Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Robert Campin (Master of Flémalle)
Netherlandish; 15th-century
Ghent, Belgium: Museum voor Schone Kunsten
85%
Man of Sorrows. c1430. Oil on panel
Though Campin's greatest works are those in which the fullness of new pictorial prospects is demonstrated with little heed for prior art, the coexistence, in this panel, of the medieval gold with things as bodied and placed-in-space as Christ's tomb and garments, is electric. It's tough to imagine a more extreme conflict than that between this painting's atmosphere (though it should be noted that the ground is not gold leaf, but painted gold) and the objects it contains, especially the thick tombstone poking out past the picture plane and then rocketing back into depicted space. Campin struggles a bit with the placement of his figures, which are almost too lively in themselves to bear interaction with each other. This is precisely what's solved by the fully-enumerated spaces of works like his Marriage of Mary: nooks and crannies in the scene at large give the pent-up energies of the perfectly rendered, painfully enclosed figures a place to go. (Consider the shutters in the back of the Merode Altarpiece.) There's some such emptiness inside the tomb, but it's so fractured and withheld that it almost seems to enhance, not ameliorate, the tautness of the relations above it. (TFS, 2026)