The Holy Family

This impressive panel is a characteristic work of the Antwerp painter known as the Master of the Mansi Magdalene. Named after a panel depicting that saint in Berlin (Gemäldegalerie), formerly in the Lucca collection of the Marchese Battista Mansi (where it was wrongly attributed to Quentin Metsys), it was suggested by Max Jakob Friedländer that he may have been the Willem Muelenbroec who registered at the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1501 as an apprentice of Metsys’. Indeed, the stylistic similarities between the oeuvres of the two painters is clear. Here, for example, the Virgin is shown seated in an elaborate polished marble and gold throne holding the Christ Child on her knee, before a parapet on which are ranged various still life elements. The composition clearly recalls the famed Virgin of the Cherries by Metsys, known now through a number of workshop versions (one of the best of these is now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague). The inclusion of the still life in the foreground of the composition was also a technique employed by Joos van Cleve to heighten the devotional import of his depictions of the Holy Family and which, for example, appears in the numerous versions of this subject at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Each of the fruits included in the present panel possess symbolic meaning: the apple to the left symbolises the Fall of Man and the Advent of Christ as the new Adam; the grapes in the centre are an obvious reference to the Eucharist and to Christ’s sacrifice; while the cherries represent the fruit of Paradise.

The reverse of the panel shows a remarkable and highly unusual range of patterns. These arrangements of patterns are carved into the panel and certainly would not have been a standard inclusion in early Netherlandish panel preparation. It is possible that the reverse of the picture was used to practice various carving techniques before it was used as a support for painting and that the panel makers late neglected to plane down the panel to remove them. Equally, they may represent a later intervention.