Lucas van Leyden

If we are to believe the early artists’ biographer Karel van Mander (1604), Lucas was born in 1494 as a child prodigy who seemed to come into this world with brush and burin in hand. What is certain is that he rose to the height of his profession in a short period of time.

Lucas’ prints stood out for their exceptionally refined engraving technique and narrative quality. The large runs of Lucas’ prints meant they circulated widely, securing the artist’s international reputation already during his lifetime.

In 1521 Lucas met the renowned German artist Albrecht Dürer. The latter’s compositions and use of light and dark effects would have a lasting influence on Lucas. In turn, Dürer’s preserved description of their encounter attests to his admiration for the younger Lucas. The artists mutually inspired one another.

After 1520 Lucas began to focus more on painting and produced three altarpieces, including the impressive Worship of the Golden Calf. As early as 1604 Karel van Mander described this lively triptych with a continuous landscape as a ‘seer uytnemende bysonderr stuck’ (very excellent or exceptional piece).

In his compositions, Lucas often introduced a creative inversion, relegating the main scene to the background. In this altarpiece, for example, he depicted a feast in the foreground where people eat, dance and make love. Only in the distance did he include the Bible story from the Old Testament of the Israelites worshipping a golden statue of a calf and thus being unfaithful to God.

Lucas drew inspiration from prints after the work of Italian artists such as Raphael, known for his graceful and anatomically correct portrayal of the human body. Although Lucas never travelled to Italy, his printed work played a major role in disseminating southern artistic innovations in the north of Europe.

Lucas made an important contribution to the early development of genre art, in which everyday life rather than religious or mythical representations is central. With this milkmaid, farmer and cows, Lucas introduced a new theme in art.

The tense relationship between men and women is a recurring theme in Lucas’ work. About The Worship of the Golden Calf, Karel van Mander wrote that you can see the impure desire in the eyes of the revellers.

Rembrandt also grew up in Leiden, a century after Lucas, and held his famous predecessor in high esteem. He collected prints by Lucas, which were an important source of inspiration. In 1642 Rembrandt bought Lucas’ hard-to-find print The Beggars (Eulenspiegel), at an auction for 179 guilders. Contemporaries were dumbfounded by the – for the time – enormous sum.

This painting of the Virgin and Child was damaged before it entered the Rijksmuseum’s collection. And yet the quality of some passages, such as the Virgin’s blue dress, are still very high. Dendrochronological analysis revealed that the oak of this small panel came from the same tree as the wings of Worship of the Golden Calf: the growth rings match. The question whether the work was painted by Lucas himself or a workshop assistant remains difficult to answer.