Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Bernaert van Orley
Netherlandish; 16th-century
Bruges, Belgium: Museum of the Church of Our Lady
72%
Passion Triptych. 1534. Oil on three panels (with Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder)
van Orley began the triptych and, after his death, Gheeraerts finished it. That's why the sombre tones and glassy, sinuous delicacy of, for instance, the pile of mourning Marys at the base of the cross, is mingled with insane Michelangelisms like the torqued soldier on the right side of the bottom left panel, or the million muscles in the legs of the horse behind the cross. Altogether it's too darkly hued, and the relations between its five panels are too unfocused, for this altarpiece to be much more than a curio. But the collision of Netherlandish painting's hard refinements and highly controlled surfaces with the crowding and hyperreality of Mannerism is, at the very least, worth noting. There's a disquiet at the core of this painting, a sort of vibration in the space between any two of its ill-fit figures. (TFS, 2026)