COTER, Colijn de - b. ~1446 Brussel, d. 1538 Brussel - WGA

COTER, Colijn de

(b. ~1446 Brussel, d. 1538 Brussel)

Flemish painter. Contracts survive for two lost works by this artist: one of 1493, in the ledgers of the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp, names a ‘Colyn van Brusele’ as a master of the Guild, commissioned by the Confraternity of St Luke to decorate the vault of its chapel in Onze Lieve Vrouw (later the cathedral); the other, in the accounts of the Confraternity of St Eligius, Brussels, reveals that Coter undertook in 1509-10 to paint the doors of a tabernacle, which was completed in 1511. The dates of these documents mark the known boundaries of Coter’s artistic activity, but his surviving work suggests these may be extended from 1480 to 1525.

Three signed paintings are known: St Luke Painting the Virgin in the parish church of Vieure, Cosne d’Allier, the altarpiece of the Trinity (Paris, Louvre) and the Virgin Crowned by Angels (Düsseldorf, private collection). Inscriptions stating that Coter painted the works in Brussels appear on the borders of the robes. These works serve as reference points for other attributions and illustrate the essential phases of Coter’s stylistic and technical evolution.

Baptism of St Libertus

The recently restored panel is part of a series in the Mechelen Cathedral depicting the legend of St Rumoldus.

De Coter imitated Robert Campin. He died at over ninety years of age in 1538 without in any way losing his Gothic mentality.

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Christ as the Man of Sorrows

This panel originally formed a diptych with a panel depicting the Mater Dolorosa, but the two were separated in the 1930s and they are now in different private collections.

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Descent from the Cross

In this dramatic Descent, the figure of Joseph of Arimathea on the right picks up the body of Christ with the help of Nicodemus, while St John supports the Blessed Virgin, who has fainted from sorrow. The five characters fill the composition, virtually covering the golden ground with black dots - a Gothic archaism of Flemish tradition - in the two upper corners. Painted with great technical precision, the superimposition of layers of colour is beautiful, in spite of the erosion and the transparencies of the pictorial layer.

This work could have derived from a lost prototype by Rogier van der Weyden, for such complex compositions and forced perspectives are characteristic of his works. The figure of the Virgin is inspired by the Madonna painted by Van der Weyden around 1435 in his Descent from the Cross kept in the Prado Museum. He also sought inspiration in Hugo van der Goes for the figure of Joseph of Arimathea, probably based on the bearded man holding a curtain in The Adoration of the Shepherds of 1480, now kept in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

Four other versions of The Descent from the Cross attributed to Colyn de Coter exist, all of which follow a similar pattern.

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The Adoration of the Magi

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