Dresden Triptych (Virgin and Child with St. Michael and St. Catherine and a Donor)

The Dresden Triptych (or Virgin and Child with St. Michael and St. Catherine and a Donor, or Triptych of the Virgin and Child) is a very small hinged-triptych altarpiece by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. It consists of five individual panel paintings: a central inner panel, and two double-sided wings. It is signed and dated 1437, and in the permanent collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, with the panels still in their original frames. The only extant triptych attributed to van Eyck, and the only non-portrait signed with his personal motto, ALC IXH XAN (“I Do as I Can”). the triptych can be placed at the midpoint of his known works. It echoes a number of the motifs of his earlier works while marking an advancement in his ability in handling depth of space, and establishes iconographic elements of Marian portraiture that were to become widespread by the latter half of the 15th century. Elisabeth Dhanens describes it as “the most charming, delicate and appealing work by Jan van Eyck that has survived”. The paintings on the two outer wings become visible when the triptych is closed. They show the Virgin Mary and Archangel Gabriel in an Annunciation scene painted in grisaille, which because of their near-monochrome colouring give the impression that the figures are sculpted. The three inner panels are set in an ecclesiastical interior. In the central inner panel Mary is seated and holds the Christ Child on her lap. On the left hand wing Archangel Michael presents a kneeling donor, while on the right St. Catherine of Alexandria stands reading a prayer book. The interior panels are outlined with two layers of painted bronze frames, inscribed with mostly Latin lettering. The texts are drawn from a variety of sources, in the central frames from biblical descriptions of the assumption, while the inner wings are lined with fragments of prayers dedicated to saints Michael and Catherine. The work may have been intended for private devotion, perhaps as a portable altarpiece for a migrant cleric. That the frames are so richly decorated with Latin inscriptions indicates the donor, whose identity is lost, was highly educated and cultured. Because of a lack of surviving documentary evidence on commissions of 15th century-Northern painting, the identities of donors are often established through evidence gathered by modern art historians. In this work, damaged coats of arms on the borders of the interior wings have been identified with the Giustiniani of Genoa – an influential albergo active from 1362 – who established trade links with Bruges as early as the mid-14th century. The Dresden Triptych was probably in the possession of the Giustiniani family in the mid- to late-15th century. It is mentioned in a May 10, 1597 record of a purchase by Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, and was then sold with the Gonzaga Collection to Charles I of England in 1627. After Charles’s fall and execution, the painting went to Paris and was owned by Eberhard Jabach, the Cologne-based banker and art dealer for Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin. A year after Jabach’s death in 1695, it passed to the Elector of Saxony, and next appears in a 1754 inventory of the Dresden Collection, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, until the German historian Aloys Hirt in 1830 established it as a van Eyck. In the mid-19th century the Dresden catalogues first attribute it to Hubert van Eyck (d. 1426) and a few years later to Jan.