Paintings for These Times
Two main areas of art historical research have occupied me this year in addition to the on-going programme of visitor engagement with the Fitzwilliam Museum paintings collection. The first area has been a reappraisal of Isaak van Nickelen’s Interior of the Church of Our Lady in Antwerp.
It was unusual for a post-Reformation Dutch painter to work across the border in the Catholic churches of Flanders so much so that in 2010, a leading art historian from the NGA in Washington suggested that the painting be renamed Interior of St Bavokerk, Haarlem imagined as a Catholic Church. However, more recent research has seen the painting revert to the original title.
As well as the magnificence of the draftsmanship applied to the rendering of the gothic architecture and the atmospheric pale colour palette that catches the eye are the sequence of standing altars that run down the centre of the main aisle. Each of these was commissioned by a particular workers guild from the city and we have now managed to identify which guild erected which altar and the main painted altarpiece that formed the focus for their worship.
I was interested if Nickelen had made any more works during his sojourn in Antwerp and this took me to one other that now hangs in the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo entitled Interior of a Gothic Church by Isaak van Nickelen. The image I came across was only an old monochrome version, so it was hard to make any comparative judgement. I requested a higher resolution colour image from their chief conservator which he duly provided. When I saw the photograph of their painting, I sensed it bore little evidence of the hand of Nickelen. While it was of a Catholic church likely to be Antwerp Cathedral, if something of a pastiche, it bore little in common with the Fitz painting. I raised this with Dr Claire Baisier, then Director of the Meyer van de Burgh Gallery in Antwerp, who is Nickelen’s biographer. She was even more emphatic in her refutation of the Oslo attribution. It will be interesting to hear the thoughts of the people in Oslo.
The other strand of my research takes us back to darker times in 1930s and 1940s Germany and the ‘appropriation’ of works of art from Jewish collectors. The startling painting to be found in Gallery 8 of the Museum by an unknown artist depicts a moment from the life of St Christopher when he meets the Devil.
The story of its acquisition, absorption into the official collection of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and restitution to the rightful owners in 1948 is well documented. However, it is known that this painting is just one part of a large devotional polyptych (multi panelled altarpiece or tabernacle).
I am now in the process, along with colleagues in Munich, of tracking down and re-assembling the component panels. Watch this space!
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