Title

Presentation of Christ in the Temple

Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine (Active in Brussels in the last quarter of the 15th century)

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Object history

This scene is one of the five that made up the triptych of the Adoration of the Magi that presided over the south altar of the lay brothers' choir of the church of the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores, in Burgos. This triptych must have been dismantled before the current Baroque altarpieces of this space were made in 1659. When Antonio Ponz visited the Carthusian monastery in the 18th century, he pointed out that, in the altarpiece on the south side, only three old paintings were preserved "en muy mal estado" (in very bad condition). Indeed, by then the central panel had been replaced by a 17th century copy, previous to the Baroque altarpiece (the original panel, deteriorated, was placed in a cell and, from 1781, in the prior's cell), and it is quite possible that, of the four scenes from the side panels, one was by then on the back of the attic, facing the monks' choir, so it may have gone unnoticed by Ponz. Thus, his account of only three ancient paintings would be correct. The scholar from Castellón also provided a piece of information of the utmost relevance about the original pictorial ensemble: “su costo ascendió a veinte y seis mil ochocientos y diez maravedís” (its cost amounted to twenty-six thousand eight hundred and ten maravedís). This data is related to another extracted from the old documentation of the monastery that says the following: “1495: Se trajo de Flandes el quadro de la adoración de los Reyes, y se colocó en el Altar del coro de los Conversos. Costó 26.800 y 10 mrs.” (1495: The painting of the adoration of the Kings was brought from Flanders, and it was placed in the Altar of the choir of the Converts. It cost 26,800 and 10 mrs.". With this information, Didier Martens, in a work published in 2001, was able to brilliantly identify the ensemble, whose track had been lost after the War of Independence, with a triptych by the anonymous Brussels artist conventionally called Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine, which, in the absence of a scene, had been reconstructed by Christiane Deroubaix in 1978-79 (the remaining scene was identified by Constanza Negrín Delgado in 1995).

The triptych of the Adoration of the Magi from the lay brothers' choir of the church of the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores is, therefore, an imported Early Netherlandish work, probably commissioned ex professo by Queen Isabella the Catholic, which arrived in Burgos in 1495 and was installed in the lay brothers' choir of the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores. Although the historical sources place it on the altar on the south side of this space, Martens thinks, based on the study of the light of this triptych and its pendant, the triptych of the Baptism of Christ by Juan de Flandes (for which the triptych we are now dealing with served as a model), that the triptych of the Adoration of the Magi was initially on the altar on the north side.

Of its five compositions (one large one in the central panel, which is the one that confers the triptych its name, and two superimposed on each of the two side panels), four are preserved in museums and institutions in Italy (Annunciation and Presentation of Christ in the Temple), Belgium (Birth of Christ) and Switzerland (Adoration of the Magi) and only one (Flight into Egypt) is preserved in a private Spanish collection in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Although the ensemble is not mentioned among the works of the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores plundered by General Darmagnac in 1810, in the context of the War of Independence, the fact that at least three of them are documented in France in the 19^th century, probably from early dates, invites us to think that this general was responsible for their departure from Spain.

The scene of the Annunciation belonged, along with that of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, to the Lyon collector Louis Carrand (1827-1888), natural son and heir of the also Lyon collector Jean-Baptiste Carrand (1792-1871), who, from 1880, settled successively in Nice, Pisa and Florence, where he died. Carrand bequeathed his collection to the Bargello Museum in Florence, where the two panels from the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores have been housed since 1889.

Dispersed since the 19^th century, in 2009 all the fragments of the ensemble were temporarily reunited in an exhibition at M Leuven, the Leuven museum.

Description

The scene of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple was in the upper register of the right wing, as evidenced both by the upper part of the image of St. John the Evangelist looking to the left painted in grisaille on its reverse and the debt of this triptych to the famous triptych of the Adoration of the Magi by Rogier van der Weyden from the church of St. Kolumba in Cologne, preserved in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. But if, in Van der Weyden's prototype, each wing houses a single scene, in the reinterpretation by the Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine each wing houses two superimposed scenes, according to a model not very common in Early Netherlandish painting, which, however, has as a prestigious reference the triptych of the Last Supper by Dirk Bouts from the Sint-Pieterskerk in Leuven.

The debt to Van der Weyden is not limited to the selection of themes: it also extends to the way in which the three themes that coincide in the triptych originally in Cologne and in the triptych originally in Burgos are treated. In the case of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple that now concerns us, the arrangement of the figures and the representation of the scene in an ecclesiastical interior are similar, but the Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine avoids the complex perspective of Van der Weyden, with its diagonal elements open to the landscape, and opts instead for a much less compromised proposal, with its various architectural members arranged in planes parallel to the picture plane. What is most striking is that, while Van der Weyden represents the Temple of Jerusalem through a Romanesque architecture (a detail that is often interpreted in Early Netherlandish painting as a reference to the Old Law, already outdated), the Master of the Legend of St. Catherine prefers a Gothic architecture.

Locations

• 1495 - 1810

  monastery

  Miraflores Charterhouse, Burgos (Spain)

• 1810 - Mid XIX^th c.

  plunder

  Jean Barthélemy Darmagnac, Burdeos (France)

• Mid XIX^th c. - 1888

  private collection

  Louis Carrand, Lyon (France) *

• 1889 - present

  museum

  Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florencia (Italy)