MATER DOLOROSA, Flemish School, 16th Century

oil on panel
15 1/2 by 9 1/4 in.; 39.4 by 23.5 cm.

Provenance:
This Mater Dolorosa can be recognized as part of a group whose likely prototype originated in the workshop of Dieric Bouts. It was a devotional type that was repeated with some regularity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and multiple versions which all appear to date to after Bouts's death in 1475 have been identified. Judging from other surviving examples, this painting may have once been paired with a Christ Crowned with Thorns, thus forming a diptych for which beautiful examples can today be found in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. NG711) and the Louvre (inv. 1986, inv. 1994). Images such as this were used as tools by which viewers could physically understand Mary's suffering. This particular use of religious imagery grew out of the Byzantine tradition of the thirteenth century, where such half-length icons were popular in court circles. Their popularity continued to influence painters in the fifteenth century, who adopted the icon type into a more naturalistic portrait-like appearance.1 Both Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden were fundamental in developing this new, portrait style in depicting the Virgin and Christ.2 This particular compositional type was in fact once attributed to Rogier's school, though was later correctly identified as a Bouts invention by Max Friedländer, who also suggested that the London version was from Bouts's workshop. 3

1. H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago and London 1994.
2. see for example, Campin's Christ and the Virgin (Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson collection, cat. 332) and Rogier's Triptych of Jean Braque (Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 2063)
3. M.J. Friedländer, Die altniederländische Malerei, Berlin and Leiden 1925, vol. III, p. 124.