Our Lady of the Dry Tree

Madonna of the Dry Tree (or Our Lady of the Barren Tree) is a small oil-on-oak panel painting, dated c. 1462-5, by Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus. Unusually innovative and dramatic for its time, it depicts the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child as she stands on a disembodied dead tree trunk, surrounded by the circular briars of a crown of thorns. The painting is believed to allude to the Book of Ezekiel, with the tree symbolizing the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden. However, Christus portrays the tree as dead and withered, with flowers blooming on its branches with the birth of Christ. The golden letters hanging from the branches of the tree are thought to represent the first letters of the Angelic Salutation, the Ave Maria. The Baby Jesus is presented as holding an orb crowned with a cross. The iconography is drawn from the Confraternity of Our Lady of the Dry Tree in Bruges, which both Christus and his wife, Gaudicine, were members of. Mary is dressed in a long red robe with a green lining, the folds deeply cut in an almost sculptural manner. Her robe closely resembles that of the Madonna in Christus’s Exeter Madonna of c. 1444, leading to speculation that the work is from an earlier period than the assumed 1462-65. Unusually for a Madonna of the time, her face is largely unidealised, the features less soft or rounded, and her expression less presupposing than in his later Madonnas or even secular female portraits. The representation of Christ seems derived from Rogier van der Weyden, especially in the playfulness and amiability of Christ’s facial expression, although given that Christus might not have had access to the older master’s work, the influence may be second-hand, through the panels of Hans Memling. The panel is highly illustionistic, perhaps on par with the older painter’s Durán Madonna. Christus employs trompe-l’œil techniques in a number of passages, creating a three-dimensional effect that adds to the strangeness and disembodied atmosphere. These can be most notably seen in the Virgin’s hand as it lies below the child’s toes, in the orb held in his hands, and in the golden letters hanging from the tree briars. X-radiograph reveals little preparatory underdrawing outside of a series of ruled lines used to situate elements within the overall design. Maryan Ainsworth notes that this is typical of Christus’s smaller panels, some which – including this work – could be considered miniatures, and compares it to the techniques used in contemporary illuminated manuscripts. Art historian Grete Ring identified the iconography of the work as belonging to the Bruges confraternity of “Our Lady of the Dry Tree” of which Christus was a member, also known as the “Confraternity of Our Lady of the Snow”. The confraternity attracted members of the upper echelon of Burgundian society; Philip the Good’s wife Isabella of Portugal was a member as were most of the leading Burgundian nobles, the leading upper-class families and the leading foreign traders of Bruges. Christus joined – for the same reason Gerard David would some years later – to attract wealthy patrons, sometime between 1458 and 1463.