NEW YORK — Prayer wheels, rosary beads, tefillin, incense and prayer mats are all aids to prayer. So is this wooden triptych, painted in the workshop of Robert Campin, an early-15th-century Netherlandish artist.
Yes, it’s also a picture — and, as it happens, one of the greatest early Netherlandish paintings in America. But when you see it at the Cloisters in New York, remember that it was an ingenious, all-stops-out attempt to bring you closer to God. The artist was trying not just to get your attention, but also to keep it, sustain it, renew it. (“Attention ... is the same thing as prayer,” wrote French philosopher Simone Weil. “It presupposes faith and love.”)
The square-shaped central panel depicts the dramatic, sacred moment when the Archangel Gabriel appears before the Virgin Mary to tell her she will conceive a child, the Son of God. This event, the Annunciation — full of tender hope and terrifying implication — is supposed to have happened 2,000 years ago in Galilee. So why does it appear to be happening in a 15th-century domestic interior in northern Europe?
In short, because Campin wanted contemporary viewers to grasp the immediate relevance of this event to their own lives. He wanted us to register the presence of the sacred and the timeless in the midst of the material, “fallen,” everyday world. Conflating two places and two different time periods, 14 centuries apart, was a way to do this.
Campin worked in Tournai, a bustling center of textile and tapestry production in what is now Belgium. It was also the hometown of the great (though younger) Rogier van der Weyden, who probably worked as Campin’s assistant.
Campin knew that whoever had access to this painting would return to it repeatedly. To keep it interesting, the artist combined rich color (intensified through thin glazes), a sophisticated sense of space (note how the table is tipped toward us, to make the things on it feel closer, more available) and, above all, a surfeit of symbolically charged details.
There are so many things to notice! The just snuffed-out candle, its black smoke rising and then curling back on itself — as candle smoke actually does. The rust stains in the wood left by the nails in the door. The shiny hanging pot that casts not one but two overlapping shadows, because it blocks two sources of light — the two round windows on the left.
On the left panel, painted after the central panel, the triptych’s owner, Peter Engebrechts, is shown kneeling in prayer. (When he married, his wife and the gatekeeper in the background were added in.) An open door suggests they are looking across the threshold at the profound scene. We can imagine them and Mary and Gabriel sharing a continuous space. Or we can respect the door as a significant division between the material and sacred worlds. Open, perhaps, but not easy to enter.
The right-hand panel shows Joseph, Mary’s husband, at work in his carpenter’s workshop. He, too, is involved in material things. Here, too, every object carries symbolic weight. The nails prefigure Christ’s suffering on the cross. The mousetraps allude to Saint Augustine’s description of the cross as “the devil’s mousetrap.”
For me, this relatively small painting’s vividness forces a sensation of vertigo. It’s as if the six centuries separating me from the time of its making were folded into the 14 centuries since Jesus’s conception. In fact, time no longer seems linear. It seems instead to double back on itself and disperse like the smoke from that snuffed-out candle.
Great Works, In Focus
A series featuring art critic Sebastian Smee’s favorite works in permanent collections around the United States. “They are things that move me. Part of the fun is trying to figure out why.”
Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.
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