Two Angels overcoming a Demon
Southern Netherlands
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1500 - 1520
Materials
Wood, paint
Measurements
42.0 x 27.4 x 10.6 cm
Place of origin
Bruges
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 514500
Summary
Wood; two angels overcoming a demon; Southern Netherlands, perhaps Bruges; c. 1500-1520. A wooden sculpture depicting two young angels overcoming a demon, using their feet and hands to hold down the grimacing monster. The sculpture is a fragment from an altarpiece, and was made in Flanders, perhaps Bruges, in the early sixteenth century.
Full description
A wooden sculpture depicting two angels overcoming a demon. The two young angels, dressed in long tunics, use their feet and hands to hold down the grimacing demon. The scene is set against a steep slope, the surface of which has a pattern of deep parallel grooves. The figures are extensively polychromed, the angels’ tunics gilded, the devil is red. The angels were originally equipped with wings, now lost. There is some repainting, especially the figure of the demon. There are two large and two small holes in the bottom of the sculpture’s base. It is mounted on a modern green velvet-covered wooden base. Partly flattened at the back, the sculpture probably originally formed part of an altarpiece, in which it would have been one of numerous panels. The panel is far too small to have formed its own panel. It would have been one of several separately-carved components that would have been assembled to create a composite scene, as can be seen for example in the scene of the Nativity in the large Antwerp retable in the Cathedral of Rennes (Sophie Guillot de Suduiraut (ed.), Le retable anversois de la cathédrale de Rennes, Rennes 2019, pp. 102-05, fig. 19), in which one of the separately carved sections in fact is formed from two child angels, one playing a viol (ibid., fig. 24). The right-hand side of the Anglesey Abbey relief is angled and painted, suggesting that the panel might have been at the extreme right of the assemblage for which it was made, and would have been at the outside edge. The subjects of the great majority of Renaissance Flemish wooden altarpieces are the Life and Passion of Christ or the Life of the Virgin Mary. In neither of these sequences does this scene seem to fit easily and, in fact, the iconography seems to be very unusual; it has not as yet been possible to identify a similar scene in other Southern Netherlandish altarpieces. Nor does it seem to form part of scenes such as the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ descended into the Underworld. It might have formed part of some scene illustrating the Art of Dying Well (ars moriendi). In for example several of the prints on this theme by the German Master M.Z., dated c 1500-1510, angels and devils contest the body of the sick man lying on his deathbed. Although it has not proved possible to find this precise subject elsewhere in Flemish carved and painted altarpieces, some rather similar charming figures of small robed boys populate the lower section of the Altarpiece of the Kinship of Saint Anne, made in a Brussels workshop c. 1500-10 and formerly in the chapel of Sainte-Anne du Val Duchesse in Audergham (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 327; Catheline Périer-D’Ieteren and Nicole Gesché-Koning, Guide Bruxellois des Retables des Pays-Bas Méridionaux (XVe-XVIe siècles). Bruxelles et Environs, Brussels 2000, pp. 60-67). The distinctive figure of the devil, as he is manhandled to the ground by the two angels, is however paralleled in images of the Devil trampled beneath the feet of the Archangel Saint Michael, for example, a figure of St Michael in the Sint-Jacobskerk in Bruges, made in Bruges c. 1440-50, or another similar figure in the Gruuthusemuseum in Bruges (John W. Steyaert, Late Gothic Sculpture. The Burgundian Netherlands, Ghent 1994, pp. 198-99, no. 42 & fig. 42a). These figures relate stylistically to a pair of wooden angels with Instruments of the Passion in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, which are of exceptional interest, since they are rare documented works signed by the sculptor Tydeman Maes, who is recorded as working in Bruges between 1429-52 (Late Gothic Sculpture, pp. 194-97, nos. 41A-B). The expressive facial features of Tydeman’s angels seem to be reflected in later Bruges sculpture, such as a seated Virgin and Child in the Gruuthusemuseum in Bruges, made c. 1500-20 (Inv. 04VS. Late Gothic Sculpture, pp. 210-11, no. 47), and in the Anglesey Abbey relief, with its slightly fleshly features and sharpish noses, and rather stiff drapery. The Anglesey Abbey relief may well therefore have been made in a workshop in Bruges. The face of the Christ Child in another Bruges seated Virgin and Child group, in a private collection, is even closer to the slightly idiosyncratic faces of the two angels (Dagmar Preising, ed., In Gotischer Gesellschaft. Die Sammlung Goldschmidt. Spätmittelalterliche Skulpturen aus einer niederländischen Privatsammlung, exh. cat., Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, Aachen 1998, pp. 101-04, no. 45). There are though also some parallels with the chubby children in the Rennes cathedral altarpiece, made in Antwerp around 1520. Jeremy Warren November 2021
Provenance
Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966), by whom bequeathed in 1966.
Makers and roles
Southern Netherlands , sculptor Flemish (Antwerp) School, sculptor
References
Christie, Manson & Woods 1971: The National Trust, Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge. Inventory: Furniture, Textiles, Porcelain, Bronzes, Sculpture and Garden Ornaments’, 1971, p. 149. Russell 2007: Joanna Russell, ‘Anglesey Abbey Sculpture Project’, Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, 2007, pp. 15-17, Pl. 4.