The Deluge

This unpublished panel presents an interpretation of the Great Flood (Genesis 6-9), illustrated with a wealth of detail and a delight in narrative incident typical of the Low Countries. The artist shows the antediluvian populace of the world as a motley crew of character types, some reminiscent of those who people the compositions of Hieronymus Bosch. Some strive to stay afloat on the debris of the old order, like the old man at centre left, with a woman and a child scrambling to join him on what might be a desk (perhaps an allusion to commerce); others seems to think that they have been clever by mounting swimming livestock, like the figures at lower centre, still unprepared for the eventual doom of all living creatures save those who have found shelter in Noah's Ark. Mimicking the men on a cow, a dark bird finds it worthwhile to take a perch on a floating hog, at lower left, while other figures run in alarm onto higher ground - safe for a while. Of particular interest is the figure of a ruddy-faced friar, who finds undignified safety at the top of a blasted, leafless oak - a jibe at men of the cloth counted amongst the sinners damned to drowning reflective of a latent sixteenth-century sympathy with the Protestant Reformation. In the midst of the vengeful inundation, righteous Noah and his family look out from the windows of the ark, the roof of which is painted with the particularly charming conceit of a glass-covered aviary - an Early Modern skylight or sunroof. The picture occupies an important place in the iconography of the Great Flood in post-medival painting; this is a rare early example of an illustration of the Biblical story in northern art (for the episode of Noah's arrival on Mount Ararat, see the work dated 1570 by the Dutch artist Simon Myle, Sotheby's, Paris, 23 June 2011, lot 30, EUR1,095,150).

We are grateful to Dr. Luuk Pijl for noting that the figural types resemble those attributed to Jan van Amstel (Amsterdam c. 1500-c. 1542 Antwerp), now generally identified with the so-called Brunswick Monogramist, suggesting that they may be by a late-sixteenth-century follower of that artist. A certain similarity exists to a large, many-figured Deluge of different composition, formerly given to Jan van Amstel or to Herri met de Bles, but now simply called South Netherlandish School (Antwerp), first half of the sixteenth century, in Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts (inventory no. 9167). The composition of the latter work is almost entirely filled with angrily swirling waves, but has similarly stripped, isolated tree trunks with figures scrambling to escape the great flood, and a distant view to a city and Noah's Ark being filled by the animals, analogous in position to the Ark shown under construction in the background of the present work.

We are also grateful to Dr. Luc Serck for suggesting an attribution to the Circle of Joachim Patinir on the basis of photographs, describing the picture as 'une oeuvre hautement originale à inscrire dans la proximité immediate de Patenier, question à approfondir' (private communication, 2012). Dr. Serck compares the combination of elements in the present work - the construction of the landscape, the background view towards a distant city, the port with ships under sail, the small background staffage, the isolated and denuded tree trunks overtaken with climbing vines and ivies, the naked rock formation, the bulky animals - with that in pictures by Patinir such as the Landscape with the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), the haunting Charon Crossing the River Styx (Madrid, Museo Nacional de Prado) and the Landscape with Saint Christopher (Patrimonio Nacional, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial). For excellent illustrations of these works, including microphotographs and infrared analysis, see A. Vergara, ed., Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue, Madrid, 2007, nos. 1, 16 and 17).