The Borman family of sculptors, active in Leuven and Brussels during the second half of the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth century, have received a lot of well-deserved attention recently. The M Leuven organized a marvelous exhibition Borman and Sons. The Best Sculptors (20 September 2019-26 January 2020). This show was the culmination of a decade of renewed scholarship on the Bormans under the aegis of ARDS (Association for Research and Documentation of Sculpture) based at M Leuven. The catalogue for this exhibition, which bore a different title—Borman: A Family of Northern Renaissance Sculptors—was edited by Marjan Debaene and published by Harvey Miller/Brepols. The volume currently under review contains revised papers presented at the sixth ARDS Conference held on 27-29 November 2019 in conjunction with this exhibition. These highlight the different methodological approaches to and technical analyses of Borman-related sculptures. The twelve essays are divided into two sections: Commissions and Commissioners from North to South and Style, Materials, Techniques, and Workshop Organization.
Although the Bormans were the most successful Brabantine sculptors during this period, their copious oeuvre is comparatively unknown still except to specialists. They lack the broader name recognition of their contemporaries in Italy or Germany. Jan I (c. 1440-c. 1502/03), Jan II (c. 1460-c. 1520/21?), and his son Pasquier (d. c. 1537?), among other family members, worked in wood and stone. They authored complex winged altarpieces, reliquary busts, and other religious sculptures for clients across Europe. Like many Netherlandish sculptors, the Bormans’ art occasionally fell victim to religious iconoclasm, wars, church secularization, and changing tastes.
Magali Briat-Philippe examines the documentary and visual evidence for the sculptures at the Royal Monastery at Brou, the mausoleum commissioned by Margaret of Austria, regent of the Low Countries. Excluding Conrad Meit’s effigies of Margaret, her husband Philibert the Fair of Savoy, and Margaret of Bourbon, most stone sculptures were executed between 1513 and 1522 by Brabantine artists who worked from designs provided by the Brussels painter Jan van Roome. This included reliefs for three large altarpieces, forty-seven statues for the tombs and altars, and twenty statues for the portals and rood screen. The names of these sculptors are not documented. Briat-Philippe conjectures based on stylistic similarities that Jan II, who is absent from Brussels documents between 1516 and 1521, might have been working in Brou while Pasquier was left to run the family’s workshop in Brussels.
Emmanuelle Mercier, Catheline Périer-D’Ieteren, and Myriam Serck-Dewaide newly attribute theAdoration of the Magi Altarpiece (c. 1495-1500) in the Basilica of San Nazaro in Milan to Jan II. The figures and the original polychromy are covered in a heavy dark varnish, likely applied in the nineteenth century. The altarpiece is mentioned in the two wills of Elizabetta Rozzi, wife of Protasio Bonsignori, a successful merchant and art lover, who was buried in the Chapel of the Magi. Using careful stylistic and technical analyzes, they relate the Milan retable with the Altar of St. George (1490-93) in Brussels, Jan II’s only autographed and dated sculpture.
Marjan Debaene and Clair Dumortier address documents, some newly discovered, pertaining to the Bormans in the Leuven City Archives. The origins of the Borman (or Borremans) family in and near Leuven are clarified. Jan I was the son of a fishmonger and is listed in 1459 in the Joiners Guild (Scrynmakers). Jan I and Jan II are documented collaborating with metal caster Jan van Naenhoven (Jan van Thienen) on the brass choir screen in St. Peter’s Church in Leuven in 1489-93. The authors analyze complaints against Jan II by Leuven’s sculptors and masons, who were members of the separate Four Crowns Guild, when the Brussels-based sculptor was subcontracted by Jan Petercels, a Leuven joiner, to carve figures for an altarpiece for the Chapel of the Brewers in St. Peter’s.
Thirty-eight Netherlandish carved altarpieces plus ten fragments survive in Sweden. Some were commissioned and others purchased on the open market, especially in Antwerp and Brussels. Hannah De Moor investigates what is known about the patronage of these wooden altarpieces. Since none is fully documented, she considers the work’s iconography, such as the choice of saints, known placement within a particular church or chapel, inscriptions, coats of arms, and possible portraits. For instance, the Passion Altarpiece (known as Strängnäs I; c. 1480-90) was donated to Strängnäs Cathedral by Bishop Kort Rogge (d. 1501) according to his death notice. The elaborate winged retable bears the bishop’s coat of arms as well as an inscription saying it was made in Brussels and the city’s stamped hallmark.
Ragnhild M. Bø discusses the sudden appearance of the non-biblical-based themes of the Resurrected Christ appearing to the Virgin Mary and the Seven Joys of the Virgin. Rogier van der Weyden and his workshop popularized the former, which celebrates Mary’s role in redemption, in his Miraflores Altarpiece donated by King Juan II of Castille in 1445 to the Carthusian Monastery at Miraflores. The Bormans used it in the Strängnäs I Altarpiece. The Seven Joys of the Virgin, as an example of “lived religion” (154), was performed each year (one Joy per year) in the Grote Markt in Brussels from 1441 until 1556. Jan II carved a related statue for the Brussels Confraternity of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin and he or his shop produced the Altar of the Seven Joys of the Virgin for the monastery at Brou.
Adam Harris Levine noted the Borman exhibition of 2019 brought together thirty reliquaries with Spanish provenance. He carefully traces the history of one of these busts together with three others destroyed in the Spanish Civil War to Francisco de los Cobos (d. 1547), one of Emperor Charles V’s closest advisors. Bearing a papal letter of permission, he acquired four relics associated with the entourage of St. Ursula when he visited Cologne in June 1521. A second document states that he paid an unnamed Brussels artist in March 1522 for making reliquary busts for Saints Benedicta, Paula, Marta, and Egidea. He sent these to Úbeda where they eventually were placed in niches in Alonso Berruguete’s high altar in the Sacra Capilla, the newly built family mausoleum.
Some of the Spanish busts linked with the Bormans are thought to be later copies. Emilio Ruiz de Arcaute Martínez studies the busts of Saints Eusebius and Columbanus in the Basílica de la Caridad in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz), both believed to be seventeenth-century Spanish works. Both are reminiscent of a bust of a bishop (c. 1520) in the Bode Museum in Berlin. Technical examinations of the pair reveal they were altered in the eighteenth century. St. Eusebius is made of twenty-six pieces, only half of which are original. Part of his miter came from St. Columbanus’s bust. These and related busts of two female saints, bearing the Guzman coat of arms and now in Hearst Castle in California, are named in a 1532 papal indulgence document and are listed in the posthumous inventory of Juan Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, the sixth Duke of Medina Sidonia.
The second section of the book opens with Michel Lefftz’s discussion of the rivalries and collaborative interactions between painters and sculptors in the fifteenth century. Rogier van der Weyden, first in Tournai and then in Brussels, worked with sculptors. He polychromed their statues, provided designs for their carvings, sought inspiration from sculpture, as in the Prado Descent from the Cross, and mimicked grisaille and monochromatic sculptures within his paintings. Without directly discussing the Bormans, Lefftz correctly observes that painted altarpieces gradually displaced the primacy of sculpted retables.
Many Netherlandish altarpieces, whether fully sculpted or with painted wings, have been dismantled. There exist lots of orphaned fragments. Ria De Boodt and Elisabeth Van Eyck report on their reconstruction of an altarpiece with double painted wings attributed to Jan Swart van Groningen (1469-1535). The panels, now in the Grand Curtius in Liège and the Fine Arts Museum in Strasbourg, have been separated and rearranged in the past. The authors propose a convincing reconstruction of the wings while speculating on the form of the altar’s frame that once included a sculptured corpus scene. Their efforts are part of the Wings & Links Project based at the Study Centre for the Flemish Primitives at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) in Brussels.
Ingrid Geelen investigates the painters who polychromed the Borman altarpieces especially those now in Sweden. A Brussels bylaw of 1454 distinguished the specific duties that sculptors and painters could and could not do. Only painters were permitted to polychrome sculptures. Painters Jan van den Dale, Cornelis I van Coninxloo, Jan van Vere and Master I*T (Jan Tons) have been identified. Some signed or monogrammed the sculptures. In other instances, certain masters had distinctive palettes, ranges of colors, or punch mark shapes.
Churches often possessed choir stalls richly embellished with reliefs and small figures. Christel Theunissen’s “Lost and Found” essay sketches the histories of the elaborate cycles made by Claes de Bruyn and Gort Gorys (1439-42) for St. Peter’s Church in Leuven and by an unnamed Brussels workshop (1491-94) for St. Sulpitius Church in Diest. Neither set is intact. There were once ninety-six seats, side and dorsal panels, and a canopy in the choir of St. Peter’s. Today there are just thirty seats. Church property was sold off in the nineteenth century. Eighteen Leuven seats are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. British collectors eagerly acquired and repurposed Netherlandish carvings. Portions of the Diest stalls are in Antwerp, England, Scotland, and Ireland.
In 2012, Seppe Roels and Marieke Van Vlierden initiated the Marks on Art, a new database in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in Rotterdam. The Brussels 1454 bylaw required the city’s hallmark to be stamped on sculptures to ensure the quality of the materials and craftsmanship. Antwerp and Mechelen had similar regulations. Sculptors had to pay for the inspector’s assessment. Hallmarks in the shape of a mallet for Brussels, normally stamped into the bottom of a sculpture with a cold iron, were found on sixteen of the twenty-one objects they studied during the Borman exhibition.
This beautifully illustrated and smartly edited volume nicely complements the findings of the Borman exhibition of 2019. The essays demonstrate how a diversity of research approaches continue to yield new information and attributions.