St Luke Painting the Virgin

Entry

St Luke the Evangelist painting a portrait of Mary was a much-beloved theme for painted altarpieces, especially in the Low Countries of the Middle Ages. These groups were often commissioned by guilds bearing the saint’s name, representing not only painters but also occasionally woodcarvers and other artisans. For obvious reasons, sculptors turned to this iconography less frequently. One rare example is a group by the South German woodcarver Jakob Beinhart (c. 1460-c. 1525), today preserved in the National Museum in Warsaw, believed to have formed part of the retable of the painters’ guild of Wroclaw (today Warsaw) that dates from circa 1506.¹ The present, far more simple Amsterdam carving, which originally also included the figures of the Virgin and the Christ Child that would have appeared to the left of this fragment, could also have belonged to a retable. The thick-set, compact proportions of Luke’s body suggest an origin in the Northern Netherlands, where painters established guilds dedicated to St Luke in the cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Delft and Leiden. Notwithstanding the highly characteristic features of the painting evangelist’s face – the wavy forehead wrinkles, broad jawline and somewhat pouty lips – a more precise regional attribution remains problematic in the absence of works suitable for comparison. The motif of the ring encircling the out-turned chaperon that hangs from the liripipe below Luke’s left shoulder also appears in a version produced by the German painter Derick Baegert (c. 1440-after 1509) in the Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Münster, an image influenced by early Netherlandish models that dates from circa 1480.²

Bieke van der Mark, 2024