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

3. Considered during the fifteenth
century to be a portrait of the
Virgin made by Saint Luke, the
Notre-Dame de Grace is, in
fact, a late fourteenth-century Italian
replica of an Italo-Byzantine
model that apparently originated
about 1300 in Tuscany. Cathedral
of Cambrai
4. This Virgin and Child after
the Notre-Dame de Grace of
Cambrai (fig. 3) is one of several
attributed to Hayne de Bruxelles,
who was commissioned in 1454/55
to make twelve copies of the
Cambrai icon. Other versions possibly
by Hayne in the Musees
Royaux des Beaux-Arts de
Belgique, Brussels, and in the
Church of Saint Martin, Frasneslez-Buissenal
(Belgium), are much
closer to the Cambrai painting
than the Virgin and Child illustrated
here. It has been suggested
that the Kansas City version
might be associated with one of
three lost copies commissioned in
1454 from Petrus Christus. Although
this picture cannot, on
stylistic grounds, be attributed to
Petrus Christus, it possibly was
painted after a prototype by him
and would seem more to reflect
Christus's style than that of any of
the other copies attributed to
Hayne de Bruxelles. The Nelson-
Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas
City, Missouri, Nelson Fund
overleaf and following page
5. Like the picture attributed to
Hayne de Bruxelles, the Museum's
fine Virgin and Child by
Dieric Bouts, painted about
1455-60, derives from the
Cambrai Notre-Dame de Grace.
This relationship suggests how the
artist might have regarded the
painting as part of a portrait tradition.
Replicas by Bouts of the
Museum's work in the Museo
Nazionale del Bargello, Florence,
and the M. H. de Young Memorial
Museum, San Francisco, and
other versions from his workshop
attest to the widespread popularity
of the composition. 8/2 X 6V2 in.
Bequest of Theodore M. Davis,
1915. Theodore M. Davis Collection
(30.95.280)
6. The closely observed and meticulously
described features of the
sitter in Petrus Christus's Portrait
of a Carthusian indicate that he
was painted or drawn from life.
The halo making this a saintly
image is almost certainly a later
addition but has led some scholars
to conclude that the painting is an
imaginary portrait of Saint Bruno,
the eleventh-century founder of the
Carthusian order See also fig. 28
7