Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (37.1996)

New York Crucifixion,74 75 or the poorly preserved Harrach collection Mater
Dolorosa, leaves little question that our female figure is Mary.79 Although
depictions of Mary holding a candle are extremely rare, they do exist in one
very specific context, scenes of the death of the Virgin;76 for example, Joos van
Cleve’s Munich altar of this subject,77 or even better, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s
unusual little nocturnal grisaille that also includes a crucifix at the foot of the
bed.78 Normally, earlier depictions of the death of the Virgin include the
mourning apostles but it is exactly this extracting of the central motif - Mary
holding a candle, smiling and looking upward in anticipation - in which the
most innovative and advanced aspects of ter Brugghen’s picture are revealed.
Ter Brugghen has freed the figure of Mary from the narrative elements
associated with depictions of her death, while preserving the essential meaning.
The process is a familiar one in the history of art, utilized at the end of the
middle ages when the image of Mary with the body of the dead Christ on her
lap was extracted from narrative base depictions of the lamentation at the foot
of the cross and isolated into a powerful new devotional image, the Pietà.
Pictures of the Mater Dolorosa developed in a similar manner. The difference
here is that ter Brugghen has provided his Mary with a complete setting rather
than placing her against an abstract and thus timeless background. In other
words, what ter Brugghen has created is the first single-figured history painting.
If this reading of the picture is credible, then this new work not only anticipates
Rembrandt’s methodology74 but also his stylistic approach to the single-figured
history picture as found in such works as his St. Paul in Prison in Nuremberg,80
a work, significantly, which also has a double light source. Rembrandt, of
course, has been given credit for pioneering this new and expressive category
of history painting, a type he used to great advantage during his Teyden and
early Amsterdam years. Ter Brugghen’s Death of the Virgin now throws this
distinction into doubt. The dating, of course, is critical; it is well-known,
however, that Rembrandt’s, most Utrecht-like work, the. 1627 dated Berlin

74 Utrecht/Braunschweig exh. 1986/87, cat. no. 21.

75 Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen, op. cit., pp. 107-8, cat. A75, plate 30b.

6 Although Blankert, A Neivly Discovered Painting.., op. cit., p.28, notes this fact, once again does
not pursue it.

Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 9, Joos van Cleve, Jan Provost, Joachim
Patenier, comments and notes by Henri Pauwels, assisted by Monique Gierts, Leyden and Brussels
1972, p.54, cat. 17, Plate 35; Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek.

78 Friedländer, 14, Pieter Bruegel, comments and notes by Henri Pauwels, Leyden and Brussels 1976,
p.44 and plate 29. The picture is now in Upton House, Banbury.

79 See Christian Tümpel, “Studien zur Ikonographie der historien Rembrandts,” Nederlands
kunsthistorisch jaarboek, 20, 1969, pp,160-187:„Herauslösung und Historisierung.”

80 Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum; A. Bredius, Rembrandt. The complete edition of
the paintings, revised by H. Gerson, London 1969, no. 602. See also J. Bruyn et ah, Stichting
Foundation Rembrandt Research Project, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, 1, 1625-1631, trans.
D. Cook-Radmore, The Hague, Boston, London 1982, cat. A 26, and especially Leonard J.
Slatkes, Rembrandt; Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, Cantini 1992, cat. 73.

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