Pietà

Carved and originally polychromed. The reverse is flat.

Besides a large crack resulting from dehydration on the reverse, numerous small fractures can be discerned on the entire group, resulting from the removal of the polychromy with a caustic.

…; from the collection A.P. Hermans-Smits (1822-1897), Eindhoven, with numerous other objects (BK-NM-2001 to -2800), fl. 14,000 for all, to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague, 1875; transferred to the museum, 1885

ObjectNumber: BK-NM-2503

This work formed part of a large collection of (applied) art purchased by the museum in 1875 from Antonius Petrus (‘Antoon’) Hermans.¹¹Antoon Hermans was a goldsmith, church warden, art dealer and collector, active in Eindhoven and was married to Joanna Maria Smits (1815-1879), see J.P. van Rijen, ‘Antonius Petrus Hermans (1822-1897), een ambivalent lid van het Sint-Bernulphusgilde’, Ex Tempore 12 (1993), pp. 57-64; P. Thoben, ‘Zilver van edelsmid Antonius Petrus Hermans’, Museum Kempenland Eindhoven Nieuws 7 (2001), p. 4; P. Thoben and R. Erven, Trotse burgers, Cuypers en de Sint-Catharinakerk: Speciale uitgave ter gelegenheid van het 150-jarig jubileum van de Sint-Catharinakerk Eindhoven, Eindhoven 2018, pp. 5, 18, 19, 24. This acquisition comprised an astounding 800 objects, including objects in ceramic, glass, silver and brass, furniture, and approximately seventy medieval sculptures of generally inferior quality. The sculptor of the present Pietà failed to fully liberate his figures from the working block. The lower portion of Christ’s body is rendered merely in relief. The authenticity of this sculpture flounders when considering the stylistic discrepancy between the ostensibly late-fifteenth-century facial types of Mary and Christ and the voluminous, but stiffly worked folds of the Virgin’s robes, rendered in a manner more typical of the sixteenth century. What Leeuwenberg termed as the ‘lifeless depiction’ of details, such as the facial features and the drapery folds, led him to the conviction that the piece is a forgery copied from an early-sixteenth-century model of Guelders origin.²²J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 922. Indeed, this specific Pietà type, with Christ essentially sitting upright and rendered in somewhat smaller proportions when compared to his mother, was fairly common in that duchy.³³Cf. C. Ceulemans et al., Laat-gotische beeldsnijkunst uit Limburg en grensland, exh. cat. Sint-Truiden (Provinciaal Museum voor Religieuze Kunst) 1990, nos. 43 and 170.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 922

B. van der Mark, 2020, 'anonymous, Pietà, Guelders, in or before 1875', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), (under construction) European Sculpture, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.25705