  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Data |
|
Catalogue Text |
|
Biography |
|
Zoom |
|
|
The source for this episode is the Apocryphal Gospels of the Nativity. Daret looked to the Gospel of the Pseudo Matthew (XII, 3 5), in which it is recounted that Joseph, having found shelter for the Virgin who was about to give birth, went in search of midwives to assist her. However, by the time he returned to the cave with the two midwives Zelomi and Salome, Mary had already given birth. The two midwives, surprised by the glow which emanated from within the cave, remained at the entrance. Zelomi was the first to arrive. She examined Mary and acknowledged and praised her virginity. The suspicious Salome refused to acknowledge Mary's virginity and tried to establish proof of it. Her incredulity was punished when she touched the Virgin, only to have her hand paralysed. Daret depicts the exact moment when Salome, in the right foreground, extends her paralysed hands to touch the Christ Child. According to the apocryphal text a "glowing youth," who is depicted here as an angel in white above Joseph, told her that the Child would cure her hands.
The subject and the composition of Daret's painting are taken from a painting on the same subject by Robert Campin now in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Dijon. The form of the stable, the midwives, the group of singing angels on the left and the angel in white are all closely derived from Campin's work. Details such as the landscape, which is more ambitious in Campin's painting, and the figure of Joseph with the candle (whose inconography derives from the Revelations of Saint Bridget) are also derived from the Dijon work. The Christ Child is conceived as a source of light, here conveyed by the golden rays which surround His nude body which is placed directly onto the ground. This luminous effect, which is stressed in the Apocryphal Gospels, was promoted by Saint Bridget, who in her account states that the light which was emanating from the Christ Child was stronger than that from Joseph's lantern (here interpreted as a candle).
Daret's panel once formed part of an altarpiece dedicated to the Virgin in the funerary chapel of Abbot Jean de Clerq in the Abbey of St Vaast in Arras. The abbot commissioned the painting which was executed between 1433 and 1435. The whole altarpiece, which included paintings and a sculpted group, had exterior wings, on one of which the present painting was located. According to a description by Jean Collard of 1651, these exterior wings also included paintings of an Annunciation (now lost), a Visitation and an Adoration of the Magi, both now in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, and a Presentation in the Temple, now in the Petit Palais, Paris.
Mar Borobia
|
|
|
