Workshop of Gerard David

The subject is recounted in all four Gospels, and shows the body of Christ being taken down from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, watched by the Virgin Mary, Saint John and Mary Magdalene. This apparently unpublished panel is one of several abbreviated versions of an original design by the celebrated Bruges painter Gerard David (c.1460-1523), painted around 1495-99 and today in the Frick Collection in New York, in which the figures are shown at full-length.¹ Some, such as such as the present painting and those formerly in the Meeus Collection in Brussels and a smaller example in the Uffizi in Florence,² are close in style and handling to David and were probably produced in his atelier. The former is especially close to the present panel, though with an arched top. Others show the shadowed and fine-boned physiognomies characteristic of his follower Adriaen Isenbrandt (1485-1551), and were likely painted by him or, owing to their varying levels of quality, in his own workshop, an association which has been suggested for the present lot. Although Isenbrandt painted a version on the same scale as the original, today in the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota,³ most of his extant versions are on a smaller scale, and were no doubt produced for the purposes of private devotion. Friedländer, for example, recorded a version in the Lange Collection in Berlin and another with the figures at full-length formerly on the art market in Vienna, both of which he considered to be from Isenbrandt’s own hand, while another in the Cathedral in Sarasota he listed as a copy.⁴ The number of extant versions of this reduced variant attest to its popularity, and suggest that perhaps David himself had painted a version in this format which is now lost. Isenbrandt would probably have encountered the design in the workshop of David, where he worked for a period after his arrival in Bruges in 1510, and he continued to repeated or adapt the older Master’s designs and patterns in his own independent production.

¹ https://collections.frick.org/objects/148/ 

² https://rkd.nl/explore/images/44806; https://rkd.nl/explore/images/50008

³ https://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/objects/24681/

⁴ File note from March 1943 recorded under no. 50011 in the Friedländer Archive in the RKD, The Hague. For the latter see Friedländer 1974 p. 85, no. 165c.