Knowing Rogier van der Weyden.

THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS

1436. Oil on panel. 220 cm Ă— 262 cm.

Museo del Prado de Madrid.

The theme shows us the moment when Jesus Christ is taken down from the cross, already dead, which we can appreciate by the wound that his figure shows on the side that occupies the central part of the composition.

Right to him appear a series of characters who would be present in the death of Jesus accompanying him at that time. Among them are two elders, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who would be the owner of the tomb where the body of Jesus is deposited. The youngest character is Juan Evangelista, whom we recognize because he still doesn't have a beard due to his youth.

The Virgin Mary has fainted, broken by grief as she contemplates the death of her son, she is in the same position that Jesus Christ is represented in the painting.

Of the three remaining women, the easiest to identify is Mary Magdalene, who is on the right wearing a belt that represents virginity and purity. We highlight the richness of the dresses and garments worn by each of the characters that fill the work. We cannot fail to point out the expression of pain that each of the figures in the work present, their disjointed faces full of tears that show, for example, the two women at the ends and that are one of the main characteristics of the work. The skull and bone traditionally represent the bones of Adam, the first man who with the weight of the cross of Christ emerges from under the ground and symbolizes the end of the old covenant and the beginning of the new.

TUNA ACADEMIA DE ARTES PLĂ STICAS https://tunacademia.wixsite.com/tunarte

ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN

https://artefixio.blogspot.com/

Tournai 1399/1400-Brussels, Belgium 1464).

tunaceramica@gmail.com

For two years I was administrator of the Begijnhof, the most important religious and economic institution in Brussels, dedicated to the relief of the poor.

Hello, my name is Rogier de la Pasture although everyone knows me as Rogier van der Weyden, named a painter of the city of Brussels at 35 years old and very well known for my surprising thoroughness and detail.

I was born in Tournai around 1399, a French city in the lands of the Dukes of Burgundy, my father was a prosperous cutler, Henri de la Pasture, and my mother Agnès de Watrelos, possibly of a higher social class than my father's.

At the age of 35, I was appointed an official painter of the city of Brussels. I enjoyed prestige and wealth in my time.

At the end of 1425, my father died and the family home was put up for sale. In 1427 or shortly before I married Elisabeth Goffaert, the daughter of a Brussels shoemaker and about five years younger, with whom I had at least four children: Cornelis, Margaretha, Pieter and Jan, born between 1437 and 1450.

At 28 I entered Robert Campin's workshop as an apprentice and when I left him I was already «Maistre Rogier» at 33 ... how can a man already married and perhaps the first child born to become an apprentice at twenty-eight in a paint atelier?

In 1423 between the trades the rule had been established that anyone who wanted to obtain his frank mastery in a city had to undergo a four-year apprenticeship alongside a teacher (Châtelet).

I stood out as a draftsman and painter of extraordinary competence, skills that I believe I have developed since my childhood.

In addition to some altarpieces on Justice for the Brussels City Council, which were lost, I did countless works of religious themes such as the Triptych of the Virgin or the Miraflores, other Triptychs and portraits. I have been the Flemish painter who deals the most with pain and drama giving great importance to composition and my figures are of a very slender canon. I also paid close attention to volume and drawing.

I was able to create the appearance of life thanks to the extraordinary meticulousness with which I approached the minute details, such as the tears that run down the cheeks, the embroideries of a fabric or the shadow of poorly shaved beards. That is why it is said that I broke in my painting with the limits between the real and the sculpted by placing my figures in spaces that are often implausible or unreal, with scales contrary to logic and, nevertheless, intensely emotional and of great aesthetic force due to the harmony of my compositions.

I died in Brussels on June 18, 1464 and I was buried, as a notable bourgeois, in the Chapel of Saint Catherine of the Church of Saint Gúdula. I was without a doubt a renovator of the flamenco artistic world,