The provenance of this exquisite small triptych, which features the Virgin and Child on its central panel and Saint Catherine and Saint Barbara, respectively, on its narrow lateral panels, can be traced back to the Abbey of Saint Mary of the Dunes, an important and influential Cistercian monastery near Bruges, then in the country of Flanders and today part of Belgium. The identity of the original owner has been lost due to the tumultuous fate the abbey suffered during the sixteenth century, when it was vandalized, sacked, and eventually rebuilt within the city of Bruges. Thanks to the triptych’s portable size, it fortunately survived these turmoils and subsequently changed owners repeatedly in Belgium before making its way to England, where it was bought by R. Langton Douglas in 1934 at the sale or the renowned banker and art collector Leopold Hirsch. Having obtained Max Friedländer’s opinion, Douglas immediately recommended the work to Percy S. Straus. While Douglas passed on Friedländer’s finding that “it is the fine work by a miniature painter at Bruges, quite in G. David’s style… The triptych was given recently to the famous miniature painter Simon Beninc [sic]” in his letter to Straus,¹ he also explained his rejection of the attribution to Bening. He argued that in 1860, H. J. Weale, the leading authority on Gerard David at the time, had still been able to read the inscription on the back of the panel, which he believed to be in a sixteenth century hand, which named Catarina Cnoop, David’s wife, as the author.² By 1934 the label had become indecipherable. Straus acquired the triptych as by Cnoop, and it entered the museum’s collection under this name ten years later. However, the oeuvre of Catarina Cnoop is so poorly documented that it was impossible to uphold this attribution, and Friedländer’s opinion that it is a work by Simon Bening has prevailed.

David’s influence on the younger Bening has been acknowledged by numerous scholars, but, as pointed out by Maryan W. Ainsworth, no documentation of any professional or personal relationship exists.³ By great good fortune, Bening’s Self-Portrait, 1588, an unusual work for an illuminator and miniaturist, has survived and is today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.⁴ Its inscription identifies him as the son of Alexander Bening, an illuminator of Ghent. Simon was probably born in that city in either 1483 or 1484, but later lived in Bruges, where he registered his illuminator’s mark in the city’s Printers Hall in 1500. In 1508, Bening joined the confraternity of the Bruges book trade but did not make annual payments to it after 1516, around the time he seems to have moved to Bruges, where he obtained citizenship in 1519.⁵ He rose to great prominence during his lifetime and continues to be highly esteemed today. The Imhof Prayer Book, dated 1511, is the earliest work firmly attributed to Bening, but his fame rests on the Da Costa Hours, c. 1515 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York), and the Prayer Book of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, c. 1525–30 (Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels), which are considered his masterworks.⁶ According to Thomas Kren, “the art of no other Flemish illuminator so fully epitomizes the triumph of Flemish manuscript painting in Europe and its enduring eminence as a court art.⁷ His patrons were members of the highest aristocratic circles from across Europe, who commissioned elaborate prayer books, genealogies, and even small stand-alone works, such as the Straus triptych.⁸

In her 1994 publication on the Norfolk Hours, an illuminated manuscript then newly attributed to Simon Bening, Judith Anne Testa proposed that Bening used Gerard David’s panel painting, Virgin and Child, c. 1515 (fig. 28.1), today in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, as the template for his Virgin and Child in the full-page illumination of The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, c. 1521, which he repeated in the central panel of the Straus triptych.⁹ According to Kren, David’s influence on Bening is particularly noticeable in the works dated around 1519, which include the Straus triptych.¹⁰ Indeed, the expressions, poses, and dress of the figures are so similar that it would be difficult to discount the relationship. The same dense layering of the paint in the figures’ features, in the manner in which the noses are highlighted with a long stroke along the ridge and followed by a white dot on the tip, corresponds with two panel paintings attributed to Bening, his Virgin and Child, c. 1520, in the Prado, and his Virgin and Child, c. 1520, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which were also directly influenced by David.¹¹ The stylistic similarities extend to the figures of Saints Catherine and Barbara on the lateral panels of the triptych, for which, however, no precedents have been found in David’s work. It should be noted that the figures of the saints are on a smaller scale than the Virgin and Child and that the treatment of their costumes, such as the embroidered borders on Saint Catherine’s yellow dress or those on Saint Barbara’s shimmering orange mantel, are even more detailed. Both figures are shown standing behind short panels, the left painted with two angels holding up a shield with an unidentified coat of arms, the right with a still life of blossoms and insects. These panels, as well as the scrollwork in the upper corners of the side panels, are typical of the ornamental features found in Bening’s illuminated manuscripts, as in for instance the Imhof Prayer Book and the Prayer Book for Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg.

Another remarkable feature are the landscapes stretching far into the background behind the figures. In fact, Bening is considered “the great innovator of landscape portrayal in Flemish miniatures of the early sixteenth century.”¹² Here, too, a difference is notable between the central panel and the side panels. The Virgin and Child are seated in a garden in front of a large house that is identical to the building that is seen in the background of David’s Virgin and Child among Virgins, c. 1500, a full-page miniature in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.¹³ Thus, two major features of the central panel—the figural group and the background—were closely inspired by two different works by David, substantiating the theory that in the early decades of the sixteenth century in Bruges there was “increased sharing of designs and patterns between manuscript illuminators and panel painters . . . particularly between Simon Bening and Gerard David.”¹⁴

The landscapes of the lateral panels, each revealing several scenes from the saints’ lives and painted with an extremely fine brush, are even more detailed than that of the central panel. They are closer, in fact, to the landscapes in Bening’s Saint Jerome Triptych in the Escorial (fig. 28.2). While the transition from foreground to background is smoother here than in the Straus triptych, we find very similar landscape elements such as the craggy rocks in the far distance, beautifully detailed architecture in the middle ground and delicately rendered trees, clear indications of the same hand.

The vast majority of Bening’s output was illuminated manuscripts; however, according to Kren, in the 1520s and 1530s Bening “increasingly made independent miniatures on parchment, both portraits and devotional subjects that were mounted on wood and functioned as panel paintings.”¹⁵ Both the Straus Virgin and Child; Saints Catherine and Barbara and the Saint Jerome Triptych fall into this category. Ainsworth believes that “this merging of the arts of panel painting and manuscript illumination in Bruges was partly due to the circumstances of the guild structure.”¹⁶ In the wider view, however, this development can surely also be seen as a consequence of the diminishing demand for illuminated manuscripts due to the rise of the printed book in the first half of the sixteenth century.

—Helga Kessler Aurisch