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拍品專文
We are grateful to Pieter van den Brink and Dan Ewing for independently confirming the attribution, on the basis of photographs. Friedländer's Notname for this artist, created in an attempt to organise the enormous number of anonymous paintings that had been produced in Antwerp in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, is based on a small triptych of The Adoration of the Magi in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting: The Antwerp Mannerists: Adriaen Isenbrandt, XI, Leyden and Brussels, 1974, pp. 26-8, pl. 52-61). A number of attempts have been made to divide this large group amongst different hands, and identify the specific artist, or artists at work, but their identity has remained allusive (see P. van den Brink, 'A shattered jigsaw puzzle: On a partly reconstructed Altarpiece by the Master of the Antwerp Adoration', Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, 2007, pp. 161-80).
These panels, which must originally have formed part of a larger Passion altarpiece, the subject of Abraham and Melchizedek prefiguring the Eucharist, shares a number of characteristics with the group of works assigned to The Master of the Antwerp Adoration, most notably the Master's idiosyncratic facial types. The Christ figure and dog in the second panel recur in a painting assigned to the Master of Christ Before Caiaphas, which forms part of a fragmentary retable in Kreuzbruder Abbey, Cologne (M.J. Friedländer, op. cit., pl. 54). The composition of Abraham and Melchizedek is also very close to a panel of the same subject, but of smaller dimensions, in a polyptych in the church of Saint Martinus in Linnich. This altarpiece, which had previously been attributed to The Master of the Linnich Adoration, has itself only recently been added to the oeuvre of The Master of the Antwerp Adoration (M. Krämer, Der Hochaltar in der Pfarrkirche St. Martinus in Linnich, Cologne, forthcoming publication, 2012).
These panels, which must originally have formed part of a larger Passion altarpiece, the subject of Abraham and Melchizedek prefiguring the Eucharist, shares a number of characteristics with the group of works assigned to The Master of the Antwerp Adoration, most notably the Master's idiosyncratic facial types. The Christ figure and dog in the second panel recur in a painting assigned to the Master of Christ Before Caiaphas, which forms part of a fragmentary retable in Kreuzbruder Abbey, Cologne (M.J. Friedländer, op. cit., pl. 54). The composition of Abraham and Melchizedek is also very close to a panel of the same subject, but of smaller dimensions, in a polyptych in the church of Saint Martinus in Linnich. This altarpiece, which had previously been attributed to The Master of the Linnich Adoration, has itself only recently been added to the oeuvre of The Master of the Antwerp Adoration (M. Krämer, Der Hochaltar in der Pfarrkirche St. Martinus in Linnich, Cologne, forthcoming publication, 2012).