Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece
NG 6470 
The Deposition

Susan Foister, 2024

Extracted from:
Susan Foister; with Rachel Billinge, Marika Spring and Lea Viehweger; and contributions by Lorne Campbell and Allison Goudie, The German Paintings before 1800 (London: National Gallery Global and Yale University Press, 2024).

Oil on wood (probably oak), 75.7 × 47.3 cm

Provenance

The Deposition may be first mentioned in 1622 in a list of pictures among the accounts of Sir Arthur Ingram (before 1571–1642), owner of Temple Newsam, Leeds: ‘A picture of Christ takinge downe from the Crosse.’¹ It cannot be clearly identified in subsequent inventories associated with Edward Ingram, 4th Viscount Irwin (1686–1714).² The Temple Newsam accounts for 1750 include a bill of 10s. 6d. for ‘cleaning and mending a Crucifix by Albert Dure’ belonging to Lord Irwin, Henry Ingram, 7th Viscount Irwin (1691–1761).³ The painting was seen in the Gallery at Temple Newsam in about 1767, and recorded in the same location in an inventory of 1808.⁴ It was recorded by Waagen in 1854, again in the Gallery.⁵ It was hung by Emily Charlotte Wood, Mrs Meynell Ingram (1840–1904) as part of the new reredos designed by George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907) for the chapel at Temple Newsam, which had been converted from the eighteenth‐century library and dedicated on 14 October 1877, but was returned to the Gallery in 1883.⁶ The painting was sold by Charles Wood, 3rd Earl of Halifax (born 1944) and purchased by private treaty sale through Christie’s in 1981.⁷

Copies and Versions

• (1) Collegiate Church of Sts Cosmas and Damian, Covarrubias, Spain, triptych with central panel of a Deposition after NG 6470 and shutters with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome (fig. 12).⁸

• (2) Triptych partly shown at the left edge of a depiction of a painter’s studio by Jan Brueghel (1568–1625), with right‐hand shutter depicting a female donor and male saint in a landscape, and a central panel also with a landscape replacing the gilded background seen in NG 6470 (fig. 13).⁹

• (3) Version attributed to a Follower of the Circle of the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece, sold at Sotheby’s, London, 6 December 2007, lot 13 and at Koller, Zurich, 17 September 2010, lot 3017. Private collection (fig. 1).¹⁰

• (4) Possibly another version in the Kemper collection, Cologne.¹¹

Variants of the Deposition Composition

• (1) Paris, Louvre (fig. 14).¹²

• (2) Philadelphia Museum of Art (fig. 2).¹³

• (3) A Deposition from about 1520 attributed to a Lower Rhenish artist, in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.¹⁴

Exhibitions and Loans

Leeds 1868 (505, as Dürer); RA 1881 (229, as Dürer); Burlington Fine Arts Club 1906 (18); London 1909–10 [page 689] [page 690] (74); on long‐term loan to the National Gallery, 1926–31 (see National Gallery Official Catalogue, 1929, p. 220) ; Burlington Fine Arts Club 1937–8 (44); Leeds 1949 (26); York 1951 (31); Manchester 1957 (32); Cologne 1961 (24); Manchester 1961 (29); NG 1977 (36); NG 1987 (23).

Technical Notes

The painting was cleaned and ‘mended’ in 1750 by John Bouttats (see Provenance), and possibly cleaned again in about 1877.¹⁵ Sometime between 1963 and 1980 the panel was built up with balsa wood, and the painting was revarnished in 1981, but no major treatment has been carried out since it was acquired. The painting has suffered a number of losses, mainly in the lower part, notably one running up the right edge affecting the Magdalen’s green cloak, as well as smaller losses along the panel join. Otherwise the paint is in very good condition, apart from some fading of red lakes, but the gilding is badly worn. Most of the modelling of the tracery is a later recreation of the original, which has suffered a great deal of flaking.

The support is a wood panel, probably oak, consisting of two vertically joined boards with vertical grain. The join is approximately 25.7 cm from the left edge (obverse). Small circular damages, arranged in groups of four, two either side of the join in the area of Christ’s head and Nicodemus’s sleeve (see fig. 7) and another group near the base of the cross, are evidence that the boards were originally joined with a half‐lap or tongue‐in‐groove join that was pegged with dowels. The panel has a slight concave warp. As the paint extends to the edges of the panel the wood is likely to have been trimmed all round. It is not perfectly rectangular, its height now measuring 75.1 cm at the left edge and 75.7 cm at the right, and its width 47.3 cm at the top and 47.2 cm at the bottom.

The white ground contains chalk; paint cross‐sections show evidence of a pale brownish‐grey priming composed of lead white with a little black and red pigment. There is a very detailed underdrawing in a liquid medium, applied with a brush (fig. 5). The forms are outlined, and both hatching (with short, comma‐like strokes) and crosshatching are used to indicate shadows. There is a large amount of hatching in all the faces, notably those of the Magdalen and the woman with the crown of thorns. The underdrawing was followed carefully, only a few small changes made during painting: the right knee of the figure at the very top of the panel has been moved down and his hanging sleeve was enlarged over the gold; the eyes of the bearded man were painted slightly to the right of the underdrawing, and Saint John’s nose was changed. At the base of the cross the skull was enlarged and the Magdalen’s pot moved down or made smaller between drawing and painting.

The original gold of the background is mordant gilding; the pale yellow mordant consists of lead white mixed with a little yellow earth. A single sample from the white tunic of the figure at the top of the ladder was analysed by GC–MS and the medium was identified as linseed oil.¹⁶

The flesh paints, examined with a stereomicroscope, are principally lead white tinted with red lake and a fine opaque red (probably vermilion), but with modifications to make distinctions between the figures. In the swooning Virgin’s face there is less red, and a considerable quantity of azurite has been used in her purple‐grey lips and around her eyes. Christ’s ashen face (fig. 3) contains little if any red pigment, and the areas around the wounds, eyes and lips have a blue‐grey hue from the addition of azurite. Saint John has a ruddier complexion, achieved by using more red pigment, with black in the shadows but no blue.

The only blue pigment used in the draperies is azurite, although considerable variety is achieved using different particle sizes, layer structures and admixtures with other pigments. The Virgin’s mid‐blue cloak has a lighter blue underlayer of azurite mixed with lead white, and an upper layer containing especially high quality large intense blue particles of azurite (fig. 4). The bearded man’s robe is a greener blue; a lower grade of azurite consisting of smaller particles of less intense colour has been used. The shadows[page 691][page 692]contain some red lake in addition. The dress of the Mary standing behind Saint John contains the same intense blue azurite as in the Virgin’s cloak, but the shadows are modelled with red lake giving it a darker blue hue.

A little azurite is also used in the underpaint for the Virgin’s dress, in combination with red lake and lead white, giving the drapery a slightly purple‐pink tone, distinct from that of the bearded man’s stockings, which contain only red lake and lead white. Saint John’s orange‐red cloak is underpainted and modelled with mixtures of vermilion and red lake, with colourless powdered glass as an additive in the darkest areas rich in red lake; the whole of the cloak was finally glazed with red lake, blotted to make it thin and even.¹⁷ The Magdalen’s green cloak is modelled with green underpaint containing varying proportions of verdigris, lead white and lead‐tin yellow; a final uniform verdigris glaze has been blotted to make it thin and even (fig. 6). The colder green of Saint John’s undercoat was achieved by using a different underpaint consisting of azurite and lead white with red lake in addition in the shadows; this was glazed with verdigris into which some red lake was blended while it was wet. The bright yellow of the shirt of the man at the top of the picture seems to contain lead‐tin yellow.

Subject

The removal of Christ’s body from the cross after the crucifixion and before its entombment is described in the New Testament (Matthew 27: 55–61; Mark 15: 40–7; Luke 23: 50–6; John 19: 38–42), where the presence of some of the additional figures shown here is mentioned, though not all are referred to in all the Gospels. According to Matthew, Joseph, ‘a rich man of Arimathea’, was given permission to remove and bury the body of Christ; John’s gospel mentions his companion, Nicodemus. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children, otherwise named as Salome (or Mary Salome in non‐biblical accounts) were also named (according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke), but were not described as present at the moment of the taking down of Christ’s body from the cross. The presence [page [693]]of the Virgin is not mentioned at all in the biblical accounts, but is a feature of later medieval devotional accounts such as that of Ludolph of Saxony and Pseudo‐Bonaventura from the fourteenth century; their focus on the suffering of the Virgin and her companions is strongly reflected in the devotional imagery of the ensuing period.¹⁸

Christ’s body, arms outstretched, is lowered from the cross. His lower body is gripped by an elderly man with white hair and beard in a red hat wearing a blue, fur‐lined coat, its fur collar trimmed with a gold beaded tassel, who is probably to be identified as the wealthy disciple Joseph of Arimathea who obtained permission from Pilate to take down Christ’s body from the cross in order to lay it in a tomb. A clean‐shaven male figure in a fur‐lined coat, gold damask sleeves (fig. 7) and a turban‐like headdress lined with curly fleece is presumably to be identified as the Pharisee Nicodemus; he grasps the body under the arms, while a boy hanging precariously from the top of the cross, his face obscured and head covered by a turban, holds the right arm with his right hand. The boy seems to have no textual precedent but a similar figure is shown for example in Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross (Prado).¹⁹ In the foreground on the right‐hand side, Mary Magdalene leans against the ladder, her elbow resting on one of its steps, her right hand to her head (fig. 10). She wears a tightly‐fitting dress of red and gold damask (fig. 8) and a green cloak; over her hair is a transparent veil. An ointment jar, her usual attribute, stands on the ground in front of her but the Gospels and other accounts mention that both Joseph and Nicodemus brought ointment to clean the body of Christ; its prominent position may also be intended to suggest to the viewer that they imagine participating in such a task. Next to it is a skull with the lower jaw missing, a sign that this is Golgotha, ‘the place of a skull’, where the crucifixion took place (John 19: 17). Behind the Magdalen one of the three Marys, dressed in grey damask, holds in her right hand the crown of thorns (figs 9, 10) removed from Christ’s head, where the wounds it has made are visible; the fingers of her left hand rest on Mary Magdalene’s waist. On the left the Virgin is swooning, supported by Saint John the Evangelist. Behind him is the third of the Marys, her hands raised in prayer. The figures are all shown as highly and deliberately unstable: it seems hardly credible that the body of Christ will be conveyed to the ground without incident, while those shown there are collapsing and swaying in their grief.

The board at the top of the cross appears to be inscribed with approximations of Hebrew and Greek letters to read (at least in part) ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’; it differs from the inscription on the Saint Bartholomew Master’s Crucifixion Altarpiece (Cologne, Wallraf‐Richartz Museum), which uses the Roman alphabet and appears to be adapted from woodcuts recording the ‘Titulus’ believed to have formed part of the original cross and rediscovered in Rome in 1492.²⁰

The background mimics sculpted shrines: the figures are set against a gold backdrop surrounded by Gothic tracery and other scrolling motifs, and they appear to stand slightly in front of this space, which extends into a barren foreground including some naturalistic details, although these too may be intended to add meaning. In the lower left‐hand corner is a spiky‐leaved plant with small pale‐yellow blooms with pinkish centres; the blooms but not the leaves resemble the black hellebore or Helleborus officinalis, while both the leaves and the blooms bear some resemblance to Helleborus viridis, or green hellebore. The poisonous plant was used as a remedy (to treat worms) and was called Christwurz (Christ‐root) in German.²¹ Alternatively, the plant may be identified as Hyoscyamus niger, or black henbane, also poisonous. Both its leaves and flowers closely resemble the plant shown here, which was named Schlafkraut (sleep herb) in contemporary German.²²

The presentation of a gilded sculptural shrine in which the figures seem to have come to life most obviously evokes the model provided in painting by Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross (Prado). The composition is clearly strongly influenced by van der Weyden, not least in its expression of emotion through the shedding of tears; but the poses and composition are, like many works of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, adaptations of Rogier’s originals which may reflect the existence of many other such adaptations. The Saint Bartholomew Master’s Crucifixion Altarpiece is also similar in its evocation of a gilded sculptural shrine in which the figures appear to have come to life, but the Rogierian compositional precedent is more faithfully followed in the large Descent from the Cross (Louvre) by the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece (fig. 14); a small painting of the Descent from the Cross (Philadelphia, fig. 2) by a workshop assistant or follower, is a version of the latter. Whereas these works closely follow Rogier’s Descent in their compositions, NG 6470 deviates from it to create an original reworking of the episode. In NG 6470 the grouping of the Virgin and Saint John is closer to that seen in the Crucifixion panel in van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments altarpiece (Antwerp); not only does the upright format demand a different arrangement from the Descent from the Cross, but a slightly earlier stage in the narrative is also suggested: Christ’s body, rather than nearing the ground where it can be embraced by those present, is higher up, as though it has only just been released from the cross by the spider‐legged boy perched on top. Joseph of Arimathea looks up towards the body, and the verticality of the composition allows space above to emphasise the stiffened, horizontal position of Christ’s arms as they were fixed on the cross.

In the narrow composition space is oddly compressed and distorted: Saint John stands close to the Virgin, and the Mary on the right touches the Magdalen with a forearm which appears to be greatly extended (although the scale of the figure behind suggests a greater distance between the women). Yet the figures are isolated in their intense grief, with eyes downcast or failing to meet each other’s gaze, rather than engaging with each other as they do in the broader space of the Louvre composition: there the figures look each other in the eye, and Mary Magdalene gazes poignantly out; here she is presented turned away from Joseph of Arimathea, looking towards the ground. This sense of isolation is perhaps engendered in order to encourage lone viewers in private prayer and meditation. By contrast, in the Louvre picture the Mary behind on the right is part of a narrative, receiving the crown of thorns from Joseph. There the focus is on the body of Christ as it nears the figures, enabling several of them to touch it. In NG 6470 the figures are taut: Christ’s arms are held horizontal, emphasising their rigidity, whereas in the Louvre composition they are at an angle. Saint John’s toes are more obviously bent, since his foot is thrust towards the foreground at the end of his exaggeratedly lengthy lower leg. In NG 6470 the billowing drapery of Nicodemus and the Mary on the right emphasises by contrast the stiffness of Christ’s body, as well as contributing to the sense of agitation. All the protagonists are shown weeping copious tears, their eyes red, as well as demonstrating more carefully differentiated signs of grief: Mary Magdalene’s four tears reflect contemporary devotional accounts which emphasised how she wept even more than her companions. She raises her right hand to her head, distraught. The Mary on the left prays, and the Mary on the right holding the crown of thorns has lowered her eyes in her distress. Christ himself appears to shed a tear.²³

Reconstruction and Original Function

The Deposition has been trimmed all round, but the top may have been considerably truncated: it is very likely that it originally had an arched top as seen in the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece’s Crucifixion Altarpiece, a large triptych; the curving shape of the tracery at the top has been reconstructed (see Technical Notes). The Crucifixion Altarpiece includes the standing figures of two saints on each shutter. Two surviving versions of the Deposition discussed below (a, b) suggest NG 6470 may originally have formed the centre panel of a small triptych, with figures of saints on the outside faces of the shutters and donor figures on the insides.²⁴

The Covarrubias Version and its Shutters

A version of NG 6470 is preserved in the collegiate church of Covarrubias in Spain: it is the central panel of an arch‐topped triptych, with large grisaille figures of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome on the left and right inner faces of the shutters respectively (fig. 12).²⁵ The indented curve of the arched top into which the upper part of the composition is tightly compressed is not found in other works associated with the Saint Bartholomew Master, but is present in the work of southern Netherlandish painters from the early sixteenth century onwards. Although two large altarpieces with shutters painted in grisaille on the reverses are preserved among the works associated with the Master of the Saint [page [695]] [page 696] Bartholomew Altarpiece (the Crucifixion and Saint Thomas altarpieces, both in Cologne), and there are many examples of such shutters by Netherlandish artists, grisaille inner faces are highly unusual. It is conceivable that these shutters were modelled on figures of saints represented on the outsides of shutters once belonging to NG 6470, although there are no close parallels for the representation of these saints in the surviving work of the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece with which to make comparison. Possibly the workshop of the Saint Bartholomew Master produced many such versions of its composition for export. The existence of a small version of the Louvre Deposition in Philadelphia (see Variants, above) is an indication of the manner in which some compositions may have been adapted and reproduced in the workshop to supply the market for devotional images of differing scales and types. The Covarrubias painting suggests that a version of NG 6470 once existed in Spain. The very detailed underdrawing (see Technical Notes), however, suggests that NG 6470 is an original work after which other versions were made, rather than itself a version of another, possibly larger work.

A Sixteenth‐Century Copy and its Shutters

An arch‐topped triptych with a central panel showing a composition very similar to NG 6470 can be seen in a painting by Jan Brueghel of a painter’s studio (fig. 13), which dates from the early seventeenth century. Only the right‐hand shutter is visible, showing a female donor with a male saint against a landscape background. The centre panel also has a dark‐skied open landscape background instead of the gilded shrine seen in NG 6470; some of the colours of the dress worn by the protagonists are different.²⁶ The scale of the painting also appears somewhat larger. Paintings of artists’ studios can frequently be shown to include accurate representations of surviving paintings (for example NG 1287, Flemish School, Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures, about 1620). It seems improbable that Jan Brueghel copied some elements of the original and invented others, such as the background, and more likely that the painting shown is a faithful rendering of an early sixteenth‐century version of NG 6470, conceivably one copied by Jan’s father Pieter Bruegel, and hence available to Jan. The background and the style of dress and headdress of the female donor, as well as the form of the triptych, can all be compared to the work of early sixteenth‐century Netherlandish painters, but are also seen in the work of the contemporary Cologne painter, Bartholomeus Bruyn. The picture represented in Brueghel’s painting is perhaps most likely to be a version of NG 6470, possibly made in Cologne at a date when gilded backgrounds had become unfashionable; a male donor was [page 697] presumably included on the left‐hand shutter. The presence of shutters and the fact that what can be discerned of the pose and appearance of the male saint finds some echo in the work of the Saint Bartholomew Master might suggest that NG 6470 once also had shutters with donors on the internal faces.²⁷ Its high quality as well as its emotional focus strongly suggests that it was painted as a commission for an individual who might have wished to be represented as a donor.

A Devotional Painting

The Deposition is clearly devised as a devotional work, somewhat different in manner and effect from the large‐scale altarpieces of the Deposition (Louvre, fig. 14) and Crucifixion. The protagonists’ isolated gestures of grief seem to serve to direct the beholder in his or her private devotional contemplation of the death of Christ. Such meditations on the Passion were a particular feature of devotion in the Low Countries and Germany in this period.²⁸ In his mid‐fourteenth century Life of Christ the Carthusian monk Ludolph of Saxony (died 1378) plays on the theological concept of receiving the host which has literally become the body of Christ, his sacrifice re‐enacted in the Mass: ‘It is far greater to receive the Body of Christ from the sacrificial place of the altar than it is to take him down from the sacrificial place of the cross. For those who did the latter received him in their arms and hands, while the former receive him in their mouths and hearts.’²⁹ The painting’s emphasis on the body of Christ might have sharpened such a parallel in the minds of its viewers if it was placed on an altar: if so, it was perhaps a small altar in a private chapel.

Attribution and Date

NG 6470 was thought to be by Dürer in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Waagen in 1854 was the first to recognise it as a work of the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece, suggesting it was by ‘a good Master of the Dutch school of the latter half of the 15th century’ and associating it with the paintings at Munich from the Boisserée collection then attributed to Lucas van Leyden, now known as the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece; other German scholars agreed, although the painting continued to be exhibited in England as a work by Dürer until 1906 (see Exhibitions).³⁰ Since then the attribution to the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece has been universally accepted. Despite its smaller scale, the degree of refinement in the painting of NG 6470 – in the depiction of details such as the crown of thorns, the glistening tears of the protagonists and the rich textiles of their clothing – allows comparisons with the larger altarpieces associated with the Master (figs 15, 16). Its theatricality, presentation of emotion and manipulation of space, from the daring pose [page 698] of the boy on top of the crucifix to the unnatural extension of the arm of the Mary with the crown of thorns on the right, make it a highly accomplished work.

As mentioned above (a, b), the golden shrine which forms the compositional setting for NG 6470 can be compared to those found in both the Louvre Deposition and the Crucifixion in Cologne. The former has been dated only by stylistic comparisons, on which there has been little agreement; the latter is presumed to be the work that Dr Peter Rinck bequeathed to the Carthusian monastery in Cologne in 1501 (see biography, p. 687).³¹ The inscriptions over the crucifix in the Crucifixion Altarpiece and the Philadelphia version of the Louvre picture appears to have been based on woodcuts first appearing in 1493 following the discovery of the ‘Titulus’ of the true cross in Rome in 1492, thus providing a terminus post quem for these works.³² Some art historians have dated NG 6470 to the earlier part of the career of the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece by comparison with these works: Grossmann thought it preceded the Cologne Crucifixion, and Stange and Pieper both dated it to the 1480s; Pieper also thought NG 6470 was earlier than the Louvre picture but later preferred a date of about 1500.³³ More recently there has been general agreement that NG 6470 is a mature and sophisticated work likely to date from around 1500 or after: Reynolds suggested NG 6470 was closer to the Crucifixion than to the Louvre Deposition; MacGregor argued it should be dated after the Paris picture as it was a ‘distillation’ of the larger work, based heavily on Rogier van der Weyden; Krischel argued that it was later than both the Louvre and Cologne pictures.³⁴ The headdress of the Mary on the left in NG 6470 appears to support a late dating, as its folds suggest the heart‐shaped curve which was to become a prominent feature of sixteenth‐century headdresses, but which is little seen before 1500.³⁵ The slashed upper sleeves of the boy on the cross are also featured in sixteenth‐century dress, as also the broad‐toed shape of the overshoes worn by Joseph of Arimathea. It seems likely that NG 6470 dates from late in the artist’s career, probably shortly after 1500.

Select Bibliography

Pieper in Boon, Pieper and Kinsky 1961, pp. 32–4, 93–4; Grossmann 1961, p. 18, no. 29; National Gallery Report, January 1980–December 1981, pp. 50–1; Smith 1985, p. 82; Dunkerton 1991, p. 368; MacGregor 1993, pp. 27–9, 40–1; Billinge 1997, p. 55; Nürnberger 1997b, pp. 340–53; Krischel in Budde and Krischel 2001a, pp. 412–13, no. 80.

Notes