Rogier van der Weyden

Flemish painter

• Born: 1399 or 1400
• Birthplace: Tournai, France (now in Belgium)
• Died: June 18, 1464
• Place of death: Brussels (now in Belgium)

One of the greatest of the fifteenth century Flemish painters, Rogier influenced other painters of the Christian altarpiece, stylistically and tonally, and dominated northern European painting throughout the period.

Early Life

Although Rogier van der Weyden (roh-gee-ur van dur VI-duhn) was presumably born in the French-speaking, southern region of the Netherlands, there is no specific knowledge of his ethnic background. Indeed, scholarly controversy continues to surround his life and his work. No single painting by him is confirmed by his signature, and the documentary evidence is also very slight. It is known that one Rogier van der Weyden entered an apprenticeship with the painter Robert Campin in 1427 in Tournai and fulfilled his service, getting his patent as master in 1432. However, the facts are complicated by the name Rogier van der Weyden appearing on Tournai documents in 1426, already denoted a master.

It may be that Rogier had been previously trained in another trade, perhaps sculpture, because the modeling in his paintings has distinct affinities to that art, which has led to speculation that his father might have been a sculptor. He also seems to have come to his apprenticeship as a painter relatively late in life; there is evidence that he had a son, eight years old in 1435, which suggests that he must have been married sometime in the mid-1420’.

Even his apprenticeship to Campin is conjectural. Stylistically, his work is very close to that of Campin, and it is presumed that he is the “Rogelet de le Pasture” who was taken into training by Campin. If so, he was the son of Henry de le Pasture, whose family can be traced back in Tournai as far as 1260. Whatever the truth may be concerning his early years, he was, by 1436, firmly established in Brussels, married to a Brussels native, Elisabeth Goffaerts, and employed as the official town painter.

Life’s Work

The three most important Flemish painters of the late Gothic period are Jan van Eyck , the Master of Flémalle, and Rogier van der Weyden. Jan van Eyck has emerged in the long run as the most admired of the three, but that was not the case in the fifteenth century. In truth, Rogier had considerably more influence on other contemporary painters than either of the other two. The difficulty in speaking of his career, however, lies in the peculiar fact that there is no work clearly identified as an example of his early career as a painter. Only the great works of his maturity (although the greatest, his The Descent from the Cross (Rogier van der Weyden)>, may be fairly early) are extant, a situation that has produced one of the most interesting scholarly puzzles in art history: Where are the works of his early career?

Like van Eyck, Rogier was primarily a painter of altarpieces that is, paintings specifically ordered to be hung above the altar used in Roman Catholic churches to celebrate the Mass. They tend, as a result, to be large and connected to a specific church, and their original function was religious rather than aesthetic. The twentieth century preference for van Eyck’s works over the paintings of Rogier is directly related to the fact that van Eyck, who is often credited with developing, sometimes with inventing, oil painting, anticipated Renaissance Humanist realism in his works. There is some slight influence of his work in Rogier, but Rogier seems deliberately to eschew the splendid technical leap forward into recording the real world in favor of the more static representation of humans and nature that characterized the medieval style. Rogier refused to abandon the last stages of Gothic art ; thus, Rogier’s work was not only distinct from that of van Eyck but also more popular in his own century.

The painter Rogier seems to resemble most is the Master of Flémalle, the shadowy figure whose altarpieces seem to have been produced in the 1430’. Touches of van Eyckian naturalism and a close relationship to Rogier’s mature works distinguish the Master’s painting. The Master’s identity remains a mystery, but it is often suggested that he was an associate of Rogier’s master, Robert Campin, or that he was, in fact, Campin. There is also an intriguing suggestion that the very paintings ascribed to the Master of Flémalle are Rogier’s missing early work that is, that Rogier is, in short, the Master of Flémalle, or at least the creator of some of the paintings now identified with the master. Given the present lack of signed works and limited documentation, the question falls into the slippery area of style, technique, and connoisseurship, in which the eye of the critic dominates. Aside from the historical importance of the question, and the rather piquant nature of the problem, the arguments themselves cut to the heart of the nature of Rogier as a painter.

It is believed that much of Rogier’s work has been lost. He produced a major work for the Brussels town hall, four variations on the theme of justice, but it was lost in a fire in 1695. There exist, however, several examples of his work as an altarpiece painter and some of his portraits that clearly show why he had such a long and prosperous career, not only as a painter but also as the head of a busy workshop. His best and most popular work is The Descent from the Cross, displayed at the Prado Museum in Madrid. It features all those aspects of his talent that not only distinguished him from van Eyck but also established him as the most influential painter of his time in the Netherlands. The subject is the common one of the lifting of the dead Christ from the Cross; yet where other painters of van Eyckian inclination might try to portray this scene with some sense of the physical, realistic surrounding of the act of pity and awe, Rogier packs ten figures into a flat, shallow niche that reminds one of the tomb itself with the figures spread out (though densely impinging one another) in a line across the front, similar to a sculptural frieze. The fall of the draperies and the sharply contorted poses are Gothic; yet the colors are bright and hard, almost enamelized, and the faces are charged by Rogier’s greatest gift, the ability to convey a sense of spiritual suffering.

There is in Rogier not only a mannered, stylized way with composition, structures, and nature (all of which run contrary to van Eyck’s warm naturalism) but also a capacity to express emotions, usually spiritual, which are quite beyond anything attempted by van Eyck. Rogier’s work as a portrait painter (the lovely Portrait of a Woman is a good example) draws back from the particulars of realism into a kind of introverted world of religious dream.

Scholars surmise that Rogier made a trip to Italy, perhaps in 1450, and that he must have visited both Florence and Rome. His Entombment in the Uffizi shows that he was not entirely obdurate in his approach to his art because it shows signs of the influence of Fra Angelico. Further, his Madonna with Four Saints in Frankfurt, which contains in its panels the Florentine coat of arms, contains elements of the Italian sacra conversazione.

Rogier’s career seems to have prospered from beginning to end, and his large studio employed a group of painters who carried on in his style a type of altar painting that was to dominate during the late medieval period in the Netherlands. Rogier died in Brussels in June of 1464.

Significance

If van Eyck is the twentieth century’s painter of choice for the late Gothic period, then Rogier, with his stiffer, somewhat monumental seriousness and lyric, almost mystic intensity was the choice not only of the public but also of the painters who came to maturity in the same period. Rogier’s way of telling the eternal story, ascetically restrained, physically desiccated (although in glowing color), was deeply admired and unabashedly imitated. It was as if Rogier read the sensibility of the age and knew that people still clung to the old imperatives, subordinating the particular and the individual to the general and the idealized; he knew that society was not yet ready to break with the safety of the collectivized, Church-centered world of religious submission to the mystery of Christianity.

The inclination today is to read Rogier’s paintings through the strangely vibrant colors, the ambiguous intensities of the portrait heads, and to find his stylized draperies, his dispositions of the human body, as somewhat quaint in their Gothic awkwardness. Yet an understanding of what Rogier was doing and when he was doing it allows for a deeper appreciation of his greatness as a painter, of the imploded power, the sonority, and the graceful, dramatic timelessness of his best work.

Bibliography

Acres, Alfred. “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World.” Art Bulletin 80, no. 3 (September, 1998). A scholarly article that focuses on the oft-neglected or understudied theme of time in art, in this case the time theme expressed in Rogier’s Columba altarpiece. Also mentions the work of Jan van Eyck and the details of other Rogier altarpieces. Includes extensive footnotes.

De Vos, Dirk. The Flemish Primitives: The Masterpieces. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. A historical look at several Flemish master painters, including Rogier and van Eyck. Includes mostly color illustrations, a map, and a bibliography.

Friedländer, Max J. Early Netherlandish Painting: From Van Eyck to Bruegel. New York: Phaidon Press, 1967. This popular volume contains a chapter on Rogier, in addition to helpful chapters on van Eyck and the painting of the period in general.

Friedländer, Max J. Early Netherlandish Painting: Rogier van Weyden and the Master of Flémalle. Translated by Heinz Norden. Brussels: Éditions de la Connaissance, 1967. A scholarly work delightfully and reasonably written and thoroughly accessible to the general reader. Not only does the author deal with the mystery of Rogier and the master, but he also handles the entire career and makes pertinent assessments of Rogier’s style and influence.

Fuchs, R. H. Dutch Painting. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. A popular, well-illustrated history of painting in the Netherlands region. Chapter 1 is a simple and direct discussion of the period in which Rogier worked.

Lane, Barbara G. The Altar and the Altarpiece: Sacramental Themes in Early Netherlandish Painting. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. The problem of fully understanding the quality of Rogier’s work, given the limited knowledge and understanding of the deeply religious sensibility, is met with care, attention, and careful argument in this short book. Rogier’s work figures substantially in the text.

Panofsky, Erwin. Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character. 2 vols. 1953. Reprint. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. By a master of iconography, intriguing essays on how to read the secret language of the religious painting.

Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. A huge collection by one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century. Text includes the 1903 essay “Rogier van der Weyden’s Entombment in the Uffizi.” Includes illustrations, maps, an extensive bibliography, and an index.