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The Madness of Hugo van der Goes: The Troubled Search for Origins in Early Netherlandish Painting
The Madness of Hugo van der Goes: The Troubled Search for Origins in Early Netherlandish Painting
Shira Brisman2021, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish painting to organize the artist's career according to a chronology. The survival of a biographical document attesting to his madness additionally troubled the expectation of artistic progression. Goes earned the reputation of the first modern artist whose genius was connected to his aberrant psychology. This essay critically examines the impulse in art history toward temporal sequencing, arguing that such a practice is most profitably applied in the case of Goes not to his oeuvre as a whole but to a study of his process within an individual work. The alterations over time to the surface of The Fall of Man, which has often (but not unanimously) been deemed the artist's “first work,” afford consideration of how Goes thought about revision and how historians of early Netherlandish painting might engage disciplinary change by rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.
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The Madness of Hugo van
der Goes: The Troubled
Search for Origins in Early
Netherlandish Painting
Shira Brisman
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
To apprehend a painting is to know what is to come. This statement may
hold true for every encounter with a depiction of the fall of man. To depict
this narrative moment, the artist must signal through the figuration of a
gesture — a pluck, a grasp, or a bite — the consequences that the viewer
knows the act will bring about: the acquisition of knowledge, the awareness
of the need for bodily covering, and the fast-approaching detachment of
human from land.
The notion that a painting of the fall of man contains a sense of
foreknowledge is especially true when, as is the case with a small panel by
Hugo van der Goes (see fig. 1), the picture has been suggested as the artist’s
“first work.”1 This designation identifies an early announcement of the formal and conceptual preoccupations the artist will return to again and again.
In the case of Goes, his Fall of Man pays homage to an Eyckian tradition
and does not quite anticipate its painter’s more radical disjunctions in color,
space, and scale. By virtue of its subject matter, however, the painting might
be the harbinger of its maker’s torment, his future fixation on the idea of
descent into sin.
The notion of a “first work” is a historian’s fiction, a step in the
game of establishing sequence amidst surviving attributions. The ordering
of an oeuvre into a chronology was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. It
began with the publication, in 1868, of a catalogue of Rembrandt’s paintings
that was the first to arrange according to date.2 It was aided by the availability of photography, which enabled comparisons and trials of line-ups from
“early” to “late.”3 By the first decades of the twentieth century, sequencing
had begun to seem like one of art history’s essential epistemes, what Michel
Foucault defined as an “ ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation . . .
of what may from what may not be characterized as scientific.”4 Some of its
practitioners — particularly those associated with the New Vienna School,
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 51:2, May 2021
DOI 10.1215/10829636-8929080 © 2021 by Duke University Press
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Figure 1.
Hugo van der Goes, The Fall of Man. Oil on oak, 33.8 × 23 cm.
Source: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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such as Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt — began to denounce its dangers
as an end game, while admitting to its usefulness as an exercise.5 Pächt was
cautious about a determinism that could lead the way toward an ideal style
for art, yet he was committed to establishing an evolution within a single
artist’s oeuvre. The effort at establishing order, for Pächt, emerged from
deep engagement; it animated the artwork: “A static artistic phenomenon
has become a dynamic one; a finished work has turned back into a work in
progress.”6 Creation unfolds as a series of choices. The value of proposing
an artist’s compositional sequence is that it draws the historian nearer to
the processes of decision and revision. Observing change over the course of
a career permits a view of how an artist learned from his experience, how
he made recourse to or fought back against his earlier feats, or how external
feedback fomented discontent with or solidified earlier tendencies.
If, beginning in the nineteenth century, photography enabled the
establishment of chronological ordering across an artist’s work, then in the
twentieth, the use of X-radiography and infrared reflectography enabled seeing through the outer layer of a given painting, allowing for the assessment
of the steps taken toward its completion. Here, too, historians were quick to
quash the notion that employing technology to enable discovery might lead
to a hasty classification of the art historian’s methods as “scientific.” Panofsky asserted that analyses aided by chemistry or the camera’s lens should
not disturb the subjective process whereby the historian “has mentally to reenact the actions and re-create the creations.”7 Yet, since the publication of
Panofsky’s essay on the value of the history of art relative to the sciences, the
study of strata has been persistently pursued, enabling the modern beholder,
in the words of J. R. J. van Asperen de Boer, “to ‘penetrate’ into the personality of a particular master through a study of his painting technique.”8 This
approach has been nowhere more rigorously applied than in the field of early
Netherlandish painting, which, since the Bruges exhibition of 1902, with the
use of the nomenclature “les primitifs flamands” to indicate the beginning
of a new artistic epoch, has been enticed by notions of order and points of
origin.9 This obsession might seem fitting for the study of painters whose
compositions concern “ur moments,” that is, where a biblical episode of a
moment of origin aligns with a painter’s effort to conceive of the world in a
new way. One might see this, say, in van Eyck’s treatments of the Annunciation or, here, in Hugo van der Goes’s rendering of the original sin.
Proceeding as a study of Goes’s “first painting,” this essay critically
examines the two methods of assigning order to an oeuvre: arrangement
according to temporal sequence and explication of artistic process. The
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method of assigning order to an artist’s career was frustrated, in the case
of Hugo van der Goes, by the resistance of his nonconformist style to the
measurable development of techniques such as the veristic use of color, a
rational use of relative scale, or a coherently applied sense of perspective.
Naturalism and illusionism, in other words, are not for this painter progressive endeavors that can be tracked by quantifiable metrics; they do not
present end-goals toward which he aimed to improve over time. While the
study of underdrawing has been an important tool for technical analysis
in a field for which very few sketches on paper survive, the use of scientific
instruments has not revealed in Goes’s case a consistent enough method of
preliminary design to aid in sequencing his works according to a recognizable advancement.
Chronological ordering of Goes’s paintings has also been thwarted
by testimony to his madness composed by a fellow monk just after Goes’s
death, which has troubled the scholarly expectation of observing evolvement
in the painter’s work. With the help of this document, Goes earned the reputation of being the first modern artist in a particular sense: he was deemed
the earliest painter in the European tradition whose genius was connected
to his aberrant psychology. The first part of this essay, which shows how
Goes’s surviving works rebuff efforts to order them chronologically, exposes
the limitation in applying the status of modernity to justify examining his
work. In my account, Goes is worthy of study not because he was modern
or mad, but because his works show a determination to do away with established pictorial solutions. The second part of this essay argues that the historicizing impulse toward chronological ordering is most profitably applied,
in the case of Goes, not to his surviving oeuvre as a whole but to a study of
his technique within an individual work. The alterations over time to the
surface of The Fall of Man afford analysis of Goes’s practice of revision. The
painting as it now stands discloses some of its process; when seen in this way,
it becomes, in Pächt’s words, “a work in progress” again. The current state of
the panel, with pentimenti showing through, also affords historians of early
Netherlandish painting the opportunity to engage disciplinary change by
rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.
Madness and method
In the case of Hugo van der Goes, the task of arranging surviving works
from “early” to “late” has been complicated by the survival of a document
that attests to his madness. Goes’s career lasted only fifteen years, from his
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admittance into the Guild of Saint Luke in Ghent, in 1467, until his death
in 1482. None of his surviving paintings are signed or dated, and documentation only confirms his authorship of one, the Portinari Altarpiece, a
triptych depicting the adoration of the shepherds at Christ’s birth (see fig. 2);
all other attributions have been made in comparison to this work.10 In total,
five paintings — in Berlin, Bruges, Edinburgh, Florence, and Vienna— have
been considered the major works for establishing chronology. This effort has
been aided by a contemporary psychological biography by Gaspar Ofhuys,
a fellow monk who had joined the Rood Klooster monastery near Brussels,
in 1475, at the same time as Goes. This text recounts a journey to Cologne,
when the painter “was seized by a strange illness of his mind; he uttered
unceasing laments about being doomed and sentenced to eternal damnation. He even wanted to lay murderous hands on himself and had to be prevented by force from doing so.”11 The convent’s prior attempted to ease the
painter’s vexed mind by soothing it with music. This treatment was memorialized in a painting by Émile Wauters in 1872 (see fig. 3). Van Gogh would
refer to Wauters’s painting three times in his letters, finding an affinity with
the inconsolable painter who sits in solitude, wringing his hands.12
What Ofhuys saw as the dangerous hyperactivity of the inventive
mind caused Panofsky to place Goes at the start of a trajectory that would
privilege the characterization of an artist as one whose affliction was also his
gift. He describes the painter as “perhaps the first artist to live up to a concept unknown to the Middle Ages but cherished by the European mind ever
after, the concept of a genius both blessed and cursed with his diversity from
ordinary human beings.”13 For Panofsky, Goes was modern because he was
mad. Unable to ignore a poetic alignment of events that occurred in 1482,
Panofsky situates the end of the painter’s life with Marsilio Ficino’s commencement of De vita triplici, a treatise in which Ficino revives an Aristotelian theory that links the cosmologically inflicted disease of melancholy to
creativity and despair.14 Hugo van der Goes is thus first in a line-up of artists
“born under Saturn” that includes Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, Annibale
Carracci, Carlo Dolci, up to Van Gogh and beyond.15
Efforts to link abnormal outbursts to the expressiveness of Goes’s art
have provoked attempts to establish a relational logic: Is mental disturbance
the cause or the effect of artistic talent?16 Ofhuys enumerates the options.
After considering “natural” explanations, such as “ ‘melancholy’ victuals,”
strong wine, or humorial imbalance, he moves on to more complicated diagnoses. One sequence he proposes is that the success of Goes’s art produced
psychological effects. A talent that gave rise to pride needed to be punished.
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So that God could rescue the painter from the threat of eternal perdition,
he inflicted a bout that caused contrition. Driven to humility on account
of his sickness, Goes’s soul was saved.17 But Ofhuys also proposes a reversal of this relationship of artistic inventiveness to disease. Goes’s condition
might have been the result of a predisposition toward imaginative thinking, which he exacerbated by pushing his mind beyond the boundaries of
controllable thoughts: “There is close to the brain an extremely small and
tender vein,” writes the monk, “which is vested with the power of fantasy;
therefore whenever fantasies over-abound in us this little vein is affected; but
if it is affected and damaged until it ruptures, the patient falls into phrenitis
or madness.”18 While Ofhuys patiently attempts to sort cause from effect,
Goes’s later biographers who have accepted the correlation between madness and eccentric artistic style position the work of art as both evidence for
and further generator of his frenzied state: “As the tension in Hugo’s mind
reflected itself in his style, so did the tensions in his style have a repercussive
effect on his mind,” Panofsky writes.19 One might hear in the circularity of
this statement an echo of what Walter Benjamin wrote of the diseased style
of a novelist obsessed with retrospection: “This asthma became part of his
art — if indeed his art did not create it. Proust’s syntax rhythmically and step
by step reproduces his fear of suffocation.”20 Cause and effect collapse in on
the notion of order.
Hugo van der Goes’s Fall of Man, however, precedes collapse. Historians including Panofsky and Pächt have tended to date the painting to what
has been called Goes’s “pre-pathological state.”21 By nature of its subject mat326 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 51.2 / May 2021
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Figure 2 (here and previous page).
Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece. Oil on wood,
253 × 141 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Photo from the
Yorck Project, Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft. Used under a
GNU Free Documentation License.
ter, the painting exercises its own reckoning with prior and after, cause and
effect. Situated in paradise, the Fall attempts to recover an image of a place
now lost. The artist has had to decide whether to represent a simultaneous
awakening to awareness on the part of the two protagonists or whether to
separate Eve’s initial transgression from Adam’s following suit. Here, Eve
has bitten from the apple (see fig. 4). Goes seems to have gouged away paint,
perhaps with the back of his brush, to make clear where her teeth tore at the
fruit. Her left hand grabs another one from the tree for Adam (fig. 1). His
hand is poised to receive. In reaching up, Adam also touches Eve’s hair, perhaps an indication that his longing to taste and his desire for carnal knowledge are one and the same. (Meyer Schapiro wrote of Cézanne’s apples as
“displaced erotic interest . . . the objects of a caressing vision.”)22 The painting is a good “first painting” because its subject is original sin. The moment
it depicts is situated not only on the cusp of human acquisition of knowledge
and on the brink of the detachment of beings from the natural world, but
also at the onset of a perceptual imperfection, a mode of seeing perverted by
the Fall.23 To paint paradise is to attempt to imagine an irrecoverable vision
of untainted bodies in perfect integration with the land. In other words,
to paint the Fall is to fail. The only option is to indicate where history is
heading by admitting premonitions of uncertainty, instability, and shame
into the picture plane. Paintings of paradise needed to operate proleptically;
they had to point to an outcome of sin, punishment, and exile. To do so not
only served the educative purpose of communicating the consequences of
the narrative; it also acknowledged the impossibility of an accurate depiction
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Figure 3.
Émile Wauters, The Madness of Hugo van der Goes (1872). Oil on canvas,
186 × 275 cm. © Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
Photo: J. Geleyns Art Photography.
of a prelapsarian time and place. Prolepsis checked the claims of the painter’s
fiction against the realities of his existential position.24 Chronological signaling, the foreshadowing of an aftermath effect, was built into the very
structure of Christianity’s ur-moment image. In Goes’s Fall, Adam’s hand
is already covering his sex; behind him, as if in sync with mankind’s moral
descent, the tree-studded mountain slips from high to low gradient. The
painting also earns well its primary place because of its inheritance from the
forefather of Netherlandish painting, Jan van Eyck. Adam and Eve acknowledge the Ghent Altarpiece’s bookending first parents as antecedents.25 Homage to van Eyck is also paid in the jewel-like preciousness of each leaf in
Eden, and the golden, individuated wisps of Eve’s hair.
The proleptic structure is found within the internal composition of
Goes’s Fall. Its indications of a future outcome are met with a response in
the painting’s companion, a panel of the same size in a diptych, The Lamentation of Christ (see fig. 5). The paired paintings were described in 1659 in the
inventory of Leopold Guillaume as the work of Jan van Eyck.26 The Fall was
first attributed to Hugo van der Goes by Alfred Michiels in 1866. The two
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Figure 4.
Hugo van der Goes, The Fall of Man (detail). Source:
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
panels, having been separated in 1780, were reunited in 1884.27 When seen
side-by-side, the paintings organize the narrative of human salvation around
spatial settings of high and low. The downward slope of paradisial landscape
in the Fall is countered in the Lamentation by the cross-mounted peak of
Golgotha that rises high. The place where Christ was crucified ascends, yet
Christ himself is brought low — his tormented corpse is being laid to the
ground. The characterization of his self-sacrifice as a descent contrasts with
Eve’s hand that reaches upward aspirationally in respone to the promise of
greater knowledge. These visual elements assist in encouraging the eye and
mind of the beholder to move from one half of the diptych to the other.28
Along with the rightward-billowing curve of the white cloth framing Christ
that echoes the arc of the serpent’s tail and the outline of Eve’s left foot, these
details build a sense of coordination across the two panels.
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Figure 5.
Hugo van der Goes, The Lamentation of Christ. Oil on oak, 33.8 × 23 cm.
Source: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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Figure 6.
School or workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, The Lamentation of Christ.
Oil on panel, 81 × 130 cm. Source: Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Yet there are stylistic dissonances between the two. Taken as one
diptych, the left and right sides, if understood as Goes’s “earliest surviving
work,” operate as a declaration of the artistic inheritances from which he
will draw and break away over the course of his fifteen-year career. Whereas,
in the Fall, Goes situates Jan van Eyck as artistic forefather, in the Lamentation he announces his debt to Rogier van der Weyden (see fig. 6). The
characters of van der Weyden’s Lamentation find cousins in Goes’s version,
and the pathos of van der Weyden’s painting is echoed in Goes’s stiffened
slump of Christ’s body, the clasping of John’s arms around Mary’s waist,
the trademark flutter of John’s red cape, and the arms of the woman on the
upper right raised in anguish.29 For decades of art historical scholarship, the
notion of the co-originating two sides of Goes’s diptych allowed the fantasy
that his first work paid tribute to the period’s founding fathers in the form
of a stylistically discordant devotional device. The oddness of the match was
explained away by a truism about format.30 Diptychs often forge together
ill-fitting sides.
Infrared reflectography — the science of seeing through the outermost layer of paint — has given confidence to the claim (first made in 1945
by Robert Rey) that the two panels were likely designed at different times.31
The underdrawings of the panels (compare figs. 7 and 8) diverge in style
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Figure 7.
Hugo van der Goes, infrared scan showing the underdrawing of
The Fall of Man. Source: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
and in the manner in which each correlates to its corresponding layers of
paint. In the Fall, the contours show that the greatest thought was given
to the placement of Adam’s and Eve’s hands — here is where the majority
of adjustments have been made. In the course of planning, Adam’s left arm
lowers, evening out his shoulders, making him seem not quite as desperate
for the fruit. Eve’s arm, once closer to rising straight up, now reaches over to
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Figure 8.
Hugo van der Goes, infrared scan showing the underdrawing
of The Lamentation of Christ. Source: Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna.
pluck the pome placed above the serpent’s head. Her hand grasping the bitten apple slips further down (fig. 7).
The planning stages of the Lamentation employ more thoroughly
hatched lines to indicate shadow. In the Fall, subtle changes were made to
the eyes, feet, arms, and hands. But in the Lamentation’s adjustments, full
bodies move (this is seen most radically in the figure of St. John and the
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Figure 9.
Hugo van der Goes, Saint Genevieve. Oil on oak,
33.8 × 23 cm. Source: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
two women behind him). Goes thinks out loud as he sketches; here he is
more like the choreographer of a dance than a photographer modifying
the details of a pose. In the final painting, the strong, central diagonal of
mourning woman-man-woman that leads down to Christ expands from its
initial compression in the planning stage. Describing the gravitas of this
line, Pächt writes: “The combination of two sliding movements in freefall
threatens to capsize the painting.” But the figures in the lower corners, the
woman in white and the man in blue, form an inner frame, which “catches
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Figure 10.
Hugo van der Goes, Adoration of the Shepherds. Oil on oak,
97 × 245 cm. Inv. 1622A, Staatliche Museen Preußischer
Kulturbesitz Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photo: Volker-H. Schneider.
Art Resource, New York.
and buffers the movement”; they create “stability and stasis.”32 Goes stages
a narrative moment about redeeming man from the Fall as a compositional
arrangement that figures a fall, rescued by the presence of two figures who
kneel. This slide and stop might also characterize how the artist’s biography
has been described: a sudden decline steadied by a recovery. Following his
psychotic break, Goes, it is thought, returned to a brief period of calm before
his death.33
Most revealing about the underdrawing is that the woman with
raised hands in the upper right did not exist in the preliminary stages of
compositional planning. Though she is visible as a painted figure in the
infrared scan, this photograph also reveals that her outline has not been
sketched in advance as have the contours of the other figures. That she is
present exclusively in paint has led Jochen Sander to link her participation
in the scene to the stipulation of a patron, one who might also be responsible
for the Saint Genevieve (see fig. 9) painted on a reverse panel of (though now
separated from) the Fall of Man. Sander, who dates the Fall to ca. 1473, the
Lamentation and Saint Genevieve to ca. 1479, imagines an owner who sought
from the painter a companion to the earlier scene. Such a gap allows for the
connection of the Lamentation to other likely later scenes, such as the Adoration of the Shepherds (see fig. 10) and Death of the Virgin (see fig. 11), which all
share an anxious compression of space.34
The Death of the Virgin is commonly situated at the end of Goes’s
career.35 The most frequently repeated chronology of Goes’s oeuvre comBrisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 335
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Figure 11.
Hugo van der Goes, The Death of the Virgin. Oil on wood,
147.8 × 122.5 cm. Groeninge Museum, Bruges. Scala /
Art Resource, New York.
mences with the Fall of Man and closes with the assumption of Mary’s soul
into heaven in Death of the Virgin. The trajectory of redemption may even
be seen to have a foreshadowing in Goes’s use of the iris in place of the
traditional fig leaf to hide Eve’s shame.36 This flower, also known as the
“sword lily,” symbolized the suffering of the Virgin at the death of her Son.
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In Goes’s early work, it covers the woman who brings about man’s downfall
with an allusion to the second woman, who will redeem. Imagining that
Goes would have seen himself as part of the mourning over Mary’s death,
Elisabeth Dhanens posits that the figure in the foreground of the final picture, who looks straight out, is a self-portrait of the artist. His hands on a
closed book “suggest the idea of an end.”37
Such a designation of the Fall as “first” and the Death as “last” make
for a development harmonious with the Christological course of sin and salvation. Thinking proleptically, seeing beginnings as harbingers of alreadyknown ends, has shaped the iconographic structure of Christian painting
and the methodological approach of constructing chronology. To order
the work of a painter’s career habitually involves taking, when possible, the
known dates provided by documents and situating paintings for which no
documents are known as leading up to or evolving from those benchmarks.
The impulse to order, while often characterized as an exposure of art history’s ambition to be recognized as scientific, has not only to do with the
aims of objectivity, but also with the ways in which thinking about time
have been shaped by particularly visual mechanisms of storytelling.38 To
refuse to acknowledge that the narrative structure of the paintings shaped
the ways in which its early historians thought about sequence is to demand
too great a rift between the content of the works of art studied and the
modes of historical narration that they enabled in the minds of their beholders. It is to refuse to see that a teleological way of thinking that has shaped
the scholarship on fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting is encoded in
the pictorial language of the painting itself. Recognizing that chronological ordering is bound to a Christian way of seeing — or, rather, the JudeoChristian plot, if one takes into consideration the typological mode of prediction and fulfillment that structures the old dispensation’s relationship to
the new — makes space for the necessity in art historical scholarship of other
forms of history writing that are nonsequential and deliberately nonobjective, such as counterfactual histories, critical fabulation, multiple narration,
and live writing projects. Dispensing with the notion that the chronological
ordering of a career is a necessary or meaningful exercise in and of itself
demands adjusting the questions about sequence so that they may lead to
an enriched engagement with the contents of the paintings, questions that
acknowledge the contingencies of their proposed points of view. In the case
of Goes, one might ask: What sorts of interferences make impossible the
establishment of a satisfying sequence? To which one might follow up with
the query: How has the proleptic nature of Christian storytelling privileged
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Figure 12 (above and following page).
Hugo van der Goes, The Trinity Altarpiece. Oil on wood,
202 × 100.5 cm (each panel). Royal Collection Trust, London.
© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. On loan to the
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
a way of ascribing protomodernity in paintings of “les primitifs flamands,”
and how might the study of Goes’s work benefit if the ascription of modernity were abandoned?
To the first question, the efforts to establish a chronology for Goes’s
work have often been disturbed by a source external to the paintings —
Ofhuys’s report on the artist’s madness— which has been read alongside the
stylistic surprises that are internal to them. Margot and Rudolf Wittkower
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divide Goes’s artistic life into phases: prepathological (1475 – 80); pathological (1481); and a brief period of calm in which he was able to paint again
before his death (1482). Panofsky, who likewise organizes according to a
moment of madness, identifies in Goes’s Adoration of the Magi and Trinity
Altarpiece (see fig. 12) a lurking tendency “to abolish rationality altogether”
as “the calm before the storm”; he describes the Portinari Altarpiece as a kind
of bubbling up, where “a conflict of opposing forces has produced a disturbance of equilibrium but not as yet resulted in their disengagement”; and he
deems the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Death of the Virgin the “outbreak of the storm.”39 For these authors, the marriage between artistic genius
and melancholy was one of the achievements of the Renaissance, an indicator of the emancipation of the craftsman from guilds and laws, as if it is only
in the extreme circumstance of psychological isolation that an individual
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identity may emerge.40 Hugo van der Goes, the first artist of this kind, led
a career that culminated in a resolvedly irrational employment of color, a
deliberately antiperspectival construction of space, and a figural arrangement that rebuked the possibility of harmonious cohabitation of the world.41
The notion of a psychotic break has been used by some to dislodge
certain examples from their place in an expected order, thus exposing how
a given historian perceives the normative progression of an artist’s career.
Max Friedländer is frank: “As the eye grows far-sighted, repetition, experience, habit become discernible. . . . Tedium, fatigue, imitation and even
copying of his own forms, loss of spontaneity and creative exhaustion are
also bound to show. . . . Only strong talents succeed in pursuing against the
trend of time.” Genius, however, which “drifts in the direction of mental
illness,” encourages the expectation of the unexpected — “it takes creative
risks, accepts the ventures of the mind.”42 Friedländer, while attempting to
place Goes’s paintings in order, struggles most with the comparatively placid
Adoration of the Magi, for which he can find no place. This is an artist who
never yields to expectation. Though the process of creating order within
an oeuvre is necessary, Goes’s paintings mock the attempt: “genius scorns
reason.”43
If the effort at producing chronology served, as Pächt argued, to
draw the observer closer to the work, then the madman’s slip into irrationality could threaten to destabilize the process of producing systematic arrangement. In describing the Death of the Virgin, Panofsky nearly yields to this
pull; the combination of devotion, ecstasy, and sorrow in this final work
“have reached a point at which emotion blots out consciousness and threatens to break down the barrier that protects reason from both the subhuman
and the superhuman.” He ends this sentence with a paragraph break, and
then begins anew, as if having recovered his own rational faculties, with
a sentence calmly declaring that the painter’s development from the Portinari Altarpiece on was a continuous and comprehensible one.44 Pächt likewise emerges from describing the Death of the Virgin as if from a trance. He
admits that the painting exerts a destabilizing force. It threatens to upset
the effort to establish order: “Having resolved not to allow the irrationality of Goes’s pictorial creation to rub off on our scholarly treatment and
assessment of the facts, but — if possible — to study wild-eyed physiognomies
while keeping our own wits about us, let us now try to position the Berlin
Adoration of the Shepherds and the Bruges Death of the Virgin within the
oeuvre of Hugo van der Goes.”45
For Panofsky, Pächt, and others who were drawn to Goes because
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of the manner in which his psychological torment registered in his distortions of scale, space, and light, the painter was modern because he was protoromantic, that is, because he produced an art in which it was possible to
find expressions of a mind possessive of a wildly unique vision.46 The notion
that madness must have impressed itself on the artist’s style at a given point
has dictated the if/then reasoning of the efforts at chronological order. Yet
a more useful guide to understanding the emotionally demanding nature
of Goes’s surfaces is not to attempt to track his progression toward a series
of pictorial solutions, but to understand him as a painter who proceeded
by shedding them. Goes’s uniqueness lay in his willingness to break with
comfortable ways of seeing as if they had suddenly pressed on the painter as
repellent untruths.47
This version of Goes as one who repeatedly bid “farewell to an idea”
allows for rather than suppresses the relationship between radical innovation
and religious fervor.48 It requires deemphasizing Panofsky’s alignment of
the artist’s birth with the rise of Ficino’s secularizing humanism. It permits
imagining how he might have been consciously and selectively casting away
the developments that teleological narratives of the period of early Netherlandish painting as a whole have tended to reward, such as naturalistic uses
of color, logic of scale, and perspectival recession. These pursuits have been
constructed as participating in the secularization of painting. The depiction
of miraculous events as though situated in a world that could be believed to
be an extension of the beholder’s — so the story goes — eventually led to a
shift in focus away from those events and onto elements of the daily world:
landscape, interiors, still lifes. Goes was not ignorant of this trajectory. He
could, as the diptych of the Fall and Lamentation shows, pay homage to the
advancements of his predecessors and build upon them. What is striking is
when he deliberately chose not to. His rejection of pictorial solutions leaned
into rather than away from his spiritual commitments.
In the Death of the Virgin (fig. 11), Goes declines to adhere to the
expected laws of perspective. The back wall and footboard of the bed run
parallel to horizontal lines of the frame. In conflict with this arrangement,
the dying woman is tilted yet foreshortened. The figures scattered around
the bed do not diminish based on distance. Panofsky writes of the apostles
that all their hands are the same size.49 This parity in scale insists on not
establishing a hierarchy — perhaps important for the community here. The
overlapping apostles that crowd around the Virgin at her death binds the
brothers together, invoking a group not dissimilar to that which nurtured
the ill painter, according to Ofhuys’s text. Yet archaic and jarring disjuncBrisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 341
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tions in figural scale startle in the Portinari Altarpiece, and diminishments in
size proceed rapidly in the Adoration of the Magi. Goes seems to have applied
an ethics to how he thought about the privilege of proximity and the allotment of space. Figural scale has less to do with distance from the beholder,
and more to do with nearness to holy beings within the depicted narrative.
This spatial logic runs counter to the anthropocentric law that makes the
beholder the fixed point of view in relationship to whom the represented
figures are staged. Goes adjudicates between appeasing arrangements and
oddness of jutting forms to enforce recognition of the startling irregularity of religious experience.50 In the Death of the Virgin, a blue hue envelops
the scene. The aureole surrounding Christ absorbs at its edges the blue of
his mother’s robe and bed. He drains the light from her flesh. In the Portinari Altarpiece, light also shines counter to logic; illumination happens not
from the top down but from the bottom up. Both here and in the Death of
the Virgin, Goes turns away from newly invented expressive idioms such as
light that obeys natural law — a device that has been seen as the achievement of van Eyck in the steps toward truthful pictorial expressions of the
lived world.51 The rise of pictorial naturalism as a sign of an outgrowing of
religious devotion is a causal link that has had a strong hold on art history
as a discipline.52 By this logic, painterly attention to things in the world and
concern with the mechanisms of human perception were signs of distractions from the divine. This correlation has left little place for a relationship
between piety and inventiveness. Hugo van der Goes breaks this mold, shattering potted notions that modernism conforms to a secularizing progress
that abandons “medieval” religiosity. Across his large-scale works, the idea of
turning back on relatively recent modes of representation to fit the particular
circumstances of a spiritual scene remains consistent, though the implementation of this idea varies from work to work.
Pentimenti and repentance
A history of art that attends primarily to the question of where in the artist’s
career The Fall of Man originated is governed by an epistemological approach
that derives significance from perceiving stylistic development over time.
The writing of this sort of history may neglect to study artistic process — the
creation of a single work — as an epistemic system in and of itself. To do so,
to work from the surface of the painting as a record of layering, especially
where it has registered chemical changes over time, can do more than point
to evidence of who made what and how. It can give insight into a painterly
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way of plotting scenes. It can describe how the requirements of planning
toward a completed image yielded new kinds of knowledge, perhaps disordering relationships of first and last, near and far, that are experienced in
areas other than visual art, such as biblical prose, liturgy, or religious ritual.
The Tree of Knowledge is a passage in Goes’s Fall (fig. 1) that inverts
an expected order. In Genesis, God creates the heavens on the first two days,
and vegetation on the third (Gen. 1:1 – 11). Ordinarily, painting affirms this
Old Testament sequencing. The sky is often painted as if “already there”;
that is, it appears as though behind everything else that is to come.53 But
Goes pushes against the notion of heavens as “back there.” Patches of pale
blue that look like dappled light through the leaves are shapes added on top
of the tree.54 In avoiding “ready-made alternatives,” Goes, like Cézanne,
“abandoned himself to the chaos of sensation.”55 Firmament glints as jagged
shapes with irregular edges. The sky is not an unpunctured expanse, shapeless and remote. It juts forward in shards, broken and startlingly close.
To dismiss attention to Goes’s disruptions to painting’s established
notions of foreground and background as merely a poetic reading of the
painting (as if poetry were not the attempt at truthful expression through
the demands of syntax, that is, through the governance of order) is to deny
that the desire for certain effects allowed the painter — and his beholder — to
see in new ways. In the Fall of Man, two other zones of observable layering
are significant because they are places of artistic revision, that is, where degradation due to the increasing transparency of oil paint over time has made
visible Goes’s responses to his earlier plans. These are Eve’s fingers and her
foot, regions that may be thought of, respectively, and in the context of the
Fall, as sites of action and consequence. To ignore these marks, to see only
with the period eye, would be, in Didi-Huberman’s words, “a denial of the
flesh of things.”56 Yet defenders of restoration caution against allowing time’s
corrosive effects to so occupy a surface as to interfere with the apprehension
of a painting.57 The dangers of doing so are characterized either as treating the image too much as an object (putting on display its physical state
and deemphasizing its artistic merit) or treating the object too much like a
new image (permitting the viewer an encounter with a scene distractingly
restructured from the one the artist finalized). But in Goes’s panel, the visibly tainted flesh attests to the age of the object and to the artist’s calibrations
of the temporal moment of the composition as it relates to the beholder’s
point of view. The greens that discolor Eve’s fingers and foot render the Fall
of Man an “epistemic image,” in that the painting discloses knowledge about
artistic procedure without requiring the peering through of layers with the
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aid of reflectography or radiography or the lining up of existing drawings
and studies into an order (a possibility not granted by the survival rate of
drawings from the fifteenth century).
Goes’s Fall of Man, in its present state, reveals the kind of artistic thinking that is made apparent in a finished image for which work-inprogress sketches exist. A trial proof of Albrecht Dürer’s engraved Adam and
Eve, for example (see fig. 13), presents for posterity the kind of vision that
only artists saw. For engraving — as for painting too — it was common first
to lay down the landscape and leave reserves where the figures would go.
Such plotting was akin to the ordered days of divine creation, when God
brought forth land, trees, fish and fowl, and last made “man in his own
image” (Gen. 1:27). In the sequencing of biblical prose, there is no void for
humans where uninhabited land is described. In Dürer’s trial, however, the
first parents are shadows of what they will become. Adam’s tilted leg is the
first to take a stance. In the process of making, the artist worked through a
glimpse of the world not yet fully formed. Sights of the inchoate may have
arrested the imagination. Alfred Acres has suggested that the demon in the
umbra of the Portinari Altarpiece — for whom there is no trace in the underdrawing — may have evolved out of the painter’s experience with portraying
shadows: “By being born in the paint alone, the evil being came late and
perhaps last to a scene first populated by the holy figures, witnesses, and
angels. His arrival could have been inspired by the place itself, while the
painter was crafting dark recesses in a world of light.”58 The visions that
came to a painter along the way could be both destructive and constructive.
It is perhaps for this reason — to show the kinds of things he saw — that in
his celebrated brush drawing van Eyck left raw and unready Saint Barbara
and her workmen, who go about heaving, hauling, and building up a Gothic
tower (see fig. 14).59 The background is filled with scenes of labor: on the top
of the building tiny constructors use pulleys to lift heavy stones. None of
this was finished in color but was left as a kind of dusty monochrome. The
painting is a work in progress about a work in progress, a quip about unfinish, a refusal to flesh out.
Hugo van der Goes allowed his process in the Fall to become part
of its finish. Economical with paint, he used primary marks in the service of
surface. The underlayer beneath flesh tones suffices in the place of contours.
Adam’s outline is limned by a layer of earthy brownish red, laid down first to
prepare the hue of his skin. The underlying brushwork of the initial layers of
paint shines through, giving the impression of muscles and tendons pressing
up from below.60 This exposure of the underneath layer enriches the effect of
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Figure 13.
Albrecht Dürer, engraving trial proof for Adam and Eve (1504).
24.8 × 18.6 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London.
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Figure 14.
Jan van Eyck, Saint Barbara (1437). Brush drawing on chalk ground
laid on oak panel, 41.4 × 27.8 cm. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.
Photo: Hugo Maertens, Collection KMSKA-Flemish Community (CC0).
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Figure 15.
Albrecht Dürer, study for Adam and Eve (1504). Pen and brown ink,
21.6 × 27.5 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London.
the flesh and was likely an appearance that the artist, following a common
practice, had planned. But over time, chemical changes have altered the
picture’s appearance, upsetting boundaries between body, food, and grass.
Standing at the center of the verdant garden, holding in her lowered hand
the already bitten fruit, the offender’s fingers look dipped in green. This is
because the artist changed his mind and lengthened Eve’s grasp. To do this,
he needed to paint past the reserve left for her hand and over the alreadylaid-down grass, whose color has now come through.
The elongation of Eve’s fingers extends the visibility of her culpability. In the case of Dürer’s studies for his engraving of Adam and Eve in 1504,
the articulation of guilt is also thought out in terms of grip. A drawing at the
British Museum (see fig. 15) shows Dürer considering the placement of the
apple in Adam’s hand. Another at the Morgan Library (see fig. 16), in which
both Adam and Eve hold a pome, reveals that he cut the sheet on which he
had drawn the two figures to bring them closer to one another.61 Both of
these were decisions about composition that he would work back from. In the
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Figure 16.
Albrecht Dürer, study for Adam and Eve (1504). Pen and brown
ink and brown wash, with corrections in white gouache, on two
separate sheets of paper, cut by the artist and joined together by a
third strip, 24.2 × 20.1 cm. Source: The Morgan Library and
Museum, New York.
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finalized print (see fig. 17), Adam has not yet grasped the apple, and he and
his temptress stand further apart, his hand reaching toward — but not making contact with—her thigh. The completed composition might, in light of
Dürer’s trials, be seen as a kind of backtracking, or slipping back in time, a
determination that the right chronological moment to portray is the “not yet”
rather than the clutch of Adam’s fall into sin. Dürer’s desire in 1504 was to
unmake some of the story he had already advanced.
The epistemic nature of Goes’s painting is not that it registers a
desire to rewind to an earlier moment, but that its visible alterations may
be seen as a calibration of action and consequence, a further articulation of
clutch and a restrained rendering of stance. Eve’s foot is partially overlaid in
green. This is the result of a discoloration in a pigment designed to obscure a
once fuller view.62 Goes initially painted a more complete foot as seen from
above, then cut it down to a foreshortened sliver by partially covering it up.
With her left heel raised, not touching the earth, the painting refuses to
affirm the security of Eve’s step. Compared to Adam, she has less footing on
the ground. The visibility of this adjustment makes plain the relationship of
bodily position to spiritual slant. In Goes, this is articulated by the amount
of contact between feet and earth. In Dürer’s engraving, it is pronounced
by the distance of the four feet from the bottom margin of the page: Adam
holds the higher (moral) ground.
What this attention to the unstable nature of Eve’s footing recalls
is that detachment from place is the eventual outcome of the Fall. This is
another way in which we might see the subject matter of this “first work”
as setting up the problems with which painting, at large, will become occupied. Perspective, the ability to see human figures as fitting comfortably into
the world, would try to negate the notion that the expulsion from paradise
promotes — perfect integration as a lost condition. Nature has never again
been hospitable to man. The hostility of surroundings to figural presence
is something that the twentieth century would reassert, as atmosphere
became surface and pushed the figure out. The pentimenti visible on the
surface of Goes’s Fall — at Eve’s gripping fingers and at her weight-bearing
foot — put forward possession and stance as troubled matters that demand to
be reworked and rethought.
Questioning the grounds of prioritization
This essay has argued that two forms of chronological ordering — establishing
the sequence of surviving works and studying process as a progression of
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Figure 17.
Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve (1504). Engraving, 24.8 × 18.6 cm.
© The Trustees of the British Museum, London.
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layers and changes — should not be seen as meaningful ends in and of themselves even if they claim to bear evidence of how and when paintings from
the past were made. Instead, these two methods of inquiry should be considered in coordination with the narrative content of the paintings so as to
foster deep engagement with the messages within the works and to promote
acknowledgment that certain historical methods are bound to soteriological
temporal models.63 To allow for this awareness is to admit that the allegations of authority to make determinations about chronology are generated by
scholars trained by the very content of the paintings to think proleptically.
Studying artistic process may alert the modern-day beholder to visionary
experiences afforded by in-progress states: the inchoateness of incompletion
as a generator of form. To imagine this possibility is to insist that technical
study not coldly detach from but passionately connect with aspects of art
that are metaphysical, communicative, or occult.
The madness of Hugo van der Goes also ought not be taken as a
matter of art historical interest in and of itself (how Ofhuys’s testimony is
to be treated in the history of diagnostic medicine is another matter), for to
coddle this designation as either the cause or the effect of his artistic achievement is to excite a Romantic association between “genius” and psychological torment.64 How then might the complexities of studying Hugo van der
Goes and his “first work” open to some of the twenty-first century’s art historical concerns?
One approach is to think critically about what an “ur-image” is
and how an iconographic tradition that names certain moments as such is
associated with particular forms of history writing. The Fall of Man is a
subject matter in which knowledge, sex, labor, and altered vision are tied
to expulsion. Loss of land or the instability of a human place upon it are
conditions that drive art-making of the twenty-first century and motivate
critical discourses that interrogate long-established art historical methods.65
This is true for art and histories of art that address global climate change or
the countless campaigns of colonial violence that have uprooted indigenous
inhabitants from their terrains. Homing in on beings not situated in spaces
but cast out from places shifts the focus of early modern European painting
away from the achievements of perspective and toward an ethics of understanding the relationship between causality, chronology, and exile.
Drawing iconography of the Fall into comparison with concerns
raised by these present-day issues demands establishing differences in narratives of agency as well as in models for recording time. The quest for knowledge and hubristic aspiration are understood as disobedience to God in the
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Judeo-Christian narrative and as the motivation behind interhuman acts
of subjugation and dispossession in narratives that decentralize this point
of view. Loss of paradise, in Genesis, is associated with settling, building,
procreating; it does not engage problems of the refusal of refuge or asylum,
problems of having no place to land. Because the word colonial takes root in
the Latin verb colere, which means to cultivate or farm, it should be asked
whether Adam and Eve are better analogized to the colonizer than to the
dispossessed.66 This question should be pressed when the “first parents” are
portrayed with white skin, as they are in Goes’s painting and in the European visual tradition at large. The story of the Fall establishes as the response
to shame the act of covering up — Adam’s hand at his genitalia, the flower
in front of Eve’s — entrenching a psychological connection between vulnerability and concealment. How might a culture look different if it reinforced
as an instinctual response to shame not the hiding but the further exposition
of the self?
Because it brings about displacement and death, the Fall creates
a division between prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. This is different
from the intention of postcolonial theory, which, in removing from the word
postcolonial the hyphen between the prefix and the adjective it describes refers
not to two moments — the before and after of early modern conquest — but
to social conditions of subjugation that exist in occupied, dependent, diasporic, or transnational communities. The understanding of the term
postcolonial as “an ideological rather than a temporal aftermath” is a politicized critique of chronological order.67
With these ethical concerns about historical methods in mind, the
publicly stated aim of the educative value of technical art history requires
qualification and refinement. It is no secret that this approach appeals to
art history’s long-standing desire for resemblance to science — a lust that in
the past has led the discipline down dangerous ideological paths to claims
of objectivity and socially decontextualized systems of classifications. What
has saved this history from repeating itself is that what constitutes the scientific has shifted to investigations in laboratories with medical-grade observational tools and the promotion of the mantra that, as in all branches of the
sciences, the data derived is open to interpretation. Machine-aided study
of strata, when taught in seminars, or if it is to be introduced into broad
methodological surveys representing the discourse of art history at large (as a
recent article in the Art Bulletin has proposed), ought to be offered with the
caveat that if these techniques were developed because they seemed particularly suitable to European paintings, they are not universally of service.68 In
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certain cases they can be applied to works outside this tradition in ways that
honor rather than contort the heritage of other cultures. Early Netherlandish painting has been a “ground zero” of technical art history. The promise
of disclosing artistic intentions lies at this method’s core.69 The mode of
thought it unlocks — foreseeing outcomes at beginning stages — is a process
present in forms of planned image-making distinguishable from the spontaneity of art that is freely composed, compiled by chance, driven by random
data-culling, or dependent on audience participation in its performance.
Thus it is imperative that when argued for as an art historical approach,
one that demands recognition in university curricula, technical art history
should not be detached from cultural histories that link the study of process
to an understanding of myth, ritual, economic and labor histories, methods of time-keeping, and the breakdown between categories of subject and
object. Without these contingencies and contexts, without a statement of the
values it instills above and beyond the skills it cultivates, technical art history will always appear to be affirming knowledge categories and epistemological procedures associated with Enlightenment thought. Scientific studies
of paintings produced in Europe in the fifteenth century too often begin
with questions of who made what when — questions that prioritize authorship and art-market value, thereby advertising what Anne-Sophie Lehmann has called “the commodity of process.”70 Putting forward instead other
conditions — such as separation from its component parts, vandalism, damage, or neglect — is one way to hint at the transferability of the approaches
to problems associated with painting from this period to conditions faced by
the at-risk heritage of other cultures.71 So too is the proposition that an analysis of materials can deepen an understanding of the correlation between
the natural origins of those materials and the means by which the culture
that utilizes them visually narrates its beliefs about creation, environmental
resources, topography, and time.72
Grants that have brought together museum staff, chemists, and students have opened — to those who attend universities with art collections
of a certain caliber or those in cities with museums that house conservation labs — enticements to students to peer into the secrets of the unseen:
microscopic views, X-rays, and photographic documentation of how nowrestored objects once looked.73 These collaborations have been established
in the name of interdisciplinarity and in the spirit of redressing an academic
“contempt for matter” that is seen to have been spawned by a privileging of
lofty theories and ideas over the fact and presence of material things.74 But,
as Claire Farago has argued, the association of any method with only a few
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top research universities that can have the resources to train art historians
for the field of the future “is missing both the opportunity and the responsibility of art history to that future.”75 Without explicitly stating what it is
that art history is adding to the marriage of disciplines beyond providing the
objects to be put under scientific scrutiny, without making clear the rigor
of social, religious, and economic histories and the consultation of primary
texts, technical art history will merely replace one elitism with another:
it will assert that art history is expensive.76 It will incur the envy of other
humanistic disciplines because it will have externally funded budgets that
soar like those of the sciences. It will affirm an institutional delusion that
to do important work requires a lot of money while losing the eloquence to
describe why the work is important.
Art history’s relationship to capital has always been vexed. Karel
van Mander’s comment about court painters — “art follows wealth for its
rich rewards” — proves true too in the reverse: wealth follows art.77 This
statement describes the danger that the perception of technical art history
will succumb to if the culturally relative meanings behind materials, trials,
accidents, and concepts of time are neither imaginatively pursued nor invitingly put forward.78 The statement also speaks to a paradox at the core of
the biography of Hugo van der Goes. And this returns us to Ofhuys’s text.
Having earned celebrity prior to his joining the Rood Klooster
monastery, Goes was given permission immediately upon his investiture to
“seek solace and entertainment of all kinds after the fashion of the people
of the world.” Prior Thomas, we are told, permitted the novice to partake
of the festivities of visitors of high rank, including Archduke Maximilian:
“this had the effect,” writes Ofhuys, “that he was made more familiar with
worldly pomp than with the ways of penance and humility.”79 Ofhuys suggests that the painter’s torment had to do with the fear that his hubris would
bring him damnation. Panofsky dismisses this analysis as “sanctimonious
malice.”80 I would call it something to discuss. Goes’s presumptive predicament expresses an anxiety familiar to many practitioners of art history about
the exclusionary lavishness of its objects and methods. To open this unease
up for interrogation may be seen as biting the hand that feeds.81 Sometimes
a transgressor is required to tooth the first tear.
•
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Notes
1
2
3
This article developed over years of looking and discussing, first with Monika Strolz,
who, during the the morning hours of the summer of 2015, before the galleries opened
to the public, kindly brought me close to the paintings and into her laboratory at
the the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. I am grateful for her kindness, for
the generosity of Margaret Koster, and for the dedicated and insightful feedback of
Sonja Drimmer and Anna-Claire Stinebring.
For the placement of the painting as Hugo van der Goes’s “first work,” see Adolf
Goldschmidt, “Notizen und Mitteilungen, Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft,”
Deutsche Literaturzeitung 24 (1903): 997 – 99; Wolfgang Schöne, Die grossen Meister
der niederländischen Malerei des 15. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: H. Schmidt and
C. Günther, 1939), 116 – 17; Herbert von Einem, “Entwicklungsfragen bei Hugo van
der Goes,” Das Werk des Künstlers 2 (1941 – 42): 153 – 99, at 189 – 92; Ludwig von Baldass, Hans Memling (Vien: A. Schroll, 1942), 36 (dates diptych ca. 1465 – 70); Max J.
Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, Volume 4: Hugo van der Goes, trans. Heinz
Norden (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1969 [original German edition 1934]), 23; Erwin
Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1964), 338 – 40 (dates diptych to 1467 – 68); Otto Pächt,
Early Netherlandish Painting: From Rogier van der Weyden to Gerard David, ed. Monika Rosenauer, trans. David Britt (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 156. Dissent with
these opinions is expressed in an essay which dates the diptych to 1478, after the Portinari Altarpiece. See Karl Oettinger, “Das Rätsel der Kunst des Hugo van der Goes,”
Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, n.s., 12 (1938): 43 – 76, at 55.
Friedrich Winkler also removes Goes’s Fall from his “early work,” dating it to ca.
1477; Das Werk des Hugo van der Goes (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1964), 43.
Carel Vosmaer, Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (La Haye [The
Hague], 1868); Catherine B. Scallen, Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 37 – 51. For more
on the historical context of chronological arrangement, see Christopher P. Heuer,
“Entropic Segers,” Art History 35, no. 5 (2012): 934 – 57, at 950.
On the commercial production of photographs after works of art beginning in the
1850s, see Anthony Hamber, “The Use of Photography by Nineteenth-Century Art
Historians,” in Art History through the Camera’s Lens, ed. Helene E. Roberts (London:
Gordon and Breach, 1995), 89 – 121; and Hamber, “The Photography of the Visual
Arts, 1839 – 1880, Parts I, II, III,” Visual Resources 5 (1989): 289 – 310; 6 (1989): 19 – 41
and 165 – 79. See also André Malraux, Museum without Walls, trans. S. Stuart and
F. Prince (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), 30; William Ivins, Prints and Visual
Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1953), 136. On the assessment of the
usefulness or misleading nature of photography for the nineteenth-century historian of art, including Wölfllin’s distrust of it, see Wolfgang M. Freitag, “Early Uses of
Photography in the History of Art,” Art Journal 39, no. 2 (1979): 117 – 23. For an early
statement about the difference between the facture and intermediating artistic hand
of reproductive printmaking as opposed to reproductive photography as “cold, dry
science,” see Lewis Wright, “Substitutes for Wood Engraving,” Art Journal 28, no. 51
Brisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 355
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4
5
6
7
8
(1866): 87 – 88, quoted in Trevor Fawcett, “Graphic vs. Photographic in NineteenthCentury Reproduction,” Art History 9, no. 2 (1986): 198 – 212, at 202.
Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 – 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage Books,
1980), 194 – 228, at 197.
For an evaluation of evolutionist and anti-evolutionist interpretations of art history as a polemic in favor of the study of individual works of art, see Hans Sedlmayr,
“Toward a Rigorous Study of Art,” trans. Mia Fineman, in The Vienna School Reader:
Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New York:
Zone Books, 2003), 133 – 79. For an understanding of how bound up the historiography of early Netherlandish painting has been with a notion of a progressive history of
style, a key reading is Keith Moxey, “Art History’s Hegelian Unconscious: Naturalism
as Nationalism,” in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25 – 51. Moxey dismantles the hegemony of chronological sequencing by demonstrating how a work of art can participate in rupturing
the notion that it belongs exclusively to the past, in Visual Time: The Image in History
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), esp. 31.
Otto Pächt, The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method, ed. Christopher S.
Wood and David Britt (London: Harvey Miller, 1999), 62 – 66 and 105; and see Pächt,
Early Netherlandish Painting, 156. For further discussion of the necessity of chronology, see Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:20.
Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the
Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 1 – 25,
at 14. A similar denouncement of the use of works of art as laboratory subjects for an
applied science (this time in reference to dendrochronology) is made in an essay that
considers the art historical practice of dating according to assessments of style; see
Willibald Sauerländer, “Alterssicherung, Ortssicherung und Individualisierung,” in
Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung, ed. Hans Belting, Heinrich Dilly, Wolfgang Kemp,
Willibald Sauerländer, and Martin Warnke (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1986), 117 – 45, at 123.
Panofsky’s skepticism is critically examined in Caroline Fowler, “Technical Art History as Method,” Art Bulletin 101, no. 4 (2019): 9 – 17, at 10 – 11.
This comment is made in the context of cautioning art historians from studying the
X-ray of a fifteenth-century painting as though it were a newly created artwork; see
J. R. J. van Asperen de Boer, “An Introduction to the Scientific Examination of Paintings,” in the special issue “Scientific Examination of Early Netherlandish Painting:
Applications in Art History,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 26 (1975): 1 – 40, at
3. As Noa Turel has argued, and as the research of curators and conservation scientists
such as Maryan W. Ainsworth has shown, technical study often leads to a destabilization of the myth of the single author and instead reveals the many workshop hands
who contributed to the making of a painting; see Noa Turel, “Genius Disrobed: The
Early Netherlandish Underdrawing Craze and the End of a Connoisseurship Era,”
Journal of Art Historiography, no. 16 (2017): 1 – 16, at arthistoriography.files.wordpress
.com/2017/05/turel.pdf; Maryan W. Ainsworth, Gerard David: Purity of Vision in the
Age of Transition (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998); and Ainsworth,
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9
10
11
12
ed., Workshop Practice in Early Netherlandish Painting: Case Studies from Van Eyck
through Gossart (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2016).
See Henri Hymans, L’Exposition des primitifs flamands à Bruges (Paris: Gazette des
Beaux Arts, 1902); and W. H. James Weale, Exposition des primitifs flamands et d’art
ancien (Bruges: Desclée, De Brouwer, and co., 1902). By the nineteenth century, the
term primitif had come to refer to “artises, peintres ou sculptuers qui ont précédé les
maîtres de la grande époque,” that is, art preceding the High Renaissance; Nouveau
Larousse illustré, 7 vols. (Paris: Larousse, 1890 – 1904), 7:31 – 32; Andrée Hayum, “The
1902 Exhibition, Les Primitifs flamands: Scholarly Fallout and Art Historical Reflections,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 11 (2014): 11 – 20, at 15, arthistoriography.files
.wordpress.com/2014/11/hayum.pdf. For a discussion of the decision to use the term
primitifs as a rejection of the Italianate retrospection associated with the term Renaissance, see Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 447 – 48.
The connection between the Portinari Altarpiece and Hugo van der Goes is first
made in the 1550 edition of Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed
architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Firenze, 1878), 1:184 – 85. The Portinari
Altarpiece (253 × 304 cm) is housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and may
be viewed at the museum website, at www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/adoration-of-the
-shepherds-with-angels-and-saint-thomas-saint-anthony-saint-margaret-mary
-magdalen-and-the-portinari-family-recto-annunciation-verso.
Gaspar Ofhuys’s account is found in his chronicle of the monastery, Originale Cenobii
Rubeevallis in Zonia prope Bruxellam in Brabancia, in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale
de Belgique, Msc. II, 480.017, fols. 115v – 18r. This document was first published by
the uncle of Émile Wauters and in the same year that Wauters composed his portrait
of Goes. See Alphonse Wauters, Hugues van der Goes: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Bruxelles,
1872). The text was transcribed and translated into German by Hjalmar G. Sander,
“Beiträge zur Biographie Hugos van der Goes und zur Chronologie seiner Werke,”
Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 35 (1912): 519 – 38. The English translation here is
from Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, 1400 – 1600: Sources and Documents (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 15 – 18. The indebtedness of portions of Ofhuys’s text to Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum
(Nuremberg 1483), bk. 6, chap. 6, is discussed in William A. McCloy, “The Ofhuys
Chronicle and Hugo van der Goes” (Ph.D. diss., State University of Iowa, 1958),
31 – 32. See also H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth- Century Germany (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 26 – 32. For the practice of
recording narratives of individual members of the Windesheim Congregation and
the particular emphasis of this sect on the Christological significance of humility, see
Margot Wittkower and Rudolf Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and
Conduct of Artists (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), 111 – 12; and Margaret
L. Koster, Hugo van der Goes and the Procedures of Art and Salvation (London: Harvey
Miller, 2008), 9 – 14.
Vincent van Gogh — The Letters, ed. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker, 6
vols. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), letters 011 (1:32 – 33), 361 (2:373 – 75), 650
(4:199 – 201), and 709 (4:337). In the first of these letters, van Gogh is inquiring about
Brisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 357
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photographs of paintings, indicating that he already has one of the Hugo van der
Goes portraits. From 1869 to 1873, van Gogh worked for the firm Goupil and Co.,
which sold reproductive photographs.
13 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 330. On the association between Hugo van
der Goes’s madness and his modernity, see also Pächt, Early Netherlandish Painting,
155. For a denouncement of this association and a plea to understand Goes’s paintings
as expressions of religious fervor, see Oettinger, “Das Rätsel,” 74.
14 For more on Ficino’s association of melancholy with genius, see Erwin Panofsky, The
Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005),
165 – 67; and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 102 – 3. Foucault, citing the paintings of
Bosch and Bruegel, agrees with Panofsky’s “point of origin” when he writes, “from
the fifteenth century on, the face of madness has haunted the imagination of Western
man.” Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason (London: Routledge, 1973), 15.
15 Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:48; Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964), 155 – 56.
16 Van Mander’s notion that the painter’s madness was due to unrequited love, though it
was memorialized in a sonnet by Lucas de Heere, is not often entertained at length in
the scholarly literature on the artist. Jochen Becker, “Zur niederländischen Kunstliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts: Lucas de Heere,” Simiolus 6 (1972 – 73): 113 – 27, at 123.
Hieronymus Münzer, in his traveling record of 1495, attributed Goes’s illness to his
inability to rival the Ghent Altarpiece, an explanation in which Panofsky finds “a grain
of truth” (Early Netherlandish Painting, 331).
17 For humility’s curative powers, especially in an Augustinian context that would have
resonated for the brothers of the Roode Kloster, see Rudolf Arbesmann, “The Concept of ‘Christus Medicus’ in Augustine,” Traditio 10 (1954): 1 – 28; and Mitchell B.
Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia I” (New York:
Zone Books, 2018), 94. Friedländer suggests that “the superstitious theological verdict,” that the affliction was Goes’s punishment, might have further exacerbated the
painter’s state of mind, “deepening his delusions and lending them content” (Early
Netherlandish Painting, 4:15).
18 This portion of the text is omitted in Stechow’s translation. I quote here from Koster,
Hugo van der Goes, 14 – 15.
19 Panofksy, Early Netherlandish Painting, 332. For a similar circular logic, whereby the
anxiety about finishing his work was both cause and exacerbator of Goes’s disease, see
Pächt, Early Netherlandish Painting, 176; Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting,
4:15; and Griselda Pollock, “Artists, Mythologies, and Media — Genius, Madness, and
Art History,” Screen 21, no. 3 (1980): 57 – 96, at 70.
20 Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
(New York: Schocken, 1988), 203 – 17, at 214.
21 Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 111.
22 Meyer Schapiro, “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-Life,”
Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: G. Braziller, 1978), 1 – 38, at 5.
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23 Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Mortification of the Image: Death as a Hermeneutic in
Hans Baldung Grien,” Representations, no. 10 (Spring 1985): 52 – 101, at 82.
24 On prolepsis as a mode of Christian painting, see Alfred Acres, Renaissance Invention
and the Haunted Infancy (London: Harvey Miller; Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 45.
25 Adolf Goldschmidt, “Der Monforte-Altar des Hugo van der Goes,” Zeitschrift für
Bildende Kunst 26 (1915): 221 – 30, at 224. But for a dissenting opinion, contrasting
Goes’s first parents with van Eyck’s, see Joseph Destrée, Hugo van der Goes (Paris:
G. Van Oest, 1914), 39. The Ghent Altarpiece, a twelve-panel polyptych, also called
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, is housed in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, and may
be viewed in high resolution at Closer to Van Eyck, closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be
/ghentaltarpiece/#home. For a trajectory of Goes’s career whereby he moved away
from the realism of van Eyck to express the passionate spirituality of the devotio moderna, see Bernhard Ridderbos, De melancholie van de kunstenaar: Hugo van der Goes
en de oudnederlandse schilderkunst (’s-Gravenhage [The Hague]: SDU, 1991).
26 In Leopold Wilhelm’s inventory, no. 860, the description of the two panels plus Saint
Genevieve is as follows: “Zway khleine Stückhl aneinader von Öelfarb auf Holcz,
in den ainen Adam vnd Eua vnder der Baumb cum serpent, in den andern ein Versperbildt Christi, warbey vnser liebe Fraw, St. Johannes, Joseph vnd andere Figurn
mehr seint. In einen hölzenen vergulden Rämbl, auszwendig auf einer Seithen St.
Genouefa, auf der andern ein Schildt, warin ein schwarczer Alder’ jedes 1 Span 9 Finger hoch vnd 1 Span 4 Finger braidt. Original von Joann von Eyck” [Two small panels side-by-side of oil painting on wood, in one of them is found Adam and Eve under
the tree with the serpent, in the other a Pietà with Christ, in which is found our Lady,
St. John, St. Joseph, and other figures. (On the verso), in a gilded wooden frame is St.
Genevieve on one side and a Coat of Arms with a black alder, each 1 span and 9 fingers high and 1 span 4 fingers wide. Original by Jan van Eyck]. Quoted in Flämische
Malerei von Jan van Eyck bis Pieter Bruegel d.Ä.: Katalog der Gemäldegalerie (Wien:
Herold, 1981), 189 – 92; my translation.
27 Alfred Michiels, Histoire de la Peinture Flamande et Hollandaise (Paris, 1866). After
the acceptance of Michiels’s attribution, in 1896 the painting was listed in the catalogue in Vienna as a work by Hugo van der Goes. For the provenance of the painting
and its full attribution history, see Elisabeth Dhanens, Hugo van der Goes (Antwerpen: Mercatorfonds, 1998), 221 – 24.
28 Acres characterizes how a diptych structure operates thus: “The meaning of one half
resolves only by circulation of an observer’s thought through the other” (Renaissance
Invention, 45).
29 A symposium to present the technical research drawn from the restoration of Rogier
van der Weyden’s Lamentation (housed in the Mauritshuis), which was held in the
Hague on November 21 and 22, 2019, challenged the attribution of this painting to
van der Weyden’s own hand. In his lecture, Bernhard Ridderbos discussed the influence of the painting, citing in particular its impact on Goes’s Lamentation. If the
Mauritshuis painting cannot be securely attributed to van der Weyden, it can without
doubt be considered “Rogierian.” I am grateful to Anna-Claire Stinebring for sharing
her notes and impressions of this symposium with me.
Brisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 359
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30 Friedrich Winkler, Das Werk des Hugo van der Goes (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1964),
42; John Oliver Hand, Catherine A. Metzger, and Ron Spronk, Prayers and Portraits:
Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art;
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 7. For Goes’s Vienna diptych as one
of the “most original and expressive essays in dyadic form,” see Colin Thompson and
Lorne Campbell, Hugo van der Goes and the Trinity Panels in Edinburgh (Glasgow: A.
Zwemmer, 1974), 88.
31 Robert Rey, Hugo van der Goes (Bruxelles: Éditions du Cercle d’Art, 1945), 18 – 26.
Doubt about the original coexistence of the panels is also expressed in Pächt, Early
Netherlandish Painting, 156. For a detailed report of the underdrawings, see Ingrid
Alexander, Franz Mairinger, and Roger van Schoute, “Le dessin sous-jacent chez
van der Goes: Le diptyque du Péché original et la Déploration du Kunsthistorisches
Museum de Vienne,” Revue des archéologues et historiens d’art de Louvain 11 (1978):
73 – 83.
32 Pächt, Early Netherlandish Painting, 159.
33 Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 111.
34 Jochen Sander, Hugo van der Goes: Stilentwicklung und Chronologie (Mainz, Ger.: P.
von Zabern, 1992), 79 – 90. On page 77, Sander reports on the dendrochronological
data from the two panels. The earliest possible felling dates are 1457 for the Fall and
1463 for the Lamentation; thus, the earliest possible creation dates are, respectively,
1459 and 1465. See also Hand, Metzger, and Spronk, Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, cat. no. 12, 98 n. 13. This catalogue entry’s more radical suggestion than that the
two sides may never have been attached in Goes’s own time is based on the fact that
copies are known of both the Fall and the Lamentation, but no replica of the diptych
exists. For images and entries on the two copies after the Fall and two after the Lamentation, see Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:68 and 75. Photographs of
the two copies after the Fall, along with the provenance history of the paintings, are
archived in the M. J. Friedländer collection of the Netherlands Institute for Art History; see BD/RKD – ONS/Photo-archive M. J. Friedländer, no. 0000112597 and no.
0000107468, at RKD – Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, rkd.nl/nl/explore
/images/106191#galleria and rkd.nl/nl/explore/images/62989#galleria. On Friedländer’s collection of about 15,000 photographs, mostly of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Netherlandish paintings, now housed at the RKD, see Suzanne Laemers,
“ ‘Ein wertvolles Hilfsmittel’: Het foto-archief van Max J. Friedländer,” RKD Bulletin
1 (2005): 37 – 39. For Friedländer’s own commentary on the use of photography for art
historical study, see Max J. Friedländer, On Art and Connoisseurship, trans. Tancred
Borenius (London: B. Cassierer, 1942), 197 – 99.
35 A summary of the arguments for this dating is found in Bernhard Ridderbos, “Hugo
Van Der Goes’s ‘Death of the Virgin’ and the Modern Devotion: An Analysis of a
Creative Process,” Oud Holland 120, no. 1/2 (2007): 1 – 30; and for his own interpretation of the painting, see Ridderbos, De melancholie van de kunstenaar, 56 – 57.
36 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 333 and 500 n. 2.
37 Dhanens, Hugo van der Goes, 360. Ofhuys recounts that Goes “spent a great deal of
time studying in a Flemish book.” For a discussion of compilation and reading practices of New Devotionalists, see Koster, Hugo van der Goes, 20. For other suggestions
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38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
of where self-portraiture might be located in Goes’s paintings, see Margaret L. Koster,
“New Documentation for the Portinari Altar-Piece,” Burlington Magazine 145, no.
1200 (2003): 164 – 79, at 175.
On stylistic classification as a scientific impulse that reached a height in German
and Austrian scholarship from the 1880s through the 1920s, see Willibald Sauerländer, “From ‘Stilus’ to Style: Reflection on the Fate of a Notion,” Art History 6 (1983):
253 – 70, at 264.
Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 336 – 37. The Adoration of the Magi, also called
the Monforte Altarpiece after the Spanish town where the painting was housed by a
college of Jesuits before being transferred to the Staatliche Mussen in Berlin, may be
viewed at Web Gallery of Art, www.wga.hu/support/viewer_m/z.html.
Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:50.
For the use of infrared reflectography in the Portinari Altarpiece to argue that Goes
first planned a perspectivally arranged recession and then rejected it for a flatter construction of space, see Koster, “New Documentation,” 175; and Koster, Hugo van der
Goes, 92.
Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:20. Friedländer also discusses the expectations of normative stylistic progression in his book on connoisseurship, or “the science of pictures” (On Art and Connoisseurship, 205 – 12).
Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:33.
Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 338.
Pächt, Early Netherlandish Painting, 201. Pächt goes on to suggest that the Death of
the Virgin is not an example of Goes’s “ultima maniera,” as Panofsky had argued, but
that the painter instead ended his career with his most distinctive aberration — the
oversized figural scale of the apostles in the Portinari Altarpiece and the Trinity Altarpiece. Pächt carefully lays forth this argument in an essay about the complicated chronology of Goes’s painting; see Otto Pächt, “Typenwandel im Werk des Hugo van der
Goes,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 22 (1969): 43 – 58.
Excluded from my discussion is an account of how Goes’s work has been considered
modern for the realism of his painting, particularly in regard to the shepherds in the
Portinari Altarpiece. See Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert, La renaissance septentrionale et
les premiers maîtres de Flandres (Bruxelles: G. Van Oest, 1905); Moxey, “Art History’s
Hegelian Unconscious,” 32 – 36. On Goes’s realism as a devotional mode of expression, particularly as it pertains to his use of light, still life, and character study, see
Susanne Franke, Raum und Realismus: Hugo van der Goes’ Bildproduktion als Erkenntnisprozess (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012).
“When a poet puts off an old style . . . he or she perpetuates an act of violence, so to
speak, on the self.” Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1.
The line, borrowed from Wallace Steven’s poem “Auroras of Autumn,” provides the
title for a compilation of essays by T. J. Clark which he introduces with the explanation that “already the modernist past is a ruin. . . . This has not happened, in my
view, because we have entered a new age. . . . On the contrary, it is just because the
‘modernity’ which modernism prophesied has finally arrived that the forms of representation it originally gave rise to are now unreadable.” T. J. Clark, Farewell to an
Brisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 361
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Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1999), 2.
49 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 337. For an understanding of the apostles’
hand gestures as expressions of practices associated with the devotio moderna (an argument for the painting as an expression of piety not madness), see Susan Koslow, “The
Impact of Hugo van der Goes’s Mental Illness and Late Medieval Religious Attitudes
on the Death of the Virgin,” in Healing and History: Essays for George Rosen, ed. Charles
E. Rosenberg (Kent: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1979), 27 – 50. For a discussion of the scale of figures in this painting, see also Ridderbos, De melancholie van
de kunstenaar, 56 – 57.
50 Goes’s paintings thus go against Carl Schnaase’s dictum that religious expression
should arise from delicate relationships of form and color. Carl Schnaase, Niederländische Briefe (Stuttgart, 1834), 365.
51 For Goes’s paintings as a commentary on the “mainstream realist tradition” of van
Eyck, see Craig Harbison, Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism (London: Reaktion,
2012), 16.
52 See Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and
Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Ernst H.
Gombrich, “The Quest for Spirituality,” chap. 4 of The Preference for the Primitive:
Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), especially his discussion of Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, 147.
53 For a discussion of the ordering of landscape and figures in cases where these two
elements were collaborations between artists or workshops, see Linda Jansen, “Shop
Collaboration in the Painting of Background Landscapes in the Workshop of Pieter
Coecke van Aelst,” in Making and Marketing: Studies of the Painting Process in
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth- Century Netherlandish Workshops, ed. Molly Faries (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2006), 119 – 42; and Alejandro Vergara, “Who Was Patinir?
What Is a Patinir?,” in Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue, ed. Alejandro Vergara
(Madrid: Prado, 2007), 19 – 45, at 31.
54 For an analogous “landscape plotted and pieced,” see Vendler’s discussion of Hopkins’s concept of “dapple,” which includes the obliteration of distinction between field
and ground, as expressed in his poem “Pied Beauty” (Breaking of Style, 17).
55 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader:
Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 59 – 75, at 63.
56 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, before Time: The Sovereignty of
Anachronism,” trans. Peter Mason, in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and
out of History, ed. Claire J. Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2003), 31 – 44, at 36.
57 Cesare Brandi, “Postscript to the Treatment of Lacunae,” in Theory of Restoration,
trans. Cynthia Rockwell and Dorothy Bell (Firenze: Nardini Editore, 2005), 90 – 93,
at 92, cited in Fowler, “Technical Art History,” 12.
58 Acres, Renaissance Invention, 178. For the discovery that the demon does not appear in
the evidence of infrared reflectography, see Koster, “New Documentation,” 171.
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60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
J. R. J. Asperen de Boer, “Over de techniek van Jan van Eycks ‘De Heilige Barbara,’ ”
Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Antwerp, 1992): 9 – 18.
Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:24.
Margaret Holben Ellis and Marjorie B. Cohn, “Drawing for Printing: An Expanded
Fabrication Narrative for Dürer’s Adam and Eve of 1504,” Master Drawings 55, no. 4
(2017): 435 – 53.
Though less pronounced, Adam’s fingers and toes also appear dipped in green. This is
the result of his extremities having been elongated beyond what the reserves had left.
Sander, Hugo van der Goes, 56 – 57.
The suggestion to link technical analysis of process to the shaping of a work’s content
was made early in the twentieth century by the founder of the Laboratoire microradiographique at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon. See Fernand Mercier, Les primitifs français: La peinture clunysienne en Bourgogne à l’ époque Romane (Paris: Picard,
1931), vii – xiii.
In his introduction to his translated and redacted version of Ofhuys’s document, Stechow states that “it has perhaps even greater significance for the history of medicine
and psychology than for the history of art” (Northern Renaissance Art, 15). I will add,
anecdotally, that when I presented a preliminary version of this paper at the Robert
E. and Jean F. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of
Wisconsin Madison on April 26, 2016, a professor of pharmacology approached me
after my talk to diagnose Hugo van der Goes with syphilis based on the evidence of
Ofhuys’s text. For a powerful critique of another aspect of the art historical treatment
of madness — how it has exiled its traces as “outsider art” rather than considered it as
integrative to the formation of modernism — see Kaira M. Cabañas, “Aferword,” in
Jacques Derrida, Artaud the Moma: Interjections of Appeal, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed.
Cabañas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 86; and Kaira M. Cabañas,
Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2018), 5.
For the relationship of the depiction of ground to moral stance, see Joseph L. Koerner,
Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2016).
The etymology and history of use of colonial terminology is explored in M. I. Finley,
“Colonies: An Attempt at a Typology,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26
(1976): 167 – 88, at 173.
Karen Eileen Overbey, “Postcolonial,” Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): 145 – 56, at
145. See also Sugata Ray, “Postcolonialism,” in The Encyclopedia of Empire, ed. John
M. MacKenzie (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 1 – 3, at 1; and James
D. Sidaway, “Postcolonial Geographies: An Exploratory Essay,” Progress in Human
Geography 24, no. 4 (2000): 591 – 612, at 594.
This proposal is made in Fowler, “Technical Art History,” 11. Fowler’s essay was
inspired by her residency as the A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physical
History of Art at Yale University, a position that was created to offer a curriculum that
could engage with the university’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.
Upon the acquisition of the facility where the institute is housed (known as “West
Brisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 363
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69
70
71
72
Campus”), the then president of Yale, Richard Levin, in an unfortunate analogy,
compared the university’s purchase of the Bayer Pharmaceutical factory to another
historic “westward expansion”: “In some ways, you could liken the West Campus
opportunity to the decision that Thomas Jefferson faced when confronted with the
opportunity to buy Louisiana. . . . Think about what would have happened if Jefferson had failed to buy Louisiana.” Mark Branch, “Deal of the Century,” Yale Alumni
Magazine 74, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 2010), at yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/2980-deal
-of-the-century?page=1. Maryan Ainsworth has also suggested that university programs offer technical art history as a required rather than elective course for the art
history major: Maryan W. Ainsworth, “From Connoisseurship to Technical Art History: The Evolution of the Interdisciplinary Study of Art,” Getty Conservation Institute
Newsletter 20, no. 1 (2005), electronic edition, at www.getty.edu/conservation
/publications_resources/newsletters/20_1/feature.html.
Defenses of “technical art history” often cite the coiner of the term, David Bomford,
who promised that the approach could go “far beyond the physical materials of works
of art into questions of artists’ methods and intentions.” David Bomford, introduction to Looking through Paintings: The Study of Painting Techniques and Materials in
Support of Art Historical Research, ed. Erma Hermens (Baarn, Neth.: De Prom, 1998),
9 – 12, at 9. See also David Bomford, “The Purposes of Technical Art History,” IIC
Bulletin 1 (2002): 4 – 7; and Bomford, “Editorial: A New History of Conservation and
Technical Studies,” Burlington Magazine 157, no. 1351 (2015): 670. Erma Hermens
likewise writes that technical history “aims at a thorough understanding of the physical object in terms of original intention”; see “Technical Art History: The Synergy of
Art, Conservation, and Science,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, ed. Matthew Rampley et al. (Leiden: Brill,
2012), 151 – 65, at 165. It should be noted that, in contrast to a pursuit of original linguistic usage that I have given here, summaries and assessments of postcolonial theory often admit to its complexity, transdisciplinarity, and the difficulty of tracing its
origin to a single scholar, even though particular authors are frequently cited. See, for
example, Antony D. King, “Colonialism,” in Grove Art Online, September 22, 2014,
doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T018767.
Ann-Sophie Lehmann, “Epilogue: ‘Good Art Theory Must Smell of the Studio,” in
Hiding Making — Showing Creation: The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, ed. AnnSophie Lehmann, Rachel Esner, and Sandra Kisters (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 245 – 55, at 246.
One scholar working to redress this issue is Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum. See, for example, Sanchita
Balachandran, “Race, Diversity, and Politics in Conservation: Our 21st Century
Crisis,” Conservators Converse, the blog of the American Institute for Conservation,
May 25, 2016, www.conservators-converse.org/2016/05/race-diversity-and-politics-in
-conservation-our-21st-century-crisis-sanchita-balachandran/.
Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 43 – 45.
On the use of synthetic pigments for the painting of modern life, see Laura Anne
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Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
73 See, for example, Ian McClure and Carol Snow, “Inside Art: Teaching Technical Art
History at the Yale University Art Gallery,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2013):
72 – 81.
74 Ann-Sophie Lehmann writes, “[T]he history of art is permeated with the superiority
of the concept of idea and a contempt for matter”; see “How Materials Make Meaning,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of
Art 62 (2012): 6 – 27, at 11.
75 Claire Farago, “Imagining Art History Otherwise,” in Global and World Art in the
Practice of the University Museum, ed. Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger
(Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2018), 115 – 30, at 117.
76 Programs that have been working to diversify the students who are afforded opportunities to train in museum studies and enter into doctoral programs include The Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and the Getty Foundation Multicultural Undergraduate Internship.
77 Carel van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters, trans. C. Van de Wall (New York:
Arno Press, 1936), 4.
78 For the contextualization of the emergence of this term, see Ainsworth, “From Connoisseurship to Technical Art History.” For a history of the development of the field
in Europe, including the perspective of skeptics, see Marco Cardinali, “Technical Art
History and the First Conference on the Scientific Analysis of Works of Art,” History
of Humanities 2, no. 1 (2017): 221 – 43.
79 Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, 16.
80 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 331.
81 Here the banqueter is a well-nourished and grateful one. The present author has benefited from participating in the Kress Foundation Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History (Summer 2016), and from teaching an Object-Based Study Workshop (Nov. 2019) and an Object-Based Study Seminar, “Concepts of Authorship in
the Early Modern Era” (Fall 2019), both supported by a multiyear Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation grant and offered through the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania and hosted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Brisman / Madness of Hugo van der Goes 365
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