MASP

The painting – The Last Judgement and the St. Gregory’s Mass – formed the central panel of a retable that probably was conceived as a triptych. Mercier attributed the authorship of this work to Maître François, who may have been one of Jean Fouquet’s two sons. Mercier linked the painting with a group of richly embellished manuscripts of Saint Augustine’s The City of God, conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris (ms. fr. 18-19), at Sainte-Geneviève abbey (ms. 246), and in libraries in The Hague (ms. II), Nantes (ms. 18), and Mâcon (ms. 1 and 2). The prototype of this family of manuscripts is conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale (ms. fr. 18-19). It is was illustrated by Maître François in 1473, as demonstrated in a letter in which Robert Gaguin, Minister General of the Order of the Trinitarians, accounted for a commission he received from Charles de Gaucourt, camerlengo of Louis XI: “Robert Gaguin à Charles de Gaucourt, Chevalier doré, salut. Les indications des miniatures et l’agencement des ‘hystoires’ que vous avez commandé of peindre au livre of la Cité of Dieu ont été remis par nous au célèbre peintre François qui les a exécutés dans la perfection comme il s’y était engagé. C’est en effet un artiste si parfait dans l’art of peindre qu’Apelles s’inclinerait à bon droit devant lui…” (apud Fernand Mercier). Although he has not yet been systematically studied, Maître François was actually one of the most important manuscript painters of the so-called School of Tours in the second half of the 15th century. Proof of this is found not only in the manuscripts of The City of God amassed by Laborde and Mercier, but mostly in God the Father in His Glory, of the Wildenstein collection of selected illuminations, presently conserved in the Musée Marmottan (Wildenstein 1979, n. 191). When drawing a comparison between the figure of Christ in His Glory depicted in the panel of the Masp Collection and the figure in this Wildenstein-Marmottan illumination, one distinguishes an enormous affinity of style between the two artists, which is symptomatic of the close art relations nurtured among the Touraine and the Aragonese provinces of Roussillon, Catalonia, and Valencia in the 15th century. Although indisputable, the attribution of the panel in the Masp Collection to Master de Artés should not eclipse the influence of French illumination, particularly that of Provence and the Loire region, on our painter’s style. The work in question resulted from the combination of five iconographies: the Last Judgment, Purgatory, The City of God, St. Gregory’s Mass, and Crucified Christ as Ecce Homo or Vir Dolorum. Notwithstanding its composite character, this kind of images was not uncommon in the second half of the 15th century and early 16th century, in France as well as in the Aragonese states. Examples of this are found in identical representations by Master Cabanyes and his circle of Valencian painters, which Chandler Post reviewed (1938). Ordinarily, such an iconography articulates on a symbolical space, as for example the panel at Masp, the representation of a Last Judgment in which Paradise is circumscribed by the walls of an Augustinian Civitas Dei (City of God), where to the left of Christ there is Hell and its indefectible antipopes, and to the right, Purgatory, depicting stillborn infants in Limbo and humanity resurrected. In the center the painter depicted Saint Gregory saying Mass, to whom the image of Christ as Vir Dolorum makes a miraculous apparition, showing the wounds of the cross from which blood drips in the chalice of the Eucharist. This painting alludes to a legendary apparition of Christ’s image during mass celebration at the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (or, as another tradition has it, St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome). Presumably, on this occasion the Saint donated to the church of Santa Croce a Byzantine icon with this representation combining the image Ecce Homo, i.e., Christ brutally treated and exposed before the crowd’s contempt, and the image of Christ inside a sarcophagus, after crucifixion, as shown by the nail and spear wounds. Supposedly the small 14th-century mosaic icon conserved at the church of Santa Croce is a copy of a much older prototype (7th or 8th century) that, in turn, might be a coeval record of the miracle. This issue has been addressed in the last few decades, particularly by Vetter (1963) and Bertelli (1967). According to the first, the oldest extant rendition of this theme is an icon in the sacristy of the Church of Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, datable of the 12th century. In Italy, this subject matter was rendered in a somewhat recurrent manner since the 13th century, be it in form of illuminations (Réau 1957, II; Vetter 1963, pp. 199-214), be it in Tuscan painting (Garrison 1949, n. 150; Marques 1987, p. 230), or Venetian painting (Garrison 1949, n. 152, 153, 267, and 268). In Spain, both in Castile and under Aragonese rule, several pieces were made of which a few deserve special mention: St. Gregory’s Mass by Pedro Berruguete, in the versions found at the cathedrals of Segovia and Burgos, which certainly inspired Master Portillo’s panel at the Museum of Budapest (Nyerges 1996, p. 40), or yet the so-called Master of the St. Gregory’s Mass (Museo Provincial, Segovia). The Ecce Homo painted in the late 15th century by a Valencian painter (Master of Cuenca?), presently conserved at the Louvre (R. F. 1950-1952), also deserves mention. The Masp painting is the place of convergence and, only to a certain extent, synthesis of the most different cultural elements. The baldachin that provides the setting for the Mass is a remarkably faithful reproduction of the canopy at the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. In any case, its architecture is clearly Tuscan-Roman of the Trecento, in the manner of baldachins designed by Arnolfo di Cambio and the masters Cosmateschi. However, it should be noted that even the precarious and elementary perspective used in the representation of architecture and altar is drawn after the spatial simplification of 14th-century Tuscan’s painting. The landscape depicted on the background is not specifically Tuscan, although it may bring to the viewer’s mind a certain recollection of Tuscan hills. Otherwise, everything in it derives from a compromise between Gothic Provençal and Franco-Flemish traditions, particularly the gilded empyrean, the saint’s brocade garments, the systems of starched drapes worn by the angels, the lack of classical references in the physical features, and namely in the torso of Christ, the indifference for space unity, the type of fortifications in the celestial architecture, the pavement with tiles decorated with flower motifs, the stunning variety of an imaginary that is at the same time full of references of learned theology and fable, all of which are, in short, well in agreement with the world introduced by Bosch. It is remarkable the presence of Judas in Hell with a bag of money hanging from his neck, placed in symmetrical opposition to the souls being freed from Purgatory – an opposition that is not indifferent to the medieval allegories of Virtues and Vices, the psychomachy that abounded in 15th-century French painting, particularly from Picardy. No accurate source of reference allows the dating of the Masp work that, however, should be approximately the same as its peer at the Museo Provincial, of Valencia, dated c.1512.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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