_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."