The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment

Two panels, each about the size of a forearm, holding between them a Crucifixion crowded with figures under a city and a Last Judgment split into heaven above and a hell held open by Death. They were bought in Spain in the 1840s by a Russian ambassador, transferred from wood to canvas in 1867, bequeathed to the Imperial Hermitage, and sold out of the Soviet Union in 1933 for foreign currency to pay for the first Five Year Plan. The Metropolitan Museum bought them through Knoedler; the sale was secret until The New York Times reported it on 4 November 1933.

For a hundred and thirty years they were argued back and forth between Jan van Eyck, his brother Hubert, his sister Margaret, Petrus Christus, a pupil and the school. The Met's recent research reads them as the doors of a shrine made to hold a purportedly desecrated host in Brussels, and argues that the format objections dissolve once the function is understood. The frames, cut away in 1867 and kept, turned out to carry a vernacular Dutch text under modern gilding, and are the strongest evidence in the case.

What they are

Two paintings, each 56.5 by 19.7 centimetres, now oil on canvas but originally oil on oak. The proportion is the first thing to notice: they are more than twice as tall as they are wide, which is not a shape Jan van Eyck used anywhere else that survives.

The Crucifixion shows the moment after death, when the soldier traditionally called Longinus is helped to push a lance into Christ's side to establish that he has died. Below the cross the crowd divides: on the right a group meditates or stares, on the left another jeers. Below them the Virgin hides her face and is held up by John, surrounded by the other Marys, with the Magdalen in a fur-trimmed green gown raising her joined hands. In the lower right corner a woman in red with a black shawl and a turban watches without emotion; who she is has never been settled. Behind everything is a city meant for Jerusalem and a mountain range, and at the right edge a waning gibbous moon hangs in a midday sky, hours before the third hour after noon at which the Gospel of Mark places the death.

The Last Judgment divides horizontally rather than in the usual way. Christ reigns above with the wounds showing, flanked by the Virgin and John the Baptist, with angels holding the instruments of the Passion. Below, Saint Michael stands on the wings and skeletal arms of Death, which spread open over a hell of bodies being torn apart. Between the two, the dead climb out of their graves and out of the sea.

The apostles are Carthusians, and the Virgin is a Virgin of Mercy

Two details in the Last Judgment are not standard and both point in the same direction. The twelve apostles seated in glory are dressed in the white habits of the Carthusian order. And the Virgin is shown as the Virgin of Mercy, spreading her cloak wide to shelter the naked souls begging her to intercede, which is a specifically Carthusian devotion.

An iconographic anomaly of that kind is not decorative. It records who the picture was for, or who was involved in specifying it, and it is one of the threads that leads the Met's researchers to the Carthusians of Brabant and to a shrine rather than to a private diptych.

The hell below is built from Deuteronomy 32:23-24, and the frame says so. This is a picture in which the text and the image were designed together, which is why what happened to the frames matters more here than on almost any other panel of the century.

The frames were cut off in 1867 and kept, and they are the evidence

In 1867, while the panels were in the Hermitage, they were transferred from wood to canvas: the paint and its original ground were lifted off the oak and stuck down on a coarse canvas with what was probably a zinc-containing adhesive, then stretched on five-member stretchers. The original integral frames were cut away in the process and preserved.

That preservation turned out to be the single luckiest accident in the object's history. Dendrochronology on the frames gives a felling date for the oak of about 1410 to 1440, and shows the wood came from the same part of the eastern Baltic as the panel of the Virgin at the Fountain now at the Clark Art Institute, a workshop version of a van Eyck of 1439.

The frames also carry the hardware history. Along their inner sides are recesses for hinges. Along the outer sides, in the position they would occupy if the two were closed face to face as a diptych, are three square holes from a latch. And the x-radiographs show nails from a second set of fittings that would have latched the frames closed side by side, as the wings of a triptych. So both arrangements are physically attested, at different times, which is why the literature has been able to argue about the format for a hundred and eighty years without either side being wrong.

Finally, under modern gilding on the flat outer borders, the recent examination found the remains of an inscription originally painted in white and black on a solid red ground. The palaeographer Marc Smith identified it as Middle Dutch, corresponding to the Latin texts in raised pastiglia on the cavettos.

Why a vernacular text changes the argument

A Latin inscription on a fifteenth-century frame is unremarkable. A Middle Dutch translation of the same passages, painted where a person standing close could read them, is not. It implies an audience of lay people rather than clergy, and it implies that they were expected to stand near enough to read.

The Met's research team, led by the curator Maryan Ainsworth with the conservator Sophie Scully and the conservation scientist Silvia Centeno, builds a specific proposal on that. The Latin text running clockwise around the Last Judgment begins, unusually, at the centre left rather than the upper left, and it begins with the words Ecce Tabernaculum Dei cum Hominibus, behold the tabernacle of God is with men. That phrase is found on the doors of tabernacles that held the consecrated host. If a monstrance holding host relics stood inside, the words would have sat at the level of the wafers.

The reading is not new in outline. Heinz Peters suggested in 1968 that the panels were doors to a tabernacle for the display of the host, and Lotte Brand Philip developed the idea in 1971 and attached it to a specific relic. What is new is the physical evidence for the reading and the redirection of the argument to a different city.

Dijon, and why the Met rejects it

Brand Philip's candidate was the Miraculous Bleeding Host at Dijon. The history is documented and it is worth stating plainly because it explains what these panels may have been made to stand in front of.

Pope Eugenius IV granted Philip the Good a relic in 1433, in acknowledgment of the duke's support for the papacy against the Council of Basel. The papal bull describes a host bearing the image of the Saviour enthroned, pierced in many places by some madman with the ferocity of a sword's blows, and stained with blood, kept in the papal sacristy. It was moved to Dijon in 1433 and placed in the Sainte Chapelle beside the ducal palace. Rene of Anjou, held prisoner at Dijon between 1435 and 1437, became devoted to it, endowed a perpetual mass and commissioned the two earliest images of it for his books of hours. In 1454 Isabella of Portugal, Philip's third wife, gave the relic a gold monstrance.

The Met's team rejects Dijon on two grounds. The court there spoke French, not the Middle Dutch of the frames. And the monstrance stands free on an altar in every surviving illumination, not inside a shrine with closing doors. Neither objection is stylistic; both are the kind of check that ordinary scholarship often skips.

Brussels, and the accusation of 1370

The alternative is Brussels, where Dutch was spoken, and the collegiate church of Saints Michael and Gudula, where a Miraculous Bleeding Host had been venerated since 1370.

The origin of that cult was an accusation of host desecration against the Jews of Brabant. The documented events are these. Jonathan of Edingen, the leading Jewish financier and community leader of Brabant, was accused of persuading a convert to steal consecrated hosts from a chapel at Molenbeek. On Ascension Day, 31 May, the Jews were paraded through Brussels to the Grand Place and on to Saint Katherine's chapel at the Flanders Gate, where they were executed, and the Receiver General of Brabant took control of their property. The accounts of the desecration were repeated and elaborated for decades afterwards.

What followed in the 1430s was an official revival of the cult. Cardinal Albergati, himself a Carthusian, issued an indulgence in October 1435 from the Council of Arras, with the participation of the Carthusians of Edingen and Antwerp, for a site of veneration at a former house synagogue where the desecration was said to have occurred. A chapel for the host was built on the north side of the ambulatory of Saints Michael and Gudula in 1436-38, and a papal bull of 19 March 1436 granted a hundred days of indulgence to visitors, with further indulgences for a Thursday mass before the relic and for visits on particular Sundays. Philip the Good gave the chapel a window in 1438.

The Met's date for the panels is about 1436 to 1438. That is the same three years. The argument is that they were the doors of the shrine in that chapel, made for lay visitors coming to earn indulgences, which is why the biblical texts were given in a language those visitors could read.

What is painted, and what it says about who painted it

The Crucifixion contains figures whose Jewish identity is signalled through caricature: hooked noses, open grimacing mouths, bared teeth. The Met's own catalogue entry describes them in those terms and links them to the adjacent frame text from Isaiah concerning the ungodly.

This is not a modern reading imposed on the picture and it is not incidental. If the panels were made for a shrine whose entire cult rested on an accusation of desecration against a Jewish community that had been executed for it, then the caricature in the Crucifixion and the story behind the relic are the same programme. Recording that is not an interpretation of the artist's private beliefs, for which there is no evidence; it is a description of what the object was for and what is on its surface.

The honest formulation is the narrow one. A cult founded on an antisemitic accusation was revived by church and ducal authority in Brussels in the 1430s; a shrine was built for it; and the painting proposed as its doors depicts Jews in the manner that cult required.

A hundred and thirty years of reattribution

Tatishchev bought the panels in Spain as Jan van Eyck. Nobody kept that name on them for long.

Passavant, in 1841, took them for the wings of a triptych and, with others, saw portraits of the van Eyck brothers and their sister Margaret in them. Waagen, cataloguing the Hermitage in 1870, moved them to Petrus Christus at an early period, arguing from the signed and dated Last Judgment by Christus in Berlin. Crowe and Cavalcaselle followed in 1872. Schnaase made them the work of an immediate pupil of Jan in 1879. Clement de Ris questioned the Christus attribution in the same year. Justi restored them to Jan in 1887. Kaemmerer in 1898 suggested early Jan or even his sister Margaret, and recorded the transfer to canvas. Tschudi, in the same year, compared them to the Berlin Crucifixion and gave them to Jan. Voll in 1900 agreed they were not Christus, rejected Jan, and proposed the school. Seeck in 1901 gave them, with the Ghent Altarpiece, to Hubert van Eyck. Chatelet accepted Jan in 1980 and dated them 1422-24.

The sequence is the attribution history, and it is worth reading as a whole rather than as a series of opinions. Every name in the fifteenth-century Netherlandish canon was tried on these two small pictures, including a woman who may never have painted at all, and the position the museum holds today is the one a Russian diplomat held in the 1840s.

Why the objections were made, and why the Met dismisses them

The case against Jan van Eyck was never about quality. It was about anomaly, and the anomalies were real: these are the only paintings in his corpus with narrative themes treated so extensively; the tall narrow format is unique in his surviving work; the figures are unusually small; pastiglia texts on the inner cavettos of the frames appear nowhere else in his work; and the Last Judgment text begins at the centre of the frame rather than the upper left, which was his habit.

The Met's answer is that every one of those follows from the commission. Doors for a reliquary shrine need a shape no altarpiece needs. That is also why, uniquely in his work, each painting was cut from a single plank with a fully integral frame, which is how wooden reliquary shrines are ordinarily made. The vertical pitch of the perspective towards a high horizon is what lets the Crucifixion hold that many people in that width. The Last Judgment is divided into equal halves for heaven and hell, following Augustine, rather than into saved on the right and damned on the left, because the shape demanded it.

The positive stylistic case rests on the panels of the Knights of Christ and the Holy Hermits from the Ghent Altarpiece of 1432, which solve the same problem of packing figures into a tall narrow rectangle. In those, in the two versions of Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata in Turin and Philadelphia, and in this Crucifixion, the base of the composition is anchored on carefully studied rock. The rocks in the Crucifixion have been identified as recognisable geological specimens resembling columnar basalt, pillow lava and certain sedimentary formations, and the underdrawing shows van Eyck put them in at the design stage. A painter who drew identifiable volcanic rock before he drew the crowd is a specific painter, not a school.

The Met is careful about how far this goes: the panels are most often attributed to Jan van Eyck, or to van Eyck with workshop assistance, and the museum's entry says so.

How they left Russia

In the late 1920s the Soviet government needed hard currency for the industrialisation ordered under the first Five Year Plan. In February 1928 the Hermitage and the Russian Museum were instructed to list works worth at least two million roubles for export. About 250 paintings were sold out of the Hermitage over the following years, by artists including Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens and Raphael.

The selling was done quietly through dealers. Calouste Gulbenkian was the first foreign buyer, from early 1930. The dealer Matthiesen formed a consortium with Colnaghi of London and Knoedler of New York, the firm most used by Andrew Mellon, who had acquired twenty-one Hermitage paintings for a total of 6,654,000 dollars by the end of 1931. The Met bought these two panels through Knoedler in 1933.

The transaction stayed secret until The New York Times reported on 4 November 1933 that several Hermitage paintings had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum. That is unusual and worth stating for what it is: a national museum acquiring, through an intermediary and without announcement, objects a foreign government was selling to finance a five-year plan. The price the Met paid is not published in the sources consulted.

The version problem, which is severe

Very few objects in this archive present a worse identification hazard. There are four traps.

The first is Petrus Christus's signed and dated Last Judgment in Berlin, the picture Waagen used to take these panels away from van Eyck in 1870. It is a different object by a different painter and it is routinely reproduced beside these.

The second is Jan van Eyck's Crucifixion in Berlin, which Tschudi used in 1898 to give them back.

The third is the sheer number of small Netherlandish Crucifixions and Last Judgments in circulation, including two by Joos van Cleve in this same museum. A tall narrow fifteenth or sixteenth-century Netherlandish Last Judgment is not, on sight, this Last Judgment.

The fourth is the format itself. These panels have been published as a diptych, as the wings of a triptych with a painted centre, as the wings of a triptych with a sculpted centre, and as the doors of a tabernacle or reliquary shrine. Reconstructions of all four exist as diagrams. A diagram is not a photograph of the object, and this record carries none.