The Merode Altarpiece: The Annunciation, with Donors and St. Joseph

Harry Rand, senior curator of cultural history at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, writes about Robert Campin's Masterpiece, the Merode Altarpiece, now displayed at The Cloisters in New York City, in The Wall Street Journal:

Sadly, relatively few of these works survived the iconoclastic frenzy that accompanied the Netherlands' subsequent embrace of Protestantism. Another problem that long barred the recognition and appreciation of their creators was the elevation of the Italian Renaissance as the universal criterion of artistic quality, an alien standard that automatically demoted these Flemish masters.

Among the obscured painters one of their geniuses languished, long known only as the Master of Flémalle—named for a town now in Belgium. Today we know him as Robert Campin (c.1375-1444), generally recognized as the teacher of the more famous Rogier (Roger) van de Weyden.

Now in the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's upper-Manhattan outpost for Medieval art, Campin's Mérode Altarpiece (c.1427-32) can still startle with its revolutionary formal and technical innovations. A wooden triptych only 25½ inches tall, the work seems too diminutive for so important a painting. But its size derives from its intended use for private worship and meditation. It was probably commissioned by Peter Ingelbrecht, a wealthy merchant; Campin produced what seems, at first, an unremarkable "Annunciation with donors." Yet behind its calm appearance the work delivers a magnificently ambitious ensemble, staggering in visual sumptuousness and breathtaking in its symbolic message. 

The Mérode Altarpiece has never been surpassed in symbolic complexity. Campin saturates his scene with emblems designed to show Providence's unceasing hand shaping and guiding the world of Campin's faith.

Read the rest here. Image credit: detail of the center panel.

The Canterbury Clerestory Windows at The Cloisters

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting an exhibition of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral at The Cloisters:

This exhibition of stained glass from England's historic Canterbury Cathedral features six Romanesque-period windows that have never left the cathedral precincts since their creation in 1178–80.

Founded in 597, Canterbury Cathedral is one of the oldest Christian structures in England. It was an important pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages—as witnessed by Geoffrey Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales, a literary masterpiece from the fourteenth century—and is also the cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion worldwide. Recent repairs to the stonework of the magnificent historic structure necessitated the removal of several delicate stained-glass windows of unparalleled beauty. While the restoration of the walls has been undertaken, the stained glass has also been conserved.

The windows shown at The Cloisters are from the clerestory of the cathedral's choir, east transepts, and Trinity Chapel. The six figures—Jared, Lamech, Thara, Abraham, Noah, and Phalec—were part of an original cycle of eighty-six ancestors of Christ, the most comprehensive stained-glass cycle known in art history. One complete window (Thara and Abraham), rising nearly twelve feet high, is shown with its associated rich foliate border.

Masterpieces of Romanesque art, these imposing figures exude an aura of dignified power. The angular limbs, the form-defining drapery, and the encompassing folds of the mantles all add a sculptural quality to the majestic figures. The glass painting, which is attributed to the Methuselah Master, is striking for its fluid lines, clear forms, and brilliant use of color.

Blue Heron is performing at The Cloisters on Palm Sunday, April 13--both performances are sold out!

In 1541, following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, Canterbury Cathedral was re-founded as a secular cathedral. The works in the program are drawn from a set of partbooks commissioned by Canterbury from the singer and scribe Thomas Bull, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, in order to supply the cathedral's new choir of professional singers (including the youthful Thomas Tallis) with a complete repertoire of Masses, Magnificats, and votive antiphons. The centerpiece of the program is the Missa Spes nostraby Robert Jones (fl. 1520–35), a wonderful and wholly obscure composer whose only two surviving works appear in Bull's partbooks.

Radiant Light: Stained Glass from Canterbury Cathedral at The Cloisters closes on May 18, 2014--makes me want to book a flight to New York! My husband took the picture above when we visited Canterbury Cathedral many years ago.

Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet at The Cloisters

Closing tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum/Cloisters in New York City:

The Forty Part Motet (2001), a sound installation by Janet Cardiff (Canadian, born 1957), will be the first presentation of contemporary art at The Cloisters. Regarded as the artist's masterwork, and consisting of forty high-fidelity speakers positioned on stands in a large oval configuration throughout the Fuentidueña Chapel, the fourteen-minute work, with a three-minute spoken interlude, will continuously play an eleven-minute reworking of the forty-part motet Spem in alium numquam habui (1556?/1573?) by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505–1585). Spem in alium, which translates as "In No Other Is My Hope," is perhaps Tallis's most famous composition. Visitors are encouraged to walk among the loudspeakers and hear the individual unaccompanied voices—bass, baritone, alto, tenor, and child soprano—one part per speaker—as well as the polyphonic choral effect of the combined singers in an immersive experience. The Forty Part Motet is most often presented in a neutral gallery setting, but in this case the setting is the Cloisters' Fuentidueña Chapel, which features the late twelfth-century apse from the church of San Martín at Fuentidueña, near Segovia, Spain, on permanent loan from the Spanish Government. Set within a churchlike gallery space, and with superb acoustics, it has for more than fifty years proved a fine venue for concerts of early music.

The article on Spem in alium suggests that Tallis wrote this brilliant piece during Mary I's reign, not during Elizabeth I's. After all, the words are drawn from the book of Judith, one of the Deutero-Canonical works usually omitted from Protestant Bibles. The conclusion is:

All these considerations together point to a planned premiere of Spem in alium in Nonsuch Palace in 1556, with Queen Mary Tudor as the intended dedicatee. In the event, that premiere seems not to have occurred—most likely because of the death of Fitzalan's son and daughter in 1556, and of his wife in 1557. The most likely first performance was therefore in 1559 or 1567, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. (The newly crowned Elizabeth spent five days at Nonsuch in August 1559, and we know from Wateridge's anecdote quoted above that the piece was performed in Arundel House in London; the date of that performance has now been determined to have been 1567.) Queen Elizabeth is therefore most likely the first English monarch to have heard Spem in alium, although the evidence suggests that it was composed for her half-sister, Queen Mary Tudor, as a fortieth-birthday present.

Spem in alium
Spem in alium nunquam
habui praeter in te, Deus Israel:
qui irasceris et propitius eris,
et omnia peccata hominum
in tribulatione dimittis:
Domine Deus, Creator caeli et
respice humilitatem nostram.

Translation:
I have never put my hope in any
besides you, O God of Israel,
who grows angry, but then,
becoming gracious, forgives all the
sins of men in their tribulation:
Lord God, creator of heaven and
earth, look upon our lowliness.

I have read that one reason Spem in Alium is so popular now is that it's featured in that "grey" book series. The exhibit has had quite an effect on visitors and The Cloisters' website for the exhibit is quite detailed. Here is another review.