All Objects

Jan Vos seems to have commissioned this panel from Petrus Christus shortly before leaving Bruges in 1450. Vos probably gave the Frick Virgin to Christus as a model, but the artist also drew inspiration from another late work by Van Eyck, the lost Maelbeke Virgin, the composition of which he recorded in the drawing shown in this exhibition. In contrast to the Frick Virgin’s commemorative function, the panel was intended as an object of private devotion for Vos to use in his cell or on his travels. Its minute details would have offered endless possibilities for examination and helped Vos visualize this divine encounter in his mind’s eye during meditation. Kneeling on holy ground far from the industrious city below, Vos exemplifies the Carthusian ideal of removal from the world.

This portrait was painted by Christus during the middle of Jan Vos’s tenure as prior of Genadedal and most likely depicts another of the monastery’s members. The sitter’s lack of tonsure and beard identifies him as a lay brother, that is, someone who had taken a vow but practiced a more relaxed version of Carthusian life. It seems to be the earliest recorded portrait of a cleric in which the sitter is not shown praying. The young man’s confident, outward gaze suggests that the portrait was intended for a secular setting. It may have been commissioned by his family to celebrate his entry into the order and invoke the presence of the absent sitter, now committed to a life of seclusion.

Jan Vos also owned a tablet made of clay depicting the Virgin holding Christ in her arms. As with the Frick Virgin, an indulgence of forty days was granted to Vos’s clay tablet in exchange for the recitation of an Ave Maria. Such clay tablets were a typical production of Utrecht, where Jan Vos spent the first and last years of his career. They were made of a local material called pipe clay, which turned white upon heating, and were popular devotional objects in Carthusian communities.

Made several decades later than the specimen Jan Vos owned (now lost), this rare surviving example owes a formal debt to Eyckian designs, notably the figures of the standing Virgin and Child. Hymns in Latin and Dutch frame the image and the figures’ halos.

This prayer-nut is the only surviving boxwood micro-carving associated with the Carthusian order. It exemplifies the variety of devotional objects used by the monks, especially in the order’s upper echelons. Depicted across its two hemispheres is the prior-general of the order, François du Puy, introduced by the order’s founder, St. Bruno, to the Virgin and Child. Du Puy holds a scroll petitioning the Virgin — and the viewer — for remembrance and protection. This imagery replicates that of the Frick Virgin on a miniature scale. The outer shell of the prayer-nut depicts a scene from the foundation myth of the order.