Workshop of Pieter Coecke van Aalst, Donatrix: Right Hand Shutter

A woman with blue eyes and brown hair kneels at a prayer desk on which is an open book. She wears a black dress, trimmed and lined with brown fur. Her purplish underdress shows at the neckline and is ornamented with a round brooch; under that she wears a transparent chemise decorated in black. Her sleeves and underskirt are pinkish red. She wears rings, and a string of beads hangs from her belt.

We don‘t know who she is, but she is on the front of the right wing of a triptych (a painting in three parts). Her clothes are in the style of the mid-1520s, and she was once identified by a coat of arms – of which little now remains – on the side of her prayer desk. Her husband faces her from the left wing. He was possibly a member of the Bollis family of Sint-Truiden.

In the landscape behind her, Christ rises into the sky. Below him, in a rocky landscape, are three of the soldiers who guarded his tomb: two recoil in terror, while the third sleeps. This is the Resurrection, a continuation of the narrative from the Crucifixion in the central panel.

The style of the triptych links it with the work of Bernaert van Orley and his pupil Pieter Coecke van Aalst, both of whom also included secondary narratives in the backgrounds of their paintings. The painting on the inner wings is comparable to that of a triptych of the Lamentation painted by van Orley during the 1520s for Philippe Haneton (Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels), and with Coecke’s triptych for Paul Robyns, apparently painted in the 1530s. The artist of our painting was much less gifted than van Orley or Coecke, however: the donors’ faces are badly foreshortened, and their hands are too large, inelegantly posed and inaccurately drawn.

Technical analysis has revealed extensive underdrawing in the wings, and where the paint has become thin this is visible to the naked eye. The underdrawing is confident, rapid and sketchy, and has been quite carefully followed for the donor figures. It gives only an approximation of the landscape and the prayer desks, however. The underdrawing of the background is so sketchy that is it impossible to tell whether the narrative scenes were suggested at all. The Resurrection was painted on top of the landscape.