Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting

This book offers the first full-length study of the contemplative function of devotional portraits in Early Netherlandish paintings (1400-1550), demonstrating that many images of people kneeling in prayer functioned within the picture as a visualisation of their spiritual process. The study is anchored within a fertile art-historical tradition that focuses on the uses and functions of devotional paintings in late medieval meditative practices (Sixten Ringbom, Reindert Falkenburg, Jeffrey Hamburger, Bret Rothstein etc.). The book’s aim is twofold: first, to improve our knowledge of these specific kinds of images; second, to offer a new perspective on this field of research, thanks to an innovative methodology that combines visual and textual analysis. On the one hand, this methodology lies in a close analysis of the “pictorial language” of these paintings, namely an analysis that goes beyond their simple iconographical and formal aspects and investigates the strategies used to construct the pictorial space and to integrate the portraits into the religious composition. On the other hand, the method is based on a confrontation of these visual strategies with concepts and metaphors developed in late medieval spiritual and devotional literature from the Low Countries, especially authors from the Devotio moderna and the mystical tradition such as Jan van Ruusbroec († 1382), Geert Grote († 1384), Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen († 1398) or Hendrik Herp († 1478). The phenomenon of devotional portraits came into existence at the beginning of the Middle Ages and remained popular until at least the 17th century. However, it is during the 15th and 16th centuries that it really became popular as a genre, especially in the Low Countries. Noble men and women, wealthy bourgeois, clerics and members of religious communities wanted to leave a trace of their piety and of their presence on earth by commissioning religious paintings that included their portraits. By being depicted in the image, these people were able to express their devotion and their status, ask for the protection of a saint and, above all, to ensure their salvation. Many of these paintings were also conceived as devotional instruments aimed at supporting the meditative practices of their owners. From this point of view, the interest of such pictorial production lies in the fact that the depiction of devotees, who were versed in, and applied the precepts of, devotional literature, can be understood as a mise–en-image of their spiritual experience. Indeed, the spiritual implications of paintings that include devotional portraits are wide: such a picture can appear as an intermediary between the devotee and the sacred personae. It materialises, announces and even idealises the meeting between the visible and the invisible worlds. Paintings including devotional portraits not only make present to the viewers the eternal and invisible, but they also allow the devotee to physically enter the image in order to pictorially show his/her spiritual perfection. By studying, as I propose to do in this book, the visual strategies of the paintings alongside the texts of the major writers of the spiritual tradition of the Low Countries, it is possible to bring to light the strong convergences between late medieval pictorial and textual conventions related to the spiritual ascent and the transformation of the soul. The book is composed of five chapters and is accompanied by a catalogue of paintings with devotional portrait(s) that were produced in the Low Countries between 1400 and 1550 (in PDF-format). This corpus contains 721 paintings, classified according to a typology that takes into account: 1. the localisation of the portraits within the structure of the work (on the outer or inner wings of triptychs or polyptychs, on the same panel as the religious scene, on a diptych…); 2. the type of religious scene (narrative or hieratic); and 3. the presence or not of a patron saint introducing the devotee. Besides traditional data on the works (dimension, localisation, dating), extra information on the identity of the people portrayed and the original location of the work (when known), the iconography, the attributes of the portraits, the social status of the persons depicted, etc. and a bibliography are provided for each entry. The catalogue is thus conceived to become a reference database for researchers of devotional portraits. Chapter one describes the pictorial conventions that have a particular bearing on a picture’s meaning. Based on the catalogue, it analyses the different ways in which portraits are integrated into the religious compositions. It first focuses on the physical structure of the paintings and the location of the portraits within it, and then on the structuring of the pictorial spaces. Here, the “levels of reality” and the opposition, conflation, and ambiguities between the sacred and secular spheres and figures of these images are considered. These elements are then brought to bear on the subsequent chapters of the book, which confront these pictorial devices with key-concepts and themes dealing with spiritual elevation and transformation in spiritual literature produced and read in the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages. Chapter two first considers how spiritual and contemplative processes are described and visualized in devotional and mystical writings of the time. Then, it demonstrates how the structuring of sacred and secular zones and transitory motives (such as paths, porches, gates, open fences) endow the paintings with a dynamic dimension that can be understood as pictorial means (or machinae) showing the spiritual progression of the depicted devotees. Chapter three deals with a specific theme of the verbalisation of spiritual progression, namely the ‘spiritual ascent’. It shows that while this topic enjoyed great success in the writings of the Devotio moderna (for instance the De spiritualibus ascensionibus of Zerbolt van Zutphen), it is also alluded to in several paintings that include devotional portraits, and notably in Petrus Christus’ Exeter Madonna and in the Diptych of Lodovico Portinari of the Master of the Ursula Legend. Chapter four is dedicated to spiritual perfection and union with God and their visualisation in paintings with devotional portraits. The concept of ghemeine leven (‘common life’, a mixture of vita activa and vita contemplativa), that Jan van Ruusbroec develops to describe spiritual perfection, lies at the core of this chapter. More precisely, it first underlines the complexity of the outcome of the spiritual progression, which is not experienced as the result of a linear elevation, as is usually acknowledged, but as a cyclic process. This chapter shows that just as Ruusbroec’s texts describe the relationship between the active and contemplative lives in a subtle manner, so too do several paintings with devotional portraits by means of pictorial devices and visual ambiguities that have regularly been underestimated, even though they undoubtedly played a significant role in the devotional hermeneutic of these images. Finally, chapter five offers a new interpretation of the place and status of such images in meditative practices. It first analyses how Geert Grote, the founder of the Devotio moderna, uses Ruusbroec’s concept of the Ghemeine leven to describe the role of images during the contemplative process: according to Grote, images are not only used in the beginning of the process, but rather retain their role throughout the path to spiritual perfection. At the end they are not eliminated, but transcended. Such an understanding of the status of images sheds new light on the visual ambiguities of many paintings, which can instead be interpreted as devices indicating how to use such images properly in meditative practices. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that paintings with devotional portraits are singular works that require special attention since they combine both sacred and secular motifs, personae and spaces. In such pictures, the structuring of the pictorial space plays a more crucial role than previously acknowledged: it leads to a complex interplay of differentiation, gradation or fusion between the sacred and secular zones and figures of the composition, a fact that is usually underestimated by art historians. By bringing together contemporary visual and textual production, this book will offer a new – and culturally grounded – appraisal of these visual strategies, which allowed the artists to offer a spiritual topography, in which the devotees are depicted as moving towards union with God, thereby showing their spiritual progression.