Art: Flemish Anonymous

Overshadowed by the High Renaissance, the 15th century artists of the Lowlands were called “Flemish primitives.” But the modern eye has adjusted to their light, and appreciates the full sophistication of their art. This quality is clearly visible in The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus, a long-hidden work by an unknown Flemish master which went on view last week at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (see opposite page). Preserved for many years in the seldom-used Paris house of a French banker, the yard-high triptych first reappeared in public at a 1962 auction. A Manhattan art syndicate bought it for $346,550, a huge sum for an anonymous work. Presumably, the Boston museum paid even more.

Hippolytus, by legend a Roman legionary converted to Christianity, was sentenced to be torn apart by wild horses during the 3rd century. But the Flemish artist painted his martyrdom as a contemporary event and in the dress of the day the grisly event took on a more direct meaning. Only one other known altarpiece is devoted to the same subject—the one by Dieric Bouts and Hugo van der Goes that hangs in the Museum of the Church of the Holy Saviour in Bruges.

Before its channel to the sea silted up, Bruges was a thriving port, grown wealthy under its Burgundian duke, Philip the Good, from banking and the wool trade with England. The prince’s financial adviser, Hippolytus de Berthoz, presumably commissioned both triptychs to honor his saint’s name. The heraldry painted on the outer faces of the triptych suggests that it was done some time between 1480 and 1494, almost certainly by a master painter in the Guild of St. Luke, a medieval union that included saddlers and glassworkers.

The so-called Flemish primitives were actually the first to master some of the subtler techniques of oil painting. From the triptych’s wood panels, prepared with white lime, light flashes through glistening layers of oil pigments as if from the depth of the landscape. But the artist depended on more than radiant color to entrance his viewers. He extended the action into the flanking panels, breaking boldly out of the boxy frames. The turning necks of tugging horses and the upraised arms of their whipping drivers set up a motion around the spread-eagled saint that sweeps through the three panels like a deadly carrousel, binding them together more than the folding altarpiece’s hinges. In depicting the Dark Ages torture of a martyr, the unknown painter of Flanders was stepping forward artistically into the awakening Renaissance.