One of my favourite places in Brussels, the abbey of Rouge Cloître (Roode Closter), is going through renovation.
A long boarded-up abbatial house is being converted to a hotel.
Some might decry this as a death-blow to heritage.
To me resurrecting the abbey, even for secular ends, is better than if
it were to decay.
Back in the late 19th/early 20th century the
former abbey had served as an inn and a restaurant. So, whoever is financing
the project is reverting to that business model.
I find it reassuring that this restoration-cum-conversion is being
handled by Monuments Group, a company that has a lot of experience in reviving
Belgium’s historical gems.
Above all, I hope that once the hotel opens its doors (2021) visitors to
the ex-monastic estate will remember its once famous resident: Hugo van der
Goes (1440?-1482).
One of the giants of the Netherlandish Renaissance art.
Born in Ghent, trained by Jan Van Eyck, van der Goes reached the
highlight of his career as a master of portraits under Charles the Bold, duke
of Burgundy, and his wife Margaret of York (she
was - inter alia - the patron of William Caxton, the printer of the first book
in the English language).
He also created celebrated altarpieces, one of which – the Portinari Triptych – I had a chance to admire at the Uffizi Gallery.
He also created celebrated altarpieces, one of which – the Portinari Triptych – I had a chance to admire at the Uffizi Gallery.
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| Adoration of the shepherds with angels and Saint Thomas Apostle, Anthony, Margaret, Mary Magdalen and portraits of the Portraits of the Portinari family. The Announciation. "Portinari Triptych." ca. 1476-78. Oil on panel. Uffizi Gallery |
The story has it that van der Goes fell in love with a woman from Ghent.
He gained her hand in marriage, but she soon died after.
In the depths of despair, he entered Rouge Cloître to begin a novitiate as
a lay brother.
In appreciation for his talent, prior Thomas let him continue working in
a makeshift studio on commissions for wealthy clients. He had little doubt that
they would then provide more support to the abbey. Sure enough, van der Goes
would entertain illustrious visitors, like Archduke Maximilian Habsburg (in
1478), the future Emperor Maximilian I. He was also given freedom to move around.
Five or six years after his profession, the painter-lay brother went on
a journey to Cologne. Returning home, together with some monks, van der Goes
suddenly went into a psychotic state. He started despairing that he was destined
for eternal damnation and saw suicide as his only recourse. The fellow monks,
helped by some onlookers, had to restrain him by force.
When they arrived home, the monks got to work. Recalling that King Saul
had been helped in his illness by David’s playing the harp, the prior ordered
that music therapy – probably singing and “theatrical performances” (spectacular recreativa) - be applied to
try to restore van der Goes to his senses.
It was to no avail. His mental
condition continued to deteriorate. Within a year van der Goes was dead.
The painter’s epitath – no longer existing - stated simply: “Here lies the painter Hugo van der Goes.
Regretted by the arts, of he knew no equal.”
What brought on the painter’s breakdown?
H.C. Erik Midelfort, author of A
History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, speculates that “for Hugo
an initial frustration of artistic pride turned into a morbid obsession with
his own sinful pride.” This tension of reconciling his artistic angst with “the
self-denying, ascetic life of the cloister” must have become simply unbearable.
The painter’s desire to match the skill of van Eyck, the author of the
magnificent Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece
in Ghent, is also thought to have played a role. A German physician Hieronymus
Munzer noted in 1495 that a painter from Ghent was driven to melancholy by the
attempt to equal the Ghent Altarpiece. This may have been a reference to van
der Goes.
Interestingly, van der Goes’ descent to madness was not known until the
nineteenth-century. In 1863 a Belgian historian Alphone Wauters discovered
references in The Chronicle of the Red
Cloister. Written thirty years after the painter’s death, it was the work
of Gaspar Ofhuys, a later prior of the monastery, who knew van der Goes
personally. In an attitude more enlightened for his times, this monk did not
believe that Hugo was possessed by a demon (though - as he recalls – some people did attribute
the painter’s illness to the devil). As to the reason for the terrible
melancholy, professing agnosticism - “I believe that only God knows what it was”
– he nonetheless supposed that van der Goes was troubled that “he could never
finish all the paintings he had undertaken” and thus despaired too much. What
compounded the problem was “his natural inclination by drinking wine.” Ofhuys’ late
medieval description of van Goes’ condition has been described by modern
scholars as “one of the first reliable records of a mentally ill artist.”
Researchers have determined that to diagnose the painter’s condition Ofhuys,
an ex-infirmarian, consulted De
proprietatibus rerum (On the
Properties of Things, 1240), a
medico-scientific encyclopedia, written in the thirteenth-century by a
Franciscan academic at the University of Paris known as Bartholomew the Englishman. Since this book was disseminated
widely across medieval Europe,very likely it ended up in the monastic library at the Red Cloiser. How do we know for sure that Ofhuys looked it up? The proof is in the fact that one entire paragraph of his chronicle, in which he tries to discern the causes of van der Goes' condition, is almost ad verbatim lifted from the description of the imbalance of the fluids found in Bartholomew's work.
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| Pages from Bartholomew's De proprietatibus rerum |
Ofhuys may also have been aware of another book Complexus effectuum musices (ca.
1472-1475), by a fellow Flamand Johannes
Tinctoris, who was a composer and theoretician of music. It is a compendium of
twenty uses and effects of music.
The author refers to the biblical story of
David and Saul not when discussing the power to cure, but as regards to the music’s ninth effect – its power to banish evil.
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| Tinctoris pictures in the incunabula |
So, notwithstanding what appears to be the prior's premodern approach to the etiology of disease, he too must have been hedging his bets.
Just in case.
***
The 19th century discovery of the painter’s infirmity
attracted interest.
It inspired Alphonse’s nephew, painter Emile Wauters (1846-1933), to paint his then
celebrated work: Hugo van der Goes
Undergoing Treatment at the Red Cloister, showcased at the Brussels
Exhibition of 1872.
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| Emilie Wauters "Le peintre Hugo van der Goes au couvent de Rouge-Cloître" (1872). Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique |
Wauters’ painting shows vividly Hugo’s tormented state and the desperate
attempts of those around him to revive his spirits.
The story does not end here.
Wauters’ oeuvre made a great impression on another painter, and, as it
turned out, also a victim of mental illness.
Vincent van Gogh.
Van Gogh identified emotionally with van der Goes, depicted by Wauters. We
know this for a fact since he referred to the painting in letters to his
brother Theo.
On 25 July 188, he wrote:
Not only my pictures but I myself
have become haggard of late, almost like Hugo van der Goes in the picture by
Emil Wauters.
Only, having got my whole beard
carefully shaved off I think that I am as much like the very placid priest in
the same picture as like the mad painter so intelligently portrayed therein.
Another time, on 21 October 1888, he remarked rather prophetically:
I am not ill, but without the
slightest doubt I'd get that way if I do not eat really well and if I don't
stop painting for a few days. As a matter of fact, I am again pretty nearly
reduced to the madness of Hugo van der Goes in Emil Wauter's painting.
And if it were not that I have
almost a double nature, like that of a monk and that of a painter, I should
have - and that long ago - been reduced completely and utterly to the aforesaid
condition.
Yet even then I do not think that
my madness would take the form of persecution mania, since when in a state of
excitement my feelings lead me rather to the contemplation of eternity, and
eternal life.
But all the same I must beware of
my nerves, etc.
Sadly, little did van Gogh know, he would indeed share the fate of a
fellow great Netherlandish artist.
***
Next time you visit Auderghem, please do stop by Rouge
Cloître and recall the rise and fall (all within 14 years or so) of Hugo van
der Goes.
Sources:
André De Vries, Brussels:
A Cultural and Literary History.
H.C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany.
Remi Chiu. Plague
and Music in the Renaissance.
Ronald Pickvance, Van
Gogh in Arles.
