The World as it Was and Ways of Painting the Virgin Mary

I was in London the other day and intended to go to the National Portrait Gallery to look at an exhibition of miniatures that I have read is very good. However, I thought I would first go next door to the National Gallery and spend a few minutes worshipping at the altar of one of my favourite paintings - the self-portrait of van Eyck that is housed in the gallery's Sainsbury wing.

But when I reached the part of the gallery where the van Eyck used to hang, everything had been swapped around. It was wonderful. I was forced to look at a whole lot of pictures I either hadn't noticed before or had never seen at all - perhaps they were in storage and not on display at all until this rehang.

I discovered so many beautiful paintings. The first is this Virgin and Child by Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, which was painted, they think, somewhere between 1496 and 1499.

What first attracted me to the painting was the unusual portrayal of the Virgin - so pale, with the colouring of a red headed Celt:

After that, I thought of how much my brother liked it when I remembered to photograph the landscapes in the backgrounds of ancient paintings, and I took these for him, for old time's sake:

The city shown is probably Conegliano, north of Venice and home of the artist

I was intrigued to see a very different Virgin in this nearby painting, a woman with more angular features and a slightly mournful cast to her expression, as if she can see into the future and knows what will happen to the innocent little boy she is holding protectively. The painting is by Alvise Vivarini, and was painted between 1483 and 1485:

Once more the painter provides a vista through the window in the background that acts as a kind of postcard from the past, giving the viewer a sense of the quiet, still, uncluttered world of the fifteenth century:

The next work to catch my eye was this Virgin and Child with Saint John, painted by Antonio de Solario between 1500 and 1510:

The wall caption tells us that the picture shows the Christ child standing on a stone parapet, prefiguring his future resurrection from the tomb. His nakedness reflects his divine incarnation, and the symbolic depiction of the figures provides a personal visual aid to devotion, while the delicate landscape transforms the picture into a beautiful object.

It seems to me that the Virgin is not strongly characterised in this picture, unlike John the Baptist - it is his image that makes the painting particularly endearing to me:

This is the background landscape the caption mentions:

Antonello da Messina's Christ Crucified, painted in 1475, could hardly fail to appeal to me, given that it is almost all background. Once again the quietness of the world of the fifteenth century is the thing that strikes me most. Mary's portrait is simple almost to the point of being a cartoon, but it does express poignance:

When I came to the next painting, it surprised me. Painted somewhere between 1460 and 1469 it is thought to also be by da Messina, painter of the above crucifixion, although the two pictures strike me as very different. For a start, this one gives no glimpse of any life beyond the dark walls of the space in which the subjects are depicted; in addition, the face of the central character looks oddly modern and its expression seems worryingly lacking in tenderness - more White Witch from Narnia than Blessed Virgin. Furthermore, the child is dressed like a mini adult and seems oddly doll like:

At first I mistook the wings of the crown-bearing angels for some sort of axehead-shaped ornament jutting out from the Virgin's crown.

The next picture that captured my attention is this one of Christ appearing to the virgin after his death. It was painted by Juan de Flande between 1499 and 1500. I like the big blocks of pink and blue and the intricate detail of the floor tiles and the host of souls behind Jesus, I like the Virgin and the speech scrolls, but above all I like the pigeons:

Nearby I found a painting made by Michael Sittow in 1500. It is one of a series of 47 painted for Queen Isabella of Castile; only 27 survive. I am always fond of Ascension paintings when they show only Christ's feet as he disappears into the clouds. There is such an innocent quality to the decision to show those feet, without any apparent recognition that the resulting image is inevitably slightly absurd (perhaps because there just is something absurd about feet? Or perhaps I am being too subjective and others do not find such compositions similarly endearing)

The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine from the early 16th century was the next picture I found showing the Virgin Mary. It intrigued me largely because it is by a Portuguese artist (name unknown). It is rare that one sees a work identified as by someone from Portugal -  in fact, I don't remember ever having done so before. The choice of a rather pale colour scheme also interested me. The wall label explains that the setting of a walled garden is a reference to Mary's virginity, that Saint Joseph is the man in the background and the figure reading in the right foreground is probably Mary Magdalene. As so often with older pictures, the image is painted onto wood. Far fewer images on canvas survive from long ago, because canvas is far less durable than wood.

Mary herself is not a very fully formed character here, I don't think, although the woodwind blowing angel over her shoulder looks full of mischief:

This next painting of the Virgin and Child with Saint Peter and Saint Paul, probably from the 1460s, comes from the workshop of Dirk Bouts, and I would guess that the painter was probably hoping to rival van Eyk or van der Weyden. I don't think that he (or, faintly possibly, she) did a bad job at all. Once again, the virgin's expression seems to convey an anticipatory mourning:

Speaking of Rogier van der Weyden, in an adjacent room, I was pleased to be introduced to this painting I'd never seen before - A Man Reading (possibly Saint Ivo) from the workshop of van der Weyden

I had not heard of Saint Ivo before - he is, it turns out, the patron saint of Brittany, lawyers and abandoned children, which is a fairly mixed bag. He is also referred to as the "Advocate of the Poor", if Wikipedia is to be believed.

In memory of my brother, I also include the view from Saint Ivo's window:

That is enough for today, although these are only a few of the treasures I saw in the gallery. It is a truly wonderful place and I think one could spend many days in there without running out of things to wonder at. More soon.