Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Petrus Christus
Netherlandish; 15th-century
Berlin, Germany: Gemäldegalerie
87%
Portrait of a Young Lady. c1470. Oil on panel
In the North, the 15th-century proceeded as a cowering from the achievement of Jan van Eyck, which crested with the sublime overconfidence of Memling and with Bosch's flippant disregard for it all. The hardness, in this painting, of the woman's flesh — the impenetrability of the lines that describe her face and shoulders — is a retreat from the supple realism of slightly earlier art. The shadow, too, that cuts from her forehead to her chin seems to foreclose possibilities of greater representational felicity. Sometimes with Christus, such foreclosures seem to result from his confusion of influences; other times, as here, it's a conscious grappling with the limits of picturing. The graphic force of this portrait couldn't have been achieved through van Eyck's attentiveness: painting wins as it loses. Notable, indescribable features of this picture's beauty include: the shadow at right, cutting through the severely horizontal wainscotting; the movement of the sitter's eyes; the slight texture in the fabric of her sleeves; the breath of red that contours both cheeks. (TFS, 2026)
Brussels, Belgium: Royal Museums of Fine Arts
83%
Lamentation. 1455-1460. Oil on panel
The figure group is at once open and unified. This simultaneity of two opposed qualities is embodied by the Magdalen at left: set apart from the action of the scene, her body arches in sympathy with the sheet carrying Christ, and her garments pile like those of the Virgin and Joseph of Arimathea. The vitality of the figures, altogether and apart, is predicated on the handsome simplicity of the landscape background, which is as schematic as the figures are complex. Yet, certain elements of the picture serve to relativize the holy scene, to place it inside an almost discomfitingly literal and worldly reality: the "still life" of tools from the crucifixion at lower left, and the cross at upper left, which has more mass and dimension than anything else in the picture. Gone is van Eyck's serenity, a symptom of his drunkenness with the invention of painting. Anxiety over the impossibility of the task of illusion creeps into Petrus; we can see it in his not-quite-resolved tensions. (TFS, 2026)