen worked, first and foremost Ambrosius Benson. In 1499, after having completed his famous Judgment of Cambyses (Groeninge Museum, Bruges), he was appointed first assistant of the corporation and became its dean in 1501. David then had a second workshop outside the walls of Bruges which continued to function after his death, until 1524, when it was taken over by Joos Wachtenpert. Subsequently, many artists, both in Antwerp (Joos van Cleve) and in Bruges (Adriaen Isenbrant and Ambrosius Benson), reappropriated his iconographic innovations.

Bibliography:
- AINSWORTH, Maryan Wynn (dir.), Gerard David: Purity of Vision in an Age of Transition, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.
- AINSWORTH, Maryan Wynn (dir.), From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (exp. cat. New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 22, 1998 - January 3, 1999), HN Abrams, 1998.
- REAU, Louis, Iconographie de l'art Chrétien, 3 flight. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958.
- VAN MIERGROET, Hans J, Gérard David, Antwerp, Fonds Mercator, 1989.