|
The saint sits frontally on a vaulted stone throne which stands in an open gallery. He is blessing the spectator. The handle of his staff is adorned with the images of St Lawrence (with the grid), St Mary Magdalene (vase) and St James the Less (fuller's club). On each side of the throne can be seen a piece of the arcade which opens out onto a landscape with the panorama of Bruges. From left to right we can recognize the towers of Our Lady's, St Saviour's, the Oosterlingenhuis (house of the German hanza), the belfry, the Poorters' Lodge, and to the right of the canopy the Jerusalem Church. Scholars in the 1950s made out the panel to be the centrepiece of a St Nicholas retable with fixed wings which each contained two scenes from the life of this saint on top of one another. In this manner it was possible to identify the enthroned bishop as St Nicholas. The scenes portray to the left the charity of St Nicholas and the miracle of the grain, and to the right the murder of the three children and their resurrection from the salt-tub.
Donated as a Van Eyck, the central panel was very soon ascribed to the Master of the Legend of St Lucy. As with another series of panels by this master, as well as by his contemporary and fellow-citizen the Master of the Legend of St Ursula, a date has been suggested on the basis of the stage of building of the carefully portrayed Bruges belfry. Seeing that the octagonal crown with the wooden steeple was built between 1482 and 1486 and, after the fire of 1493, rebuilt from 1499 to 1502, a painting in which the belfry has this superstructure could have been made between 1486 and 1493 or after 1502. The former dating seems to be more probable.
There is a remarkable similarity in composition and conception between the enthroned St Nicholas by the Lucy Master and the panel with Santo Domingo de Silos, painted between 1477 and 1477 for the church of that name in Daroca (Spain) by Bartolomé Bermejo (now Madrid, Museo del Prado). This Santo Domingo de Silos retable was also originally flanked by two horizontally split panels. It could be assumed that the St Nicholas altarpiece was a Spanish commission in which Bermejo's retable in Daroca was recommended as a model.
|
