Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin is a large oil and tempera on oak panel painting, usually dated between 1435 and 1440. It shows Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of artists, sketching the Virgin Mary as she nurses the Child Jesus. Three near contemporary versions are in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the Groeningemuseum, Bruges.
About Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin in brief
Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin is a large oil and tempera on oak panel painting, usually dated between 1435 and 1440. It shows Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of artists, sketching the Virgin Mary as she nurses the Child Jesus. Three near contemporary versions are in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the Groeningemuseum, Bruges. The Boston panel is widely considered the original from underdrawings that are both heavily reworked and absent in other versions. It is in relatively poor condition, having suffered considerable damage, which remains despite extensive restoration and cleaning. The painting’s historical significance rests both on the skill behind the design and its merging of earthly and divine realms. By positioning himself in the same space as the Madonna, and showing a painter in the act of portrayal, Van der Weyden brings to the fore the role of artistic creativity in 15th-century society. Luke was credited with painting the original of the immensely popular Italo-Byzantine Cambrai Madonna, to which numerous miracles were attributed. Within four years at least 15 high quality copies had been made. It was regarded as an example of St Luke’s skill, and contemporary painters strove to emulate him in their depictions of Mary. The panel became widely influential with near copies by the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula and Hugo van der Goes. This is one of the most famous depictions of the Virgin type of the Hodegetria most usually associated with Northern and Byzantine depictions of her.
This panel contains four individual pieces of oak, painted over a chalk ground bound with glue. The dominant pigments are black, white, lead and charcoal, with black and white pigments in the mid-1430s being the dominant black and black pigments. The colours in this work are warmer than those in the van Eyck. The Virgin type is changed, here she is depicted as a Lactans. This type of Virgin is depicted in red or scarlet, Mary in the typical warm- blues, and Luke is dressed in a more typical warm red. The most obvious similarity is the two figures standing at a bridge, who may not carry specific identities; those are sometimes identified as Joachim and Anne, the Virgin’s parents. There are no surviving contemporary archival documents for Rogier van Der Weyden’s Saint Luke Drawing The Virgin, but art historians agree that it was almost certainly painted for the Brussels painters’ guild, for their chapel at the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula. It may have been commissioned to celebrate the artist’s appointment as city painter for Brussels. In the 15th century images of Luke painting the Virgin were more commonly found in Northern rather than Italian art. Luke was thought to have been a portraitist, and Northern European painters’ guilds were considered to be under his protection. The Virgin appears to the left, a positioning that became predominant in later Netherlandish diptychs.
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