The Virgin and Child in an apse

One of the most enduringly popular images of the Northern Renaissance, The Virgin and Child in an Apseis thought to derive from a lost prototype painted by Robert Campin in the early fifteenth century. Decades later however, from about 1480 to 1530, the image seems to have reached iconic status, generating the production of a vast number of replicas, none of which can be dated to Campin’s lifetime. Today well over sixty versions of this composition are recorded, displaying varying degrees of quality. M.L. Lievens-de Waegh and Maryan Ainsworth have charted the development of this celebrated composition: its earlier incarnations, such as the version in the Metropolitan Museum and that formerly in the Diamond collection New York, show the apse seen from above and display a compact arrangement of figures. In subsequent versions, such as those in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Toledo Art Museum, the space starts to take greater prominence in relationship to the diminishing size of the figures and the angels have moved away from the Virgin and Child. Later in the sixteenth century, leading Netherlandish artists like Gerard David, Bernard van Orley and Jan Provoost would produce their own variations on this famous image, taking greater liberties and each stamping it with their own personal style (Lievens-de Waegh, Le Musée National d’Art Ancien et le Musée National des Carreaux de Faïence de Lisbonne, Brussels, 1991, pp. 106-27; M.W. Ainsworth, ‘The Virgin and Child in an Apse: Reconsidering a Campin Workshop Design’, in S. Foister, S. Nash, Robert Campin: New Directions in Scholarship, Turnhout, 1996, pp. 149-58).

The author of the present painting chose to omit the attending angels, focusing exclusively on the standing Virgin and Child. While the drapery folds are entirely consistent with Campin’s model, the Virgin’s facial type here moves away from Campin’s moon-shaped female heads. Rather, it is closer to the type seen in later approaches to the composition, in particular the the one given by Max J. Friedländer to Bernard van Orley (Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Càdiz, Càdiz; M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, II, Leyden, Brussels, 1967, p. 74, no. 74A.

The grace and serenity of The Virgin and Child in an Apse, a tender scene of motherly embrace, would have provided the devout viewer with an ideal visual aid for their daily prayers. However, why this specific image fueled such a demand, and why this phenomenon occurred decades after the composition was originally conceived, remains a matter of speculation. A compelling proposition is that toward the end of the fifteenth century, the original or one of the copies became associated to a miracle or an indulgence, and was thus invested with spiritual and apotropaic potency that dramatically increased the image’s desirability (L. Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Paintings, London, 1998, p. 102; M.W. Ainsworth, From Van Eyck to Brueghel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1998, p. 220).