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Lot Essay
A brilliant palette of acerbic hues accentuates the tumultuous energy of the scene unfolding in this panel: Saint Michael and his fellow angels casting Lucifer and the rebel angels from heaven. Michael dominates the composition, the peridot feathers of his magnificent wings echoed in the green velvet lining of his damask robe that flutters vigorously about him. With an impassive expression he brandishes his sword above Lucifer (the light-bearer), whose fair face and golden ringlets remain a mark of angelic beauty, but whose hands have already been transformed into hideous appendages resembling chicken feet. Beneath him, other fallen angels spiral toward hell, some still clad in their voluminous robes, others having already lost this privilege, their nudity revealing the full extent of their Boschian monstrosity. This epic battle was a popular theme in Northern Renaissance art, its origins dating back to the Limbourg brothers' Très Riches Heures of 1416 (fol. 64v; see L. Silver, "Jheronimus Bosch and the Issue of Origins," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, I:1 (Winter 2009) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2009.1.1.5). The biblical source is found in the Old Testament (Isaiah 14:12-15), in which the prophet exclaims:
How art thou fallen from heaven,
O Lucifer, son of the morning!
How art thou cut down to the ground,
That didst cast lots over the nations!
And thou sadist in thy heart:
“I will ascend into heaven,
Above the stars of God
Will I exalt my throne…
I will be like the Most High”.
The story is taken up again in the New Testament (Luke 10:18) when Jesus first speaks: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” and again in 2 Peter 2:4: “For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment”.
In the Renaissance, the story of the Rebel Angels’ battle with God was understood through the lens of Saint Augustine’s City of God, in which the 5th-century Father of the Church establishes Lucifer’s rebellion as the origin of evil in the world. In this manner, Augustine reoriented the invention of sin, namely that of Pride, to the beginning of the story of Creation, prior to Adam and Eve’s Temptation in the Garden of Eden (ibid.).
Accordingly, this panel could have originally been part of a large polyptych dedicated to the Story of Creation, in a similar manner to Master Bertram’s 1379 Grabow Altarpiece (Kunsthalle, Hamburg), in which the first scene depicts the Fall of the Rebel Angels. Stylistically, however, the author of the present panel drew inspiration from the work of Rogier van der Weyden as interpreted by his student, Hans Memling. In particular, the angel’s facial types, with their protruding eyes, long, narrow noses, and high foreheads crowned by centrally-parted golden curles, find parallels in the numerous angels who populate Memling’s paintings, such as those seen in his Triptych of the Last Judgment (1467-1471, Muzeum Narodowe, Gdansk), as well as his depictions of the Virgin Mary (see, for example, the c. 1467-70 Virgin and Child in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). Yet the present composition’s overall emphasis on sculptural plasticity, together with the vibrant color scheme dominated by lime greens and frosty shades of red, points to the artist’s Germanic origins. Examination of the panel’s extensive underdrawing, visible to the naked eye in several places, but most clearly seen through infrared reflectography (fig. 1), provides further evidence that the author worked in this region, the birthplace of printmaking. The numerous, agitated drapery folds of the angels’ garments as well as the shadows that define the volumes of their faces are worked out in crisp parallel- and cross-hatches that are so meticulously rendered that it suggests the artist was proficient in making woodcuts and engravings.
How art thou fallen from heaven,
O Lucifer, son of the morning!
How art thou cut down to the ground,
That didst cast lots over the nations!
And thou sadist in thy heart:
“I will ascend into heaven,
Above the stars of God
Will I exalt my throne…
I will be like the Most High”.
The story is taken up again in the New Testament (Luke 10:18) when Jesus first speaks: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” and again in 2 Peter 2:4: “For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment”.
In the Renaissance, the story of the Rebel Angels’ battle with God was understood through the lens of Saint Augustine’s City of God, in which the 5th-century Father of the Church establishes Lucifer’s rebellion as the origin of evil in the world. In this manner, Augustine reoriented the invention of sin, namely that of Pride, to the beginning of the story of Creation, prior to Adam and Eve’s Temptation in the Garden of Eden (ibid.).
Accordingly, this panel could have originally been part of a large polyptych dedicated to the Story of Creation, in a similar manner to Master Bertram’s 1379 Grabow Altarpiece (Kunsthalle, Hamburg), in which the first scene depicts the Fall of the Rebel Angels. Stylistically, however, the author of the present panel drew inspiration from the work of Rogier van der Weyden as interpreted by his student, Hans Memling. In particular, the angel’s facial types, with their protruding eyes, long, narrow noses, and high foreheads crowned by centrally-parted golden curles, find parallels in the numerous angels who populate Memling’s paintings, such as those seen in his Triptych of the Last Judgment (1467-1471, Muzeum Narodowe, Gdansk), as well as his depictions of the Virgin Mary (see, for example, the c. 1467-70 Virgin and Child in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). Yet the present composition’s overall emphasis on sculptural plasticity, together with the vibrant color scheme dominated by lime greens and frosty shades of red, points to the artist’s Germanic origins. Examination of the panel’s extensive underdrawing, visible to the naked eye in several places, but most clearly seen through infrared reflectography (fig. 1), provides further evidence that the author worked in this region, the birthplace of printmaking. The numerous, agitated drapery folds of the angels’ garments as well as the shadows that define the volumes of their faces are worked out in crisp parallel- and cross-hatches that are so meticulously rendered that it suggests the artist was proficient in making woodcuts and engravings.