SCOREL, Jan van

Jan van Scorel’s portraits are highly naturalistic and reflect little of the ‘modern’ manner of his other paintings. While in Haarlem, he created a joint portrait of members of the Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims. The Brotherhood, founded in 1506, consisted of prominent local men who had made the arduous pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which is depicted in the small painting within the painting held by a servant. This is an early group portrait, a type of painting that grew in popularity in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Van Scorel sacrificed unified action for a clear presentation of each individual. The twelve gentlemen are arranged, in chronological order of their pilgrimage, two by two, as if in procession. Each holds a palm branch, known as a Jerusalem feather. The Brotherhood’s members were responsible each Palm Sunday for escorting a wooden Palmesel, a wheeled statue of Christ riding on an ass, through the streets of Haarlem.

Scorel placed the group against a wall. The men’s coats-of-arms and mottos appear as if painted on the wooden trim above their heads.The sculpturesque features of each man are carefully recorded. Below, inscribed sheets of paper, rendered in trompe l’oeil, are affixed to a fictive strip of wood. The first lists deceased members of the Brotherhood. The eight-line text beneath each man identifies him, testifies that he visited Christ’s grave and offers a supplication or prayer. Later their death dates were added. The third figure from the right, above the detached edge of paper, is the artist dressed as a canon.

In Venice, Scorel was impressed by the sensuous character of Venice and Venetian art with its painterly qualities and beautiful nudes reclining amid mellow woodlands. His Death of Cleopatra was inspired by the well-known Venetian type, Giorgione’s Venus.

Jan van Scorel left Utrecht in 1518 and traveled through Germany and Austria, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, and sojourned in Rome, where he became the curator of the collection of antiquities in the Belvedere under the Dutch Pope Adrian VI. Stylistically his diptych Virgin and Child and Portrait of a Man is indebted to his experience in Italy.

The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem is the central panel of a triptych ordered in 1526 by Herman Lochorst, canon of the cathedral in Utrecht. The fascinating view of Jerusalem in the background of the painting was based on a sketch Scorel had made of Jerusalem from a point east of the city on the Mount of Olives.

The triptych was ordered in 1526 by Herman Lochorst, canon of the cathedral in Utrecht. The central panel depicts the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem. The interior wings present saints venerated in Utrecht: Agnes, Pope Cornelius, and Anthony on the left, Sebastian, Gertrude of Nivelles, and Christopher on the right. Of these figures, St Agnes is the most striking in her charming classical pose and the sheer, gauzelike chiton she wears. On the outsides of the wings (not shown here) the donor and his family are presented, kneeling in front of their patron saints.

This painting, showing the suicide of Lucretia, is on the back side of the Portrait of a Man. After rape by Sextus, son of Tarquin, king of Rome, the Roman matron preferred death to further dishonour, so she killed herself. Scorel turned to a much-used Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael as his source.

This panel depicts a plain interior adorned only with a green curtain, which creates the background, leaving one section of the wall visible. Before it, and occupying the centre of the composition, is the Virgin holding some narcissi, and the Christ Child. Flanking them is the pair of unidentified donors. The most striking feature of the panel is the contrast between the realism, austerity and sobriety of the donors and the idealization, spontaneous movement and freshness of the group formed by the Virgin and Child.

The central group in this painting became extremely popular in its own day and there are numerous copies and versions. The present panel has been related to two other similar compositions, one in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and the other in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie.

Scorel travelled all over Germany, and into Italy, went to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, arrived back in Venice in 1521, made his fortune by being in Rome at the right moment to be practically the only artist patronized by the Dutch pope Hadrian VI, came back to Utrecht full of the influences of Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, Raphael and Michelangelo, and later went to France.

Scorel was the first Renaissance artist in the Netherlands. He depicted Mary Magdalen as a Venetian courtesan seen through the eyes of a Netherlandish artist who had mastered the imitation of materials. He placed her in the mountains of southern France to which the converted prostitute supposedly retreated in later life.

The sitter of this portrait of unusual format is Joris van Egmond (1504-59), Bishop of Utrecht from 1534 to 1559, a member of a family that was successively raised in political importance by the Habsburgs in the late 15th and 16th centuries. He is portrayed life-sized, turned slightly into three-quarter view against an undifferentiated green background.

The painting is the right half of a diptych: the man originally faced a Madonna (now in a museum in Tambov, Russia). The sitter’s most highly prized virtue is stoicism, a classical attribute, symbolized by the suicide of Lucretia shown on the verso of his portrait.

The attribution of this painting to Jan van Scorel is based on its affinity with a group similar portraits by him that date from c. 1520, from the period when he was in Italy. He took a particular interest in Venetian painting. In addition to similarities to Venetian portraits, the relationship between figure and landscape is reminiscent of northern portraits such as Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man with a Roman Coin.

This painting was executed during the artist’s stay in Venice. The composition follows the format developed by Giovanni Bellini.

Christ being baptised in the river Jordan by St John the Baptist. The Holy Ghost appears in the form of a radiant dove. For this painting Van Scorel drew on elements from works by Raphael and other Italian Renaissance artists. He had travelled in Italy.

The picture is a superior example of the assimilation of the new Italian conception in Netherlandish painting. In it several motives, functionally quite distinct, are brought together, and they are brought together as they should be: within a clear, realistic space, and answering to aesthetic requirements developed in Renaissance art theory, such as grace and visual variety.

The teacher of Anthonis Mor, Van Scorel introduced Roman Mannerism into the Low Countries. This scene combines figures derived from Michelangelo with a nocturnal landscape characteristic of the northern tradition. In the brightly lit foreground, a large crowd flees the unstoppable advance of the water. People and animals create a semicircle framing the background landscape, which is plunged into darkness and includes Noah’s Ark with men and women clinging on in the hope of being saved. The striking contrast between the brightly lit foreground and dark background encapsulates the drama of the scene.

This drawing is a picturesque study of a bridge over a deep ravine in the high mountains. It was sketched by Scorel as he crossed the mountains into Italy.

The drawing depicts a group of ruined buildings with the Convent of the Nativity to left.

The painting is the left half of a diptych, the right panel depicts a Portrait of a Man (now in the Staatliche Museen,Berlin).