MASTER OF THE HOLY KINSHIP | Christ as the Man of Sorrows

Acquired by the father of the present owner;

Thence by inheritance.

A. Stange, Die deutschen Tafelbilder vor Dürer, I, Kritisches Verzeichnis, Munich 1967, p. 25, no. 35a (as the Master of Saint Veronica);

P. Pieper, ‘Zum Werk des Meisters der hl. Veronika’, in Festschrift für Gert von der Osten, Cologne 1970, p. 85 ff. (as the Master of Saint Veronica);

F.G. Zehnder, Der Meister der Hl. Veronika, Diss., Sankt Augustin 1981, pp. 131-34, no. 5.2, cat. no. 19 (with tentative attribution to the Master of the Holy Kinship);

B. Corley, Painting and Patronage in Cologne 1300–1500, Turnhout 2000, p. 118 (with incorrect fig. ref.; as the Master of the Holy Kinship).

The following condition report is provided by Henry Gentle who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. The crude panel has visible knots to the reverse along with a central vertical join. The top right hand corner, from the reverse, has been replaced. The paint layer is stable but a little raised. The compromised corner, top left from the front, has been restored, the spear tip having been entirely replaced. Dark shrinkage craquelure is visible to Christ's figure. Along the cracks there has been a limited amount of paint loss, revealing the pale ochre ground beneath. There has been significant recent reduction of this pale ground. The kneeling figure and Veronica's shroud have similar craquelure and augmentation. Uneven loss to the bottom edge of the composition has been restored. The gold background is in good original condition and such details of the tools and associated religious iconography are well preserved. There would be no appreciable tonal difference gained from removing the varnish.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Firmly rooted in the International Courtly Style that dominated the art of Cologne from about 1410 for several decades, this Man of Sorrows is typical of the preoccupation of donors with the Passion of Christ during the late Medieval period in that city. For the donor, such a commission was considered a step towards the salvation of his soul, the central preoccupation of society in Cologne still being with death and eternal punishment, and with the dichotomy of ambition and desire for wealth versus the urgent provision needed against the furies of hell. The panel here would have encouraged personal meditation through empathy as invoked by Heinrich Suso (c.1300-65), one of Cologne’s foremost scholars: ‘ My beautiful body was torn apart and lacerated painfully by wild flagellation, my gentle head furrowed by thorns and this sweet face soiled with spittle and blood’. The master of the Holy Kinship is so-named after the altarpiece in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, showing the Virgin and Child surrounded by numerous family members, flanked by scenes of the early part of Christ’s life. He is not to be confused with a later artist, also from Cologne, known by the same nomenclature. The master was active in the 1420s and 1430s and his style is directly correlated to that of the leading master in Cologne at the time, and the artist who more than anyone else brought the International Courtly Style to Cologne, The Master of Saint Veronica. This panel very clearly demonstrates the artist’s indebtedness to the Master of Saint Veronica, particularly in the facial type, which is analogous with the Veronica master’s Christ from his Crucifixion in Washington, and with the elongated limbs and soft modelling.¹ The veil of St Veronica that we see to the right of Christ in the present panel indeed is a direct quotation from that Master’s eponymous work in the National Gallery, London² and the figure and pose of Christ Himself is clearly indebted to the Veronica Master’s own Man of Sorrows in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.³

Pieper noted the similarity of the present Man of Sorrows to that of the panel of the same subject in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum then, as now, given to the Master of the Holy Kinship.⁴  Pieper however, like Stange, attributed the present panel to the Master of Saint Veronica himself, both of them dating it to about 1420 and seeing it as far closer in style to the Veronica Master’s version in Antwerp with which it shares an elegance and organic dispersal of the elements of the Passion, unlike the stiffly painted Christ and artificially ordered elements in the panel by the Master of the Holy Kinship in Cologne.  Pieper viewed the Antwerp panel as an early example of the Master of St. Veronica and the present example as a later, more poetic, version by the same master. Zehnder (1981) was the first to attribute the panel to the Master of the Holy Kinship.

The Veronica master spawned a vast school of painters in Cologne but the Master of the Holy Kinship, together with The Master of the Heisterbach and the Master of St. Lawrence, is considered chief amongst these. The importance of these painters who, at such an early date, brought sophisticated iconography, costly pigments and exquisite punchwork to painting in northern Europe, cannot be overstated. Cologne was the largest city in northern Europe, it had a cosmopolitan population of painters, illuminators, sculptors and goldsmiths and a patrician class who were sophisticated collectors and knowledgeable patrons of art.

1 See Corley, 2000, reproduced fig. 48.

2 Corley, 2000, fig. 58.

3 See Pieper, 1970, reproduced p. 88, fig. 2.

4 Pieper, 1970, reproduced p. 90, fig. 3.