BULLETIN
OF THE METROPOLITAN
TWO NEW FLEMISH
MUSEUM
OF ART
the Last Judgment not only illustrates a
new aspect of the work of Joos van Cleve,
but also, in the freedom and sweep of its
composition, makes an especially interesting contrast with Hubert van Eyck's Last
PAINTINGS
A Last Judgment by Joos van Cleve and
a Portrait of an Abbess by an unknown
Flemish painter of the sixteenth century
THE LAST JUDGMENT
BY JOOS VAN CLEVE
(ACTIVE
have just come to the Museum through the
generous bequest of Mr. and Mrs. Graham
F. Blandy and are good additions to the
rich collection of Flemish paintings.1 Up to
now there have been few portraits of women
in the galleries of northern paintings; and
1 Acc. nos. 40.174.1, 2. lempera on wood:
(i) h. 4834 in., w. 34 in.; (2) h. 2238 in., w. 16'4
in. Shown in the Room of Recent Accessions.
I 507-1540)
Judgment, the right wing of the Hermitage
diptych, painted just about one hundred
years before.
The new judgment scene is a competent
and typically sixteenth-century rendering
of the subject, bright and decorative in
color and formal in its arrangement. It may
originally have had a pair of wings, painted
on the inside in color, and on the outside,
IO9
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BULLETIN
OF THE METROPOLITAN
according to the fashion of the time, in
grisaille. Its composition is divided horizontally into two equal zones. The upper
one is dominated by the figure of Christ the
Judge; surrounded by light and throned on
clouds, he is attended by a myriad of tenderly painted little angels with rainbow
wings, and soaring forward, seems to have
pierced the firmament in order to appear
here at the Judgment Day. Although he displays the five wounds of the Passion and
PORTRAIT
AN UNKNOWN
OF AN ABBESS
FLEMISH
OF THE XVI CENTURY
his hands make the gestures which indicate
blessing and damnation, his mild aspect has
but little of the ominous hieratic Pantocrator who presided at this scene in Early
Christian and mediaeval times. At either
side in much smaller scale are throngs of
saints and prophets, and among them may
be recognized the customary types of Saint
John and Saint Peter. Just below the throne
of clouds are the two angels who traditionally belong to the Last Judgment, with
curving, lily-shaped golden trumpets, their
cheeks puffed out with the effort of blowing
the fateful blast. Their rich draperies, which
in an earlier period would have billowed
OF ART
symmetrically to the right and to the left,
are made by the informed renaissance hand
of Joos van Cleve to move only to the left,
blown by the same breeze that lifts the
cloak of Christ.
In the lower zone are the dead who have
been called out of their graves to be judged.
Those in the foreground, just emerging and
still trailing their grave clothes, are painted
in chiaroscuro with all the soft modeling of
flesh which anatomical studies and acquaintance with the art of Italy, especially that
of Raphael and Leonardo, were bringing to
Flemish painting. Their postures, however,
their struggles to rise from the earth and
face their judge, belong to a long tradition
and remain essentially the same as in earlier
Judgments, for instance the Van Eyck in
this Museum, the Memling in Danzig, and
the great polyptych in Beaune by Roger
van der Weyden. Behind, divided into two
groups by Saint Michael with a raised
sword, are those who already know their
fate. The blessed have placid expressions
and a leisurely conversational ease in their
motions, while the damned, driven over a
sulphurous area from which small red fires
are starting, show their terror by upraised
arms and other gestures of anguish. But for
all this conventional stage-set of horror, the
scene is neither awe-inspiring nor terrifying,
and the lack of immediacy in expressing the
emotion of fear reminds the spectator that
when this picture was painted, probably
between 1520 and 1530, humanism and the
BY
PAINTER
MUSEUM
rich life in such flourishing cities as Antwerp and Brussels had already so increased
man's satisfactions in this world as to take
from him most of his dread of the Last
Judgment as the veritable dies irae.
The history of the picture is uncertain. It
is said to have been presented to a monastery in the neighborhood of Douai about
1764 by relatives of one of the monks and
was brought to this country in 1909 after
the convent had been suppressed because of
French religious laws. It was described by
Max Rooses,2 the eminent authority on
Rubens, as one of the most remarkable
works of Bernard van Orley. The close
similarity in composition to Van Orley's
2 In an unpublishedletter fromAntwerp,July
24, 1909.
I 10
BULLETIN OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
painting of the same subject in the Museum
in Antwerp might seem to bear out this
attribution. But such arrangements of the
Last Judgment came in great quantity
from the workshops of Flemish, Dutch, and
German artists of the end of the fifteenth
and the beginning of the sixteenth century,
and in style our new picture has more in
common with the large body of work left to
us by Joos van Cleve. The figure of Christ
shows a striking resemblance to the Salvator Mundi in the Louvre, and the form of
the angels' wings, the types of faces, the
gesturing, mannered hands, the drapery
folds terminating frequently in points, are
only a few of the details in our painting
which confirm the authorship of Joos.
Joos van Cleve, known for many years as
the Master of the Death of Mary, from the
two pictures with that subject in the
Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and
in the Altere Pinakothek in Munich, has
been identified by modern scholarship with
the painter who in 151 became a free
master of the painters' guild in Antwerp,
directed a shop there for many years,
served three times as the guild's deacon,
and died in 1540 or very early in 1541.
Many pictures by Joos are to be found outside Belgium, and since there are gaps in
the records of his work in Antwerp critics
have supposed that he traveled abroad.
But Antwerp was the center of the Netherlandish export trade, and it is not at all
surprising to find paintings by a popular
Antwerp master scattered in various cities
of Europe. It is possible, however, that he
did journey to Italy, and he was certainly
in France. There are portraits by him of
Francis I and his second wife, Eleonore, the
daughter of Philip the Fair of Burgundy,
and the chronicler Guicciardini wrote in
1567 that when the French king was looking
for a very fine painter, Joos was chosen and
brought to the French court, and that he
portrayed the king, the queen, and various
nobles with the highest praise and very
large rewards.
The other painting in this bequest, the
Portrait of an Abbess, according to its coat
of arms might have come from the same
general region in the northwest corner of
France as the Last Judgment, and the
I 1
temptation is strong to suppose that they
came out of the same convent. The name of
the abbess has not yet been ascertained, but
her age is plainly given as fifty-five and the
portrait is dated 1521. The shield at the
right, with the abbatial crozier, places her
as a member of one of two families who bore
those arms; the Reinalts, originally of
France, but afterward of Spain, offer an
unlikely identification and it is more probable that she was a member of the other
family, the Wissocqs of Artois. Little is
known about painters who worked in
Artois in the sixteenth century, and the
style of Jean Bellegambe, who was active
near by at Douai is very different indeed
from that of our portrait. The painting of
the abbess has, as a matter of fact, a strongly
German character. It is much to be hoped
that some day it will be known over what
convent this shrewd, practical lady presided.
MARGARETTA SALINGER.
CHINOISERIE
Two styles, chinoiserie and rococo, lead
straight to the heart of eighteenth-century
thought and feeling. The two styles of decoration are indeed sometimes so alike that
they can be told apart only by the costumes
of the pixie acrobats that swing from swirl
to counterswirl. Both styles are also alike
in being outrageously costly-costly to design because expertness in caprice is rare,
and costly to execute because no detail is
exactly repeated. As a manufacturing proposition, rococo and chinoiserieare the opposite
of Empire and "Gothick," whose stampedout, serial ornaments helped to make them
favorites for mass production in the early
days of the industrial revolution. Chinoiserie and rococo perished at the first suspicion of chill that touched the luxuriance
of the ancien regime, for they were the
whims of small, incredibly secure coteries
who thought and acted in ampler elbowroom than any society ever enjoyed before
or since. The aristocrats' freedom from the
restraints that fettered their fellow men is
made visible in the freedom from the law of
gravity in rococo and chinoiserie, where a
Celestial can dash headlong down a zigzag
stair of twigs without a thought of falling