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Lot Essay
Matthieu van Beveren was a Flemish sculptor in wood, stone and ivory who ran a large workshop in Antwerp, mainly known for its Baroque church sculptures. He created beautiful monuments, including an allegorical group of Virtue, Fame and Time in the celebrated funerary chapel of the Duke Lamoral of Thurn and Taxis in Brussels. His smaller-scale work was little studied until Theuerkauff’s essay of 1988 (loc. cit.)
The present work, with its extraordinary physiognomy and vigorously modelled anatomy, is comparable, particularly in the details of drapery and facial type, to a number of van Beveren works, including the Pieta groups in both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Musees Royaux d’Art et de l’Histoire, Brussels (Theuerkauff, loc.cit., figs. 1 and 4). The expressive energy of the figure, however, is not reflected in some of van Beveren’s works, and the perizonium of our crucified Christ is similar to that of a smaller corpus previously attributed to the artist before a re-evaluation by Theuerkauff.
The present work, with its extraordinary physiognomy and vigorously modelled anatomy, is comparable, particularly in the details of drapery and facial type, to a number of van Beveren works, including the Pieta groups in both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Musees Royaux d’Art et de l’Histoire, Brussels (Theuerkauff, loc.cit., figs. 1 and 4). The expressive energy of the figure, however, is not reflected in some of van Beveren’s works, and the perizonium of our crucified Christ is similar to that of a smaller corpus previously attributed to the artist before a re-evaluation by Theuerkauff.