Circle of Frans Pourbus The Younger

With Les Enluminures, Paris;

From whom acquired, 2017.

Executed in tempera on parchment, this intimate triptych fuses dynastic portraiture and devotional imagery in a manner characteristic of elite courtly commissions in the Southern Netherlands during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. At the work’s center appears the Coronation of the Virgin, shown as Queen of Heaven beneath a suspended red cloth emblazoned with two heraldic devices that identify the foreground protagonists: Anne of Croy and her husband, Charles de Ligne, Prince of Arenberg, accompanied by their eldest children. The sitters are rendered at nearly the same scale as the sacred figures: at left, God the Father, conceived as King of Heaven with crown, scepter, and sword, and at right, Saint Anne enthroned with the Virgin and Child in the manner of Anna Selbdritt. 

A carefully ordered assembly of Anne and Charles’s immediate family members—several wearing the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, underscoring the family’s political standing and chivalric affiliations—populates the two side wings. The possible inclusion of Guillaume de Melun, husband of Ernestine de Ligne, whom she married in 1615, allows the triptych to be dated with unusual precision, as Charles de Ligne’s death in 1616 provides a firm terminus ante quem. The lateral panels further reinforce the triptych’s programmatic sophistication. At left, Saint John on Patmos, accompanied by his eagle, gestures toward a heavenly vision of the Virgin and Child, while at right Saint Luke sits before an easel painting the Virgin and Child—a subject closely associated with painters’ guilds and with artists working in the orbit of Frans Pourbus the Younger. The diagonal alignment of the figures and their crisply delineated features correspond closely to documented group portraits by Pourbus and his workshop, particularly those produced for aristocratic patrons before his departure for the French court.