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MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM The Salvator Mundi in Early Netherlandish Painting 1

(8.2.2023) Leonardo da Vinci probably wasn’t in any way dependant of a reimport of Early Netherlandish Salvator Mundi iconography when providing his own (?) Salvator Mundi design in c. 1494/95. As I have shown the basic scheme – with the arm with the blessing hand raised (see picture on the right; Giovanni del Biondo) – did already exist in 14th century Italian painting (and only the book of life had to be replaced with an orb). An early Italian tradition Ludwig H. Heydenreich did obviously not know when assembling what he could find of related iconographies for his 1964 essay in the Raccolta Vinciana. An essay that, in many ways, has not passed the test of time. Heydenreich’s perspective was definitively too narrow (as we will go on to show here), even if there indeed might have been a mutual influencing of Italian and Early Netherlandish iconographies. But it is worthwhile, for a number of reasons, to look at Early Netherlandish Salvator Mundi iconographies very in detail, as we will see in this first part of a two-part essay.

One) A Configuration of Iconographies

In Jan van Eyck we encounter the frontal Vera-Icon iconography (even if his original is lost) as well as a Salvator Mundi iconography that has not yet been looked at very carefully. In fact, if we begin our journey with Jan van Eyck (and with the Virgin and Child with Nicolas Rolin of 1435), it is becoming obvious that we have to do with a configuration of iconographies in which any frontally depicted (adult) Christ is only one possibility, one possible solution of the problem of how to depict Christ as a Salvator Mundi. I had, for practical reasons, defined a Salvator Mundi as a ›blessing Christ holding an orb‹. But iconographical types are only abstractions of what we may find in reality. And what we find, if looking closely into Early Netherlandish painting, is for example that depictions of God the Father are very close, very similar, and do exist actually in parallel to the Salvator Mundi iconography, due to blessing gesture as well as orb or globe in both iconographies (we will come back to that later); and we find other variations of the Salvator Mundi iconography. For example the depiction of Christ as a child, not shown frontally, but in three-quarter view, and holding a (miniature) globus cruciger, with his right hand blessing chancellor Rolin, in the Virgin and Child with Nicolas Rolin, a painting that Jan van Eyck provided for chancellor Nicolas Rolin in 1435. A painting that has and still is giving us much to think about.

Two) The Role of Nicolas Rolin

In the early 1980s one did know that Jan van Eyck had actually meant to paint also the purse of chancellor Rolin, and that, later in the process, someone must have decided not to render that purse (which is lacking in the finished picture).
In about 1990 it became clear, due to technical investigation by means of infrared reflectography, that originally Van Eyck had not intended to paint a blessing Christ (since the right arm of the Christ child had not been raised at all), and since then (it was revealed in the Palettes series by Alain Jaubert in 1989, but published by Louvre scholars somewhat later; for bibliographical references see here) we do know that probably Nicolas Rolin himself had intervened to have the Christ child in the picture bless his, Rolin’s representation in the very same picture. A rather spectacular art historical find by means of technical art history! And the picture, itself one of the most spectacular pictures in Early Netherlandish painting, since then, must be seen as an example of an important political figure using the means of images, of pictures, of paintings, to establish a view on himself as a historical figure, as someone being blessed by Christ (or wishing to be so). The picture, which is not only a most spectacular example of central perspective and of landscape painting, a picture that indeed acts as if it, the picture, in fact was a window into another reality, is thus also an example of a painting that must raise the question of what reality, whose reality do we see here, and who is actually establishing the reality that we are meant to see here.
One might say that we look into a space which is a conglomerate of an imagined quasi-historical space, but also an imagined spiritual space and in result an imaginary space, and while we are looking into that ›window‹, into the architectural landscape set into an urban as well as a natural landscape, our gaze crosses, as one might say, the act of blessing that is happening here. And since we know that, probably, this was the intention of chancellor Rolin himself, we must ask, on the basis of what we know, if it is in fact chancellor Rolin who stages and creates this Salvator Mundi iconography, and if, by doing that, chancellor Rolin is perhaps (as Alain Jaubert had written) staging the illusion of an illusion, which he does, in some sense, establish only helped by Jan van Eyck (the one illusion being the act of blessing, the other being the picture in its quality as a window that allows us to look into that window, but specifically also to notice that chancellor Rolin is being blessed or imagines to be so, or wishes to be blessed in a pictorial representation).

Three) Images of What Realities?

The painting raises further questions that are relevant also regarding any later Salvator Mundi iconography, because the painting raises the question of the status of painting and of the relation of the pictorial space, the space that is shown to us in the painting, with the real historical space of its context. In other words: if the Salvator Mundi iconography develops to be mainly one of frontally depicted representations of Christ, we must raise the question what actually did happen between a viewer at the time of the Renaissance and such a Salvator Mundi painting in which Christ was shown frontally, and shown to give a blessing gesture. Any viewer could imagine him- or herself being the one addressed by Christ, as chancellor Rolin is the one addressed by the Christ child in the painting commissioned by Rolin. But strictly speaking such picture (of a frontally depicted Christ) could only be thought as symbolically referring to Christ blessing a person, since a picture of Christ is not identical with Christ himself, and any pictorial blessing is not a real gesture.
One may wonder if at the time of the Renaissance, when representation grew to be more convincing, more naturalistic, more real or hyper-real – if men and women of the Renaissance made such distinction between pictorial reality and actual (perhaps spiritual) reality; because it is not easy to know in what way men and women of the Renaissance perceived such pictures, and lived with such pictures. The painting by Jan van Eyck actually does already foreshadow the question that Bruegel was to raise much later, when depicting a Netherlandish proverb (see picture on the right), the proverb of ›attaching a flaxen beard to the face of Christ‹, by which Bruegel was exactly raising the question that has to be raised regarding chancellor Rolin: does someone simply make use of Christian iconography, with the aim of having him or her to appear pious?

Due to infrared reflectography we might have a tool of unmasking some patrons of pictures – given that, as it seems to be the case here, that a blessing gesture that had not been part of the original concept of the artist, is introduced into a picture, having chancellor Rolin appear as being blessed by Christ in the end and for all times. And this by a very young Christ, shown, due to his attribute, a globus cruciger, as the Salvator Mundi. Salvator Mundi iconography, or at least some individual picture, is not simply just spiritual iconography, and not necessarily as innocent and spiritually correct as it may seem. In fact, the use that is made here of this iconography, casts the shadow of a question on every pictorial representation that makes use of Christian iconography: whose reality are we meant to see, and for what purposes such iconography has been used in the individual case? And this is the first lesson to draw from looking into the Salvator Mundi iconographies of Early Netherlandish painting.

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