Hugo van der Goes’s Adoration of the Shepherds: Between Ascetic Idealism and Urban Networks in Late Medieval Flanders

Abstract

Recent interpretations of Hugo van der Goes's Adoration of the Shepherds altarpiece have taken the painter's withdrawal to a monastery associated with the Devotio Moderna movement as a departure point, describing the painting as a rejection of the sensual world and the techniques of illusionism used to represent it. The painting's muted coloring seemed to support this reading, but restoration of the Adoration has provided new visual evidence, revealing the image to be bright and exuberantly illusionistic. Likewise, historical evidence indicates that the spiritual lives of Hugo's elite, urban clientele were far more complicated than the spiritual poverty prescribed in New Devotional sermons and treatises. I suggest that there may be no normative text underlying the painting's eccentric form. Instead, I turn to an equivalent artistic form to better understand the painting's aesthetic and spiritual strategies, offering a side-by-side reading with a piece of contemporary poetry produced in the same milieu.10.5092/jhna.2014.6.1.1 Fig. 1 Hugo van der Goes, Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1480, oil on panel, 97 x 245 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. no. 1662A. Foto: Volker-H. Schneider (artwork in the public domain) The Adoration of the Shepherds (fig. 1) by Hugo van der Goes has been perceived by art historians as an act of artistic implosion. 1 In an early version of this argument, Erwin Panofsky drew on the sensational biography of the artist; we know that Hugo suffered from a psychological breakdown in the late 1470s and tried to commit suicide. The Adoration and the Death of the Virgin (fig. 2) are probably the artist's last works, painted after his suicide attempt and shortly before his death in 1482. 2