page_title: Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin / Description
caption_attribution_description: Detail: Rogier van der Weyden: Der hl. Lukas zeichnet die Madonna, 137x110cm, um 1440, Boston ,USA
context_page_description: Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin is a large oil and tempera on oak panel painting, usually dated between 1435 and 1440, attributed to the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden. Housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it shows Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of artists, sketching the Virgin Mary as she nurses the Child Jesus. The figures are positioned in a bourgeois interior which leads out towards a courtyard, river, town and landscape. The enclosed garden, illusionistic carvings of Adam and Eve on the arms of Mary's throne, and attributes of St Luke are amongst the painting's many iconographic symbols.
  Van der Weyden was strongly influenced by Jan van Eyck, and the painting is very similar to the earlier Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, usually dated to around 1434, with significant differences. The figure's positioning and colourisation are reversed, and Luke takes centre stage; his face is accepted as van der Weyden's self-portrait. Three near contemporary versions are in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the Groeningemuseum, Bruges.
context_section_description: The panel contains four individual pieces of oak, painted over a chalk ground bound with glue. The preparation wood is dated to around 1410, giving an estimated date for the Van der Weyden in the mid-1430s. The dominant pigments are lead white (often used in the panel to highlight blue and green passages), charcoal black, ultramarine, lead-tin-yellow, verdigris and red lake. There has been some discolouration – some greens are now brown, including pigments used to depict grass in the background.
  Mary sits under a brocade canopy or cloth of honour, painted in brown hues which have since discoloured to dark green. The canopy hangs down to a wooden bench attached to the wall behind her. Mary's hair is loose and she wears an embroidered dress lined with fur. Around her neck is a light veil, and she is shown in the act of nursing. Her dress is a centrepiece of the panel, composed of a variety of blues overlaid with lead white and deep blue lapis lazuli highlights. The inner parts of her robe contain violet coloured fabrics, lined with greyish blues and purples.
  Luke is positioned on a green cushion, between the heavenly figure and the small study behind him. He is either rising from a kneeling position or about to genuflect. His eyes fix on her attentively, and he seems near hypnotised. Jesus is similarly transfixed. Hall describes Luke's hands as floating before him, holding the tools "with the same delicacy that an angel might hold a lily or sceptre". Mary has turned her face so that he can depict her in near full profile, a rare honour, while Luke's kneeling position is closely analogous to that of a typical donor portrait in the presence of the Virgin.
  Luke is beardless and in his early 40s,  close to van der Weyden's age in the mid-1430s. His face is not idealised; he is middle-aged with light stubble and greying hair.  The room behind him contains his attributes including an ox and an open book representing his Gospel. He is painted with more naturalism than Mary; his eyes in particular are more realistically drawn. Christ's conform to the then idealised form, as simple crescents. Mary's are formed from curved lines typical of late Gothic ideals of feminine beauty. Compared to contemporary paintings of this type, the work is unusually free of inscriptions; they appear only on items in Luke's study, dimly perceived on his right: on a book, on an ink bottle, and on a scroll emanating from the mouth of his ox, beneath the small desk.
  The scene is set within a rather narrow interior space, with a barrel vault ceiling, patterned floor tilings, and stained glass windows. The outer wall opens to the midground, with a patch of grass and plants, and has a view of a river or inlet. Art historian Jeffrey Chipps Smith notes how the transition between the grounds establishes a "complex spatial space in which [van der Weyden] achieved an almost seamless movement from the elaborate architecture of the main room to the garden and parapet of the middle ground to the urban and rural landscape behind".
  Two figures in the mid-ground stand at a battlement wall overlooking the water, their backs turned against the viewer, the male pointing outwards. They are framed by columns, and are looking towards the detailed city and landscape in the background. The figures seem preoccupied with "looking", which Carol Purtle believes, to van der Weyden, was a form of devotionalism; through  meditating on an image, the "beholder experienced visions of transports of ecstasy". Technical analysis shows that both figures were heavily reworked both in the underdrawing and the final painting;  the hood of the figure on the right was originally red, but over-painted as black, amongst many other differences.
  The positioning of these figures closely resembles that of two persons depicted in the van Eyck panel. In that painting the right-hand figure turns to face his companion, gesturing at him to look outwards. In the van der Weyden, the equivalent figure seems protective of his friend, who here is female, while the left-hand figure in the earlier panel might rep
caption: The folds in Mary's dress
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