Early Flemish Portraits 1425-1525: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...

36, 37. The Virgin and Child
with Jean Gros, painted by
Rogier van der Weyden about
1450, is the earliest surviving halflength
devotional portrait diptych,
but theform was not Rogier's invention.
He may, nonetheless,
have been largely responsible for
its popularity after the middle of
the fifteenth century.
The sitter is identified by the
portrait's reverse, which displays
the Gros coat of arms, the initials
JG, a pulley emblem, and the device
GRACE A DIEU (Thanks to
God). The emblem and device are
found again on the reverse of the
Virgin and Child. Jean Gros was
by 1450 secretary to Philip the
Good, duke of Burgundy. He acquired
great wealth and built in
Bruges a magnificent house that
still stands. He died in 1484. Left:
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Tournai.
Right: Art Institute of Chicago,
Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson
Collection (33.1051)
the dark neutral background favored by
Rogier and developed instead a pictorial space
of consummate illusion. The Virgin and van
Nieuwenhove occupy a single interior that
unites the two panels. The observer's view
onto their space is through two separate apertures
defined by the frame, as the reflection in
the mirror behind the Virgin makes clear. It
shows the Virgin and Marten, each silhouetted
against a bright opening-windows onto
our space. Ledges, upon which the Virgin
holds the Child and the sitter rests his prayer
book, mark the transition between real and
pictorial space.
Although the Virgin and patron are combined
in one illusionistic space, the individual
panels present differing spatial impressions, in
keeping with the disparate nature of their subjects.
In the temporal half, the raked-angle
view of the side wall sets the eye in motion,
directing it, as do the sitter's glance and threequarter
profile, to the left. In the sacred half,
the frontal view of the Virgin and of the rear
wall creates an iconic, symmetrical composition
appropriate to the holy subject.
The tranquil landscape glimpsed through
the window behind the Virgin is nonspecific,
but that behind the sitter is topographical,
showing the footbridge and tower (Poedertoren)
of the Minnewater district in Bruges.
The sitter, it is recalled, was the brother-in-law
of Anna van Nieuwenhove, whose epitaph
(fig. 17) displays in the background the same
monuments. The neighborhood is evidently
one with which the Nieuwenhove family was
associated.
In 1902 the eminent cultural historian Aby
Warburg observed that Italian patrons must
have perceived Flemish portraits as having
the nearly magical powers of votive images.
Fifteenth-century Florentine churches
abounded in wax effigies, often dressed in
the donors' own clothes. The surrogate presence
implicit in these ex-voto figures must
have been ascribed as well to painted donor
portraits, which create an everlasting pictorial
reality whereby patron and divinity are
inexorably linked.
One Italian family, the Portinari, were particularly
attuned to the capabilities of Flemish
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