SLUTER, Claus
(b. ca. 1350, Haarlem, d. 1406, Dijon)

Memorial to Philip the Bold

1389-1406
Stone
Charterhouse of Champmol, Dijon

Around 1400 at Dijon, Burgundy, a portal was created that was radically new in the forcefulness of its modelling. Surpassing everything that had gone before, its creator broke completely new ground in sculptural expression. In 1385 Philip the Bold had brought the sculptor Claus Sluter from the Low Countries to Dijon to work on the decoration of the mortuary chapel of the Dukes of Burgundy, the Charterhouse of Champmol.

The portal has the Virgin and Child on the trumeau. The Virgin is harmoniously poised with her weight on her left leg, while the right foot is greatly extended. Her upper torso is turned toward the Christ Child, whom she holds on her left arm. Her full cloak is gathered in front of her hip and falls around her in voluminous cascades. In her right hand, which she holds out, there was once a scepter.

In art history this figure belongs to the period of the "beautiful style", though in fact it goes far beyond the characteristics of that style. Thus the stance, a balanced contrapposto, has nothing of the idealized posture of the "beautiful Madonna," but is based on the exact observation and a mastery of the movement of a standing body. The same is true of the modeling of the face, which, with its slight double chin and dimple, was evidently observed from life, as were the eyes and forehead.

The jambs, with their almost heretical iconography and unusual composition, bear figures of a kind never seen before, and perhaps possible only in a monastery chapel remote from the public eye. Depicted life-size, kneeling, and turned toward the Virgin in prayer, are, on the left jamb, Philip the Bold, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, and opposite him his wife, Margaret of Flanders, escorted by their patrons, St John and St Catherine. The facial features of the couple, the monastery's founders, are recognizable portraits.

Never before had living people portrayed on the portal of a sacral building (and so realistically), in a position that was properly reserved for holy figures from the Bible and for saints and martyrs from the early and more recent history of Christianity. It was permissible to portray the local saints of, say, Paris or Amiens, because they were canonized as figures belonging to the past history of religion, but the appearance of individually portrayed, secular human beings here - occupying the same three-dimensionally sculpted plane of the Virgin, and in a religious context of the utmost sanctity, that of the salvation of mankind - was a wholly new manifestation of a ruler's wish for self-representation.

Together with the relatively naturalistic portrayal, characterized as "Flemish realism," of the standing Virgin, these portal sculptures mark an epoch-making change in the sculptural treatment of human beings. There had already been signs of such a change in the Prague portrait busts by Peter Parler, dating from about 1370. But the fact that this realism also penetrated the sacred sphere is of such far-reaching significance that it is called the "first great monument of early Renaissance art" north of the Alps.