Simon Bening
Artists
Born in Ghent, Simon Bening learned his craft from his father, the painter Alexander Bening. In 1500, Simon Bening moved to Bruges where he built a highly successful career. A versatile artist, Bening painted portable altarpieces on parchment as well as oil paintings on wooden panels. He was especially admired for his subtle use of light, colour and texture to create atmospheric landscapes and charming interiors. By extending the miniatures into the borders, and including subsidiary scenes, he added to the conceptual and visual complexity of the images. Enclosed within illusionistic picture frames, the miniatures function as small devotional panels. These leaves demonstrate Bening’s facility with pictorial narrative and illusionism as well as his creative adaptation of a wide range of models by the leading illuminators, painters and printmakers of the preceding generation, including the Vienna Master of Mary of Burgundy, Jan van Eyck, Gerard David, Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer.
St Anne, the Virgin and Child in a garden
Enclosed within an illusionistic picture frame, this miniature, devoted to the Virgin’s mother, Anne, functions as a small devotional panel. Anne is shown seated in a stylised garden, reading from a book, with her daughter at her feet. Bening’s skilful manipulation of linear perspective, and the juxtaposition of normal and raised points of view, renders the landscape as a deeply receding space and thrusts into the foreground the Nativity of the Virgin depicted in the lower border. The sophisticated use of colour contributes to these effects: the pale blue sky behind St Anne contrasts with the darker sky of the border, bringing the latter closer to the viewer and making it seem as if we are observing the central image through a window.
In the charming border scene, with details drawn from daily life, Anne, having just given birth, is offered a plate of food, while a midwife sits by the fireside cradling the infant Mary. Flames of shell gold, lead-tin yellow and red lead in the fireplace warm the newborn child who precociously raises her tiny palms towards the heat.