Werl Altarpiece (The Werl Triptych or Triptych of Heinrich von Werl) - Right Wing

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Werl Altarpiece (The Werl Triptych or Triptych of Heinrich von Werl) - Right Wing: Robert Campin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Robert Campin Oil Painting - Werl Altarpiece (The Werl Triptych or Triptych of Heinrich von Werl) - Right Wing

Keywords: Werl, Altarpiece, Werl, Triptych, Triptych, Heinrich, Werl, Right, Wing

Work Overview

Werl Altarpiece (The Werl Triptych or Triptych of Heinrich von Werl)
Robert Campin
Alternative name: The Werl Triptych
Date: 1438
Style: Northern Renaissance
Series: Werl Altarpiece
Genre: religious painting

Media: panel, tempera

101 x 47 cm

Location: Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

The Werl Triptych (or Triptych of Heinrich von Werl) is a triptych altarpiece completed in Cologne in 1438, of which the center panel has been lost. The two remaining wings are now in the Prado in Madrid. It was long attributed to the Master of Flémalle, now generally believed to have been Robert Campin, although this identity is not universally accepted. Some art historians believe it may have been painted as a pastiche by either the workshop or a follower of Campin or the Master of Flémalle.

The right wing depicts a seated, pious Saint Barbara, who is shown engrossed in her reading of a bound and gilded holy book, seated in front of a warm open fire which lights the room with a golden glow. The left wing has a donor portrait of Heinrich von Werl, who kneels in prayer in the company of John the Baptist facing the missing devotional center-panel scene, which is lost and unrecorded. The two extant panels are in Madrid and renowned for their complex treatment of both light and form. The panels became influential on other artists from the mid-15th until the early 16th century, after when Early Netherlandish painting fell out of favour until it was rediscovered in the early 19th century.

From an inscription in the left wing, the panels are known to have been commissioned by Heinrich von Werl, provincial head of Cologne during 1438. He is shown in the left wing kneeling in devotion alongside Saint John the Baptist. This panel contains a number of elements indebted to Jan van Eyck, notably the convex mirror in the midground, which as with the 1434 Arnolfini Marriage, reflects the scene back at the viewer.

Although the center panel is lost with no surviving copies, inventory records or descriptions, it has been speculated that it was set in the same room occupied by Saint Barbara.[2] This is likely given the abrupt end of the lines of the beams of the roof and the frames of the window, as well as the direction of the falling light. The center panel may have formed the setting for a Virgo inter Virgines.[3][4] Given that there is no surviving evidence of the triptych's influence on Cologne art until the middle of the century, it was likely the triptych was until then positioned either in private or in an inaccessible place in the church large enough to hold a number of altarpieces.[5] However it became influential from the mid-15th century.

Of the two panels, that of Barbara, although flawed in some anatomical respects, is richer in detail and considered the superior piece.

Right panel: Saint Barbara[edit]

Right wing showing Saint Barbara. Oak panel, 101 cm x 47 cm. Museo del Prado.
The woman in this panel can be identified as Saint Barbara from the tower visible beyond the open window to her top left. A popular saint in the Middle Ages, she was a Christian martyr believed to have lived in the 3rd century. According to hagiography, her wealthy pagan father Dioscorus, seeking to preserve her from unwelcome suitors, imprisoned her in a tower. Captive Barbara let in a priest who baptised her,[6] an act for which she was hunted and eventually beheaded by her father.[7] She became a popular subject for artists of Campin's generation. Jan van Eyck left a highly detailed but unfinished 1437 oak panel which focuses on the highly complex architectural details of an imagined Gothic tower.[6]

The artist depicts Barbara imprisoned in her tower, but engrossed in her reading of a book with her back against a large open fireplace. Her brown hair is unbound and falling to her shoulders. She is seated on a wooden bench draped with deep red velvet cushions. She wears a sumptuous green dress lined with heavy angular folds. Yet Barbara's figure is weakly rendered – her shoulders and knees are anatomically unrealistic;[2] she seems boneless.

The panel's strength comes from her well-described clothing and the highly detailed objects placed around her, most of which are shaped and contrasted by the two sources of light falling on their generally golden and polished surfaces.[2] The fireplace emits a warm reddish glow, which contrasts with the relatively hard light falling from the window and the unseen middle panel to the left. The ledge of the fireplace holds a glass flask while the chimney place contains a sconce holding an extinguished candle holder. A highly detailed sculpture of the Trinity is shown above the fireplace.[2]

The room is obviously from a contemporary middle-class rather than biblical setting,[8] and contains many of the same details found in the center panel of the c 1425–28 Mérode Altarpiece, also attributed to Robert Campin. These include the latticed and shuttered window, the reading Virgin seated on a long bench, and the tilted lily in a vase on a table to her side. Writers Peter and Linda Murray note that the treatment in the later work is better arranged and far more assured in its use of perspective.[9]

The perspective from which the room is viewed is unusually steep and positions the viewer as if he is on a lower floor to the Virgin and looking up at her. It has been identified as influenced by van Eyck's Washington Annunciation painted just a few years earlier. The painting contains a number of vanishing points stretching from the lower right hand to the open window serve to emphasise the panel's depth. The steep angle of the panel from the viewer's point of view is achieved through the tilt of the bench, side board, line of the fireplace, and shutters of the window. According to Walther Ingo, the dramatic angle of these elements serves to demote the figure of St Barbara to secondary importance to an examination of the anatomy of the space itself.

The painting was earlier associated with either Campin's pupil Rogier van der Weyden,[12] or van der Weyden's workshop. However the discover of under drawings in both this work and the Mérode Altarpiece leading most art historians to believe that they are by the same artist. The work has been identified as among Campin's late works by Panofsky (1953) and Chatelet (1996), although a number of others, including Kemperdick (1997), Thurlemann (2003) and Sanders (2009) continue to argue van der Weyden or his circle's authorship. It is still a minority view, not held by the Prado; according to Till-Holger Borchert, "the figure style – which...cannot be reconciled with Rogier's – would seem to speak against this."

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