Title

Nativity of Christ

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 Indeed, by then the central panel had been replaced by a 17th century copy, previous to the Baroque altarpiece (the original panel, deteriorated, was placed in a cell and, from 1781, in the prior's cell), and it is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 on 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 (Nativity 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 19th century, probably from early dates, invites us to think that this general was responsible for their departure from Spain.

The scene of the Nativity of Christ belonged to the Perrenet family of Dijon. In the English edition of vol. IV of Max J. Friedländer's classic Die altniederländische Malerei, published in 1969, the editors incorporated information about this panel, noting that it belonged to the abbé Perrenet of Dijon (surely the Fr François Perrenet who, between 1932 and 1934, was vicar of the church of the Sacré Cœur in Dijon). The editors probably took this information from the catalogue of the exhibition of masterpieces from the collections of the Côte-d'Or department held at the Dijon museum in 1958, which included this panel. When Deroubaix had the opportunity to examine it for his 1978-79 article, the Perrenet family assured him that they had owned it since 1850. It now belongs to the holdings of the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, which acquired it in 1986 from Charles Dufour of Paris, with funds from the Loterie Nationale and the newly formed Tractebel company.

Dispersed since the 19th 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 Nativity of Christ was in the lower register of the left wing, as evidenced by the lower part of the image of the Virgin and Child looking to the right painted in grisaille on its reverse. In this case, the scene did not appear in 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, which was the main source of inspiration for the triptych by the Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine for the Charterhouse of Miraflores: in Van der Weyden's prototype, each wing houses a single scene, but 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 in the Sint-Pieterskerk in Leuven. Nevertheless, the debt to the caposcuola of the Brussels painting is also evident in this scene: Deroubaix pointed out the parallelism of its composition with those of identical iconography included by Hans Memling in his reinterpretations of the triptych from the church of St. Kolumba in Cologne (one of which is kept in the Prado Museum). She proposed that both the versions by the Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine and Memling would derive, ultimately, from the representation of this scene in the also famous Bladelin Triptych by Rogier van der Weyden, justifying the differences with the latter work by the possible existence of some intermediate work currently unknown.

The Nativity of Christ confers special prominence to the figure of Mary, kneeling, and the angels who, together with her, form a circle around the figure of the newborn Christ: their light clothes that radiate light draw attention to the little one, carefully placed at the feet of the Virgin on the folds of her clothes to prevent him from being hurt by contact with the hard ground. St Joseph, to the left in the background, occupies a more discreet position, although his red clothing draws attention to his presence. To the right in the background is the manger from which the mule and the ox eat. The architectural context, which is similar to that of the main panel of the triptych, opens onto a landscape in which the episode of the announcement to the shepherds takes place (Memling's versions, however, open onto an urban setting, corresponding to the city of Bethlehem).

Locations

• 1495 - 1810

  monastery

  Miraflores Charterhouse, Burgos (Spain)

• 1810 - Mid XIX^th c.

  plunder

  Jean Barthélemy Darmagnac, Burdeos (France)

• Mid XIX^th c. - ca. 1980

  private collection

  Perrenet family, Dijon (France) *

• 1986

  dealer/antiquarian

  Charles Dufour, Paris (France) *

• 1986 - present

  museum

  Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Belgium, Brussels (Belgium)