'See, the Bridegroom Cometh; Go out to Meet Him'. On Spiritual Progress and Mystical Union in Early Netherlandish Painting

Siet, de brudegom comt; Gaet ute hem te ontmoete. Jan van Ruusbroec’s Geestelike Brulocht begins with this well-known sentence from the Gospel of Matthew (25,6), which then serves as a structure for the whole tract. By doing so, the Brulocht offers the reader a subtle description of the spiritual life, the goal of which is union with God. In this paper, by focusing on the strategies and the themes/metaphors developed by Ruusbroec in his works and by the pictorial devices that we can observe in Early Netherlandish paintings, including devotional portraits, I would like to show how images can be understood as a “mise-en-image” (or visualization) and as visual instruments that both show and explain the complexity of the spiritual quest leading to the union with God in the Late Middle Ages.