A river landscape with Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child, guided by a hermit with a lantern on the shore

From the beginning of the sixteenth century, landscape painting as a genre had begun to be ‘zealously cultivated’ in the Netherlands and especially Antwerp, the region’s cultural and mercantile centre since the decline of Bruges during the late 1490s (M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting: Antonis Mor and his Contemporaries, XIII, Leiden, 1975, p. 23). The most important exponent of this new tradition was Joachim Patinir, whose inventive and meticulous landscapes of jagged rocks, sweeping valleys and wide vistas laid the foundations for the development of the Weltlandschaft (world landscape), that would continue to be developed by later artists like Albrecht Altdorfer, Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. One of Patinir’s most important followers was Herri met de Bles. Born circa 1510, Met de Bles may have been his nephew and is likely to have been the ‘Herry de Patenir’ who registered as a member of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1535.

The subject of Saint Christopher carrying Christ offered sixteenth-century Netherlandish artists an opportunity to explore the sweeping, mysterious vistas of the Weltlandschaft genre to its fullest. As the patron saint of travellers, Saint Christopher guarded against illness, sudden death and afflictions of the eye, and was included among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who were most frequently invoked saints for aid against disease.

The great harbour city of Antwerp produced many picturesque images of the Canaanite giant who was converted to Christianity after bearing the holy infant, an increasingly heavy burden, across the river. Yet in the present work, the focus appears to be placed on the hermit in the foreground with a lantern – sometimes identified with the light of Christian knowledge – who, according to the Golden Legend, guided Saint Christopher across the river at night as he ferried passengers from one bank to the other. While the artist depicted the saint on many occasions, both in circular and rectangular formats, the present use of a lozenge-shape panel is unusual, and was employed primarily for epitaphs, votive and heraldic subjects and organised associations. Although it is difficult to establish a chronology for an oeuvre that contains no reliably dated works, infrared reflectography of the present panel (Eisler, op. cit., pp. 254-55) reveals fully realised and free underdrawing that could be dated to late in Herri de Bles’ career.