783. THE EXHUMATION OF BISHOP HUBERT.
Unknown (Early Flemish: 15th century).
This beautiful work was formerly in the collection of Mr. Beckford at Fonthill, where it was described as the Burial of a Bishop by Jan Van Eyck. It has also been ascribed to Gerard Van der Meire (see 1078) and to Thierri Bouts (about 1420-1475). This latter painter—called by early authors Thierry, or Dierik of Haarlem, from the name of his native town, and by modern writers Thierri Stuerbout,—was town's painter of Louvain, and a pupil probably of Roger van der Weyden. His principal works are now in the Brussels Museum. Other pictures in the Gallery attributed to him by some critics are 664, 774, and 943. Van der Meire, Justus of Ghent, and Albert Van Ouwater have also been suggested as the painters of this picture; it closely resembles the "Raising of Lazarus" ascribed to the last-named painter in the Berlin Gallery.
St. Hubert was originally a nobleman of Aquitaine, much addicted to all worldly pleasures, and especially to that of the chase. But one day in Holy Week, when all good Christians were at their devotions, as he was hunting in the forest of Ardennes, he encountered a milk-white stag bearing the crucifix between his horns. Filled with awe and astonishment, he renounced the pomps and vanities of the world, turned hermit in that very forest of Ardennes, was ordained, and became Bishop of Liège. So the legend runs, embalming, we may suppose, the conversion of some reckless lover of the chase, like the wild huntsman of the German legend. And at Liège he was buried, but thirteen years afterwards his body was disinterred, and lo! it was found entire; even the episcopal robes in which he had been interred were without spot or stain. A century later the body was removed from Liège and reinterred in the abbey church of the Benedictine monks of Ardennes. The Emperor Louis le Débonnaire assisted at the translation of the relics, and the day was long kept as a festival throughout this part of Flanders. This is the subject of the present picture, of which the scene is laid in the choir of a beautiful Gothic church. On the altar behind the principal group stands a shrine, on which is a little figure of St. Hubert with his hunting-horn. The royal personage assisting represents Louis le Débonnaire. The picture is of wonderful beauty, finished in every part (abridged from Mrs. Jameson: Sacred and Legendary Art, pp. 431, 432). Though it is thus an historical picture, the artist takes the figures from his own time, and the heads, like miniatures in character and delicacy of expression, are doubtless portraits—the whole scene being a picture of a Flemish Cathedral on some festival day. Notice, as a particularly interesting little piece of life, the man flattening his nose against the screen on the left, with a jeering expression, as if he "didn't half believe it all." It is a piece of living grotesque, exactly such as meets one in the sculptured stones of a mediæval cathedral itself—"peeping round the corner at you and lurking in secret places, like a monk's joke whispered in church" (Conway's Early Flemish Artists, p. 17).