664. THE DEPOSITION IN THE TOMB.
Roger van der Weyden[161] (Early Flemish: 1400-1464).
See also (p. xix)
This painter was born at Tournai, where he was known as Rogelet de la Pasture. He afterwards went to Brussels, where he assumed his Flemish name, and where in 1436 he was appointed town painter. For the Hall of Justice there he painted four pictures, which are now lost, but of which the designs are preserved in a set of tapestries in Berne Cathedral. He was the chief master (as a teacher, that is) of the early Flemish school. It was he who carried Flemish art into Italy (see 772), where he was in 1449-1450. "Contemporary Italian writers laud the pathos, the brilliant colouring, and the exhaustive finish of his works." He on his side gained something from the study of Italian masters. The composition of many of his great works—e.g. "The Last Judgment" at Beaune, the "Nativity" at Berlin, and "The Adoration of the Magi" at Munich—bears evidence of Italian influence. Nearer home, the school of the Lower Rhine in its later time was an offshoot of his school: and farther up the river, Martin Schongauer, at Colmar, was an immediate pupil of his. He set the fashions in several subjects—such as descents from the cross, and hundreds of followers imitated his designs. What gave his art this wide currency was the way in which it united the older religious feeling, from which Van Eyck had cut himself adrift, with the new naturalism and improved technique which Van Eyck had introduced. His French blood, too, gave his art an element of vivid emotion, which was lacking in the staid control of Van Eyck. He is especially praised for his "representations of human desires and dispositions, whether grief, pain, or joy." He thus painted for the religious needs of the people at large; and though an inferior artist, enjoyed a far wider influence than Van Eyck. "Less intensely realistic than Van Eyck, less gifted with the desire and the power to reproduce the phenomena of nature for their own sake, and in their completeness, he thought more," says Sir F. Burton, "of expressing the feelings common to him and the pious worshippers for whose edification he wrought. His figures exhibit deep, if sometimes rather overstrained, pathos. He strove with naïf earnestness to bring home to the senses the reality of the incidents connected with the last sufferings and death of the Saviour. Still he was naturalistic too, in the sense in which that term applies to all painters of the early Flemish school, in that he imitated with minuteness every object which he thought necessary to his compositions; but of the broad principles of chiaroscuro and subordination which Van Eyck had so wonderfully grasped, he had small perception. His scenes seem filled with the light of early morning. His colour, pale in the flesh-tints with greyish modelling, is varied and delicately rich in the clothing and other stuffs introduced. His landscape abounds in freshness and greenth. Thus he transferred to his oil pictures the light and brilliance of missal painting, an art which perhaps he had himself practised." "He occasionally practised a very different technical method from that usually employed in Flanders—that is to say, he painted in pure tempera colours on unprimed linen, the flesh tints especially being laid on extremely thin, so that the texture of the linen remains unhidden. Other colours, such as a smalto blue used for draperies, are applied in greater body, and the whole is left uncovered by any varnish" (Middleton). Of this method the present picture is a fine example.
This picture—"one of the most exquisite in feeling of the early Flemish school" (Poynter)—is full of sincere emotion. "Roger van der Weyden is especially known by his touching conception of some of the scenes of the Passion. He excelled in the lull of suppressed feeling. The picture of the Entombment by him in the National Gallery is as much more sad to the heart than the passionate Italian conception, as a deep sigh sometimes than a flood of tears. We could almost wish those mourners, with their compressed lips, red eyelids, and slowly trickling tears, would weep more—it would grieve us less. But evidently the violence of the first paroxysm of grief is over, and this is the exhaustion after it. The tide is ebbing as with all new sorrow, too soon to flow again. No finer conception of manly sorrow, sternly repressed, exists than in the heads of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who devote themselves the more strenuously to their task in order to conceal their grief. Strange that a painter of such exquisite refinement of feeling should adhere to so hideous a type of Christ as that which appears here" (Mrs. Jameson's History of our Lord, ii. 246). It is interesting to contrast the figure of Christ with that in Francia's picture (180). In painting such subjects the Italians of the best time endured the physical painfulness, the Northern temperament rejoiced in it. The painters in so doing were only meeting the wishes of their patrons. There is a contract, for instance, still in existence in which it is expressly stipulated that the form of our Lord in a picture ordered at Bruges shall be painted "in all respects like a dead man."