Margaret Wall-Romana

Rogier van der Weyden’s 1432 Deposition From the Cross, at the Prado, was the inspiration for “Painting Painting (with van der Weyden)”.

The issue of narrative content is a fraught one for many contemporary viewers, particularly vis-à-vis Christian iconography. Many people feel they just can’t relate to a crucifixion scene or a painting of Saint Somebody to whom something is being done. But narrative content is a bit of a red herring. Paintings are admired by those interested in the medium despite as well as because of what they depict. So we may wonder, if we like, whether van der Weyden was a devout Christian (in fact he was) or a painter simply hired to paint a particular scene, but what his painting shows for sure – no research required – is that he was devoted to painting.

When I looked at this painting upside down (an old trick painters use to gain some distance from narrative, the better to see a painting’s formal qualities) the Christ figure took on the feeling of a sleeper who dreams of other spaces and times. It reminded me of the mythological figure of Persephone who dreams of returning to earth from the underworld, another cosmological story of death and rebirth.

Van der Weyden broke with the convention of his time, which dictated that this oft-depicted scene should have a landscape setting. Instead, he set it in a shallow, almost shadowbox-like space barely big enough to contain its figures, and orchestrated ingeniously layered rhythms and repetitions that loop and sweep back and forth between the inward-curving figures bracketing the painting’s left and right edges. The ten nearly full-size figures have a startlingly sculptural quality, and thrust out towards the viewer.  At the same time, somehow, their crisp contours and the linearity of the angular folds of their garments seem to sit on the picture’s surface and emphasize its qualities of abstraction. The way the figures take up the picture plane, both from side to side and bottom to top, is another of the aspects of this painting that I find remarkable for its time. I used echos of these aspects in my own painting.