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Lot Essay
The Virgin and Child are here shown seated in a hortus conclusus, with an angel descending from Heaven to place a crown on Mary’s head, signifying her as Queen of Heaven. Set within the landscape of the garden, the iconography is expanded by the inclusion of numerous symbolic details, including a gatehouse surmounted by a star, a fountain, a well and a tower, which is surmounted by a crescent moon. In the early sixteenth century, these had emerged as central symbols to the iconography of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. The imagery for this was based on the numerous theological debates that surrounded the questions of the Immaculate Conception during the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The source for many visual interpretations of the iconography is typically believed to be an engraving, published by the German librarian and engraver Thielman Kerver in a Parisian Book of Hours (Use of Rome) in 1502. The various symbols and objects which made up the Litany of the Virgin were derived mainly from the Old Testament, typically from the Song of Songs and the Psalms, and used to emphasise the Virgin’s purity. Claeissens painted several treatments of this iconography, most notably in the Immaculate Conception, on long-term loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (Geneva, Gallery Rob Smeets). The complexity of the iconography of the Virgin and Child in a garden is expanded through the inclusion of further details such as the seven-headed dragon in the sky to the left of the Virgin’s shoulder, signifying her as the Woman of the Apocalypse. Beyond the walls of the garden, Claeissens shows a unicorn being hunted. The unicorn was typically associated with purity and chastity, but as a wild beast, it could only be tamed by a virgin. Within a religious context, such hunting scenes came to be understood as an allegory of the Passion. The flowers, painted with great naturalistic detail, all symbolise aspects of the Virgin’s purity, humility and salvific aid.
Pieter Claeissens the Younger was born in Bruges into an established family of painters, and documentation about his life has in the past frequently been confused with information about his father, Pieter Claeissens the Elder, and his brother, Antonius. Recent research has made it possible, however, to distinguish the hands of these masters. Pieter the Younger established himself as an artist specialised in Bruges compositions of the first half of the sixteenth century, and continued in this way the success of the Bruges art. He is known to have collaborated with his father in painting the monumental Resurrection in Sint-Salvatorskathedraal in Bruges, completed in 1585, and to have continued painting in the city, using the work of his father and preceding generations of Bruges artists, until the early seventeenth century. A now lost preparatory drawing for this Resurrection was signed with a monogram very similar to that inscribed on the present Virgin and Child (Weale, op. cit.).
We are grateful to Anne van Oosterwijk and Sara Armas for their assistance in the cataloguing this lot. The picture has been documented with infrared reflectography by Guenevere Souffreau.
Pieter Claeissens the Younger was born in Bruges into an established family of painters, and documentation about his life has in the past frequently been confused with information about his father, Pieter Claeissens the Elder, and his brother, Antonius. Recent research has made it possible, however, to distinguish the hands of these masters. Pieter the Younger established himself as an artist specialised in Bruges compositions of the first half of the sixteenth century, and continued in this way the success of the Bruges art. He is known to have collaborated with his father in painting the monumental Resurrection in Sint-Salvatorskathedraal in Bruges, completed in 1585, and to have continued painting in the city, using the work of his father and preceding generations of Bruges artists, until the early seventeenth century. A now lost preparatory drawing for this Resurrection was signed with a monogram very similar to that inscribed on the present Virgin and Child (Weale, op. cit.).
We are grateful to Anne van Oosterwijk and Sara Armas for their assistance in the cataloguing this lot. The picture has been documented with infrared reflectography by Guenevere Souffreau.