Potrait of a Carthusian
Netherlandish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1410-1473 1446 Oil on wood, 29,2 x 21,6 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York In 1444, three years after the death of Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus left his homeland in the northern Netherlands to settle in Bruges. This portrait, one of Christus's earliest signed and dated works, shows van Eyck's influence in the technical virtuosity of the trompe-l'oeil fly and the carved inscription. The sitter, once transformed into a saint by the addition of a halo, is an unknown lay brother of the Carthusian order. The fly is a symbol of decay, a reminder of man's mortality, but it also greatly enhances the fiction of a real person gazing at us from behind a stone ledge in which Christus's signature appears as an incised inscription. , Artist: CHRISTUS, Petrus , Potrait of a Carthusian , 1451-1500 , Flemish , painting , portrait
Painting ID:: 63970
Petrus Christus 1446(1446)
Medium oil on wood
cyf Potrait of a Carthusian Flemish 1415-1473
Petrus Christus Locations
South Netherlandish painter.
His known artistic career began in Bruges on 6 July 1444 when, as the Poorterboek (citizens register) for that day reveals, he purchased his citizenship ... in order to be a painter. Town records show that he and his wife became members of the Confraternity of the Dry Tree c. 1462; that in 1463 he and another painter, Pieter Nachtegale, were paid for the construction of a Tree of Jesse (destr.) and for the cost of assistants employed on the day of the religious procession in which it was used; and that on 19 March 1472 he served as a representative of the painters guild in a dispute with another painter, Jehan de Hervy the elder ( fl 1472-1507). These and a few other scattered references comprise the existing documentation for Christusa life and work.
