Carved in relief and polychromed. The gallery arcades are pierce carved. Almost the entire relief has been gilded.

Missing are the right forearm and a section of the codpiece of the lower, left-hand soldier, a section of the second soldier’s helmet, and a majority of the figures’ noses.

…; collection ridder-primaat (knight first class) Joseph Désiré Lupus (d. 1822), Brussels, date unknown; purchased with his entire collection by King William I of the Netherlands (1772-1843) and exhibited at Musée Lupus, Palace of Charles de Lorraine, Brussels, 1819; transferred to the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden, The Hague, 1823; transferred to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague, 1875; transferred to the museum, 1885

Object number: BK-NM-7446

The subject of the present retable group remains elusive.¹¹Vogelsang raised the possibility of an episode from the life of St Quirinus, though no detail concurs with the saint’s hagiography to corroborate this finding, see W. Vogelsang and M. van Notten, Die Holzskulptur in den Niederlanden, vol. 2, Das Niederländische Museum zu Amsterdam, Berlin/Utrecht 1912, no. 106. In the lower register, two men – one of them holding a scroll – are being arrested by two soldiers. One possible interpretation identifies these figures as the prophet Jeremiah and his pupil, Baruch. In this case, the young man wearing the long robe is the pupil: having previously recorded Jeremiah’s prophecies on his scroll, he subsequently reads them aloud to the people at the temple gate. The man far right wearing the crown-like headdress then would be King Jehoiakim, who orders that the scrolls be seized and burned (Book of Jeremiah 36:21-32). Nevertheless, the group’s identification as such remains precarious: retables rarely include Old Testament scenes, and nowhere is this particularly obscure episode encountered in other contemporaneous works of art.

The present relief comes from a carved retable made during the final phase of the large-scale production that flourished in the city Antwerp from circa 1500 to 1560.²²For Antwerp retables made during this final phase (circa 1540 to 1560), see J. Leeuwenberg, ‘De laatste retabels uit de Scheldestad en enig aanverwant beeldhouwwerk’, Belgisch tijdschrift voor Oudheidkunde en Kunstgeschiedenis 26 (1957), pp. 75-117. Stylistically, the present piece shares an affinity with groups in the St Matthew retable in Hulshout of c. 1540 and the Marian retable in Vitoria (Spain) of c. 1550.³³H. Nieuwdorp (ed.), Antwerp Altarpieces 15th-16th centuries, 2 vols., exh. cat. Antwerp (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal) 1993, vol. 1, nos. 13 and 41 respectively. Details such as the clothing of the left-hand soldier, attired in slashed, puffy breeches and codpiece and wearing a morion on his head, indicate the present group was likely produced somewhat later, around 1560. Shortly thereafter, commissions for Antwerp wood-carved retables subsided, as people’s mentality and taste shifted away from these outdated late-medieval precepts. Most of the altarpieces built to replace those that had been destroyed during the iconoclastic revolts were conceived in adherence to the new idiom of the High Renaissance.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 164, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2024, 'anonymous, Scene from the Life of a Saint, Antwerp, c. 1560', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20015021