Tuesday 11 December 2018

Overpriced, misattributed, misdescribed, but interesting anyway!

Marques dos Santos, from Portugal, sells on 13 December an "Attributed to Maerten de Vos" Coronation of the Virgin, estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 Euro.

The description goes on to state "in the center the Virgin, the Holy Trinity and Pope Sixtus VI, view of Antwerp in the background". The figure they claim to be Sixtus VI is God the Father, and the city one can view at the bottom is unidentified, but definitely not Antwerp.

The painting also has little to do with Maerten de Vos, his style is quite different, and better. Which brings me to the valuation, which seems very high for an iconographically very interesting work, but with little artistic value.

It is an extremely unusual version of the Coronation of the Virgin, which usually comes in two flavours; either Christ and God the Father are each to a side, and Mary is inbetween them, and they both are crowning her together. Or else you only get Mary and Christ side by side (the former seems to have been used more since the time of the Reformation, giving even more "credibility" to the status of Mary; the latter was mainly used in older depictions of the scene). But I have never seen one with a triple (though asymmetrical) throne with Mary on the side. It seems to be an effort, probably at the time of the Reformation and the Contrareformation, to get things doctrinally exactly right; getting such things wrong in those years could have very bad results for you...

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