Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 104. (Budapest, 2006)

TERÉZ GERSZI: Pieter Coecke Van Aelst and Andrea Mantegna

PIETER COECKE VAN AELST AND ANDREA MANTEGNA TEREZ GERSZI A high-quality, large-size drawing by an anonymous artist entered the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest in 1990 as the generous donation of Emil Wolf, a New York art collector of Hungarian origin (fig. 3).' Its colourful overall effect is due to the fact that the foreground is executed in light brown ink with identically coloured wash, whereas the mountain, the detail in the right middle-ground and the background are drawn in black chalk. Although the rendition refers to various moments of the Old Testament story of Abraham's sacrifice, quite particularly, the main scene

—the figures of Abraham ready to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, and the angel hindering the tragedy

—is missing from atop the mountain, since the artist, or someone else at a later date, erased and covered it with wash imitating clouds. The funeral pyre and some details of the figures are discernible only in the infrared image. Most renderings of the theme are dramatic in tone with the three protagonists placed in the foreground. Here, on the other hand, the story unfolds in a calm, narrative manner, set in an extensive landscape, following fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Netherlandish precedents. In the foreground, the supporting characters of the story, the two servants with the ass, are emphatically shown. This motif frequently figures in early Byzantine works representing the sacrifice of Abraham; it also appears on Ghiberti's (1378-1455) and Brunelleschi's (1377-1446) reliefs,

2 and was also stressed in the painting in Schwerin, formerly attributed to Barend van Orley (c. 1488-1541) and his workshop, but more recently only to the master's workshop (fig. I).

1 Nicole Dacos, on the other hand, links this painting to Michiel van Coxcie's (14991592) works of around 1520.

4 This painting is an altar wing; consequently, its vertical composition was defined by the narrow, upright format. The fact that the Parisian painting (Paris, Louvre, fig. 2)

5 dated to about 1530-1535 of the Brunswick Monogrammist (alias Jan van Amstel