Attributed to the Master of the Lyversberg Passion Cologne S...

Estimate

£30,000 - £50,000

Attributed to the Master of the Lyversberg Passion
Cologne School, circa 1470
The Betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane: The Judas Kiss 
Oil on gold ground on panel
 
The subject of this painting is taken from the Book of Matthew 26 47-52, and depicts the moment of Judas’ Kiss, when he identifies Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
 
The Master of the Lyversberg Passion, whom this panel is attributed to, was an anonymous painter active around Cologne circa 1460-1490. He owes this conventional name to the altarpiece of the Passion made for the Charterhouse St. Barbara of Cologne, donated in 1464 by the Rinck family, and which belonged in the nineteenth century to the collector Jakob Johann Lyversberg.
 
Stylistically his work bears the mark of early Flemish influences, particularly the work of Dirk Bouts, and is close to that of the so-called Master of the Life of Mary, to the point in which paintings previously attributed to that painter are now attributed to the Master of the Passion of the Lyversberg Passion. He is one of the earliest German painters to be working in the new technique of oil painting.
 
The eponymous altarpiece of the Master of the Lyversberg Passion, painted for the Carthusian monks of St. Barbara in Cologne and now split between the Wallraf-Richarz Museum and Nuremberg Museum, bears numerous stylistic parallels with the present painting, including in colouration, painting technique (especially extensive use of the pigment lead-tin yellow), facial typology, and its strongly diagonal compositions.

The composition of the painting bears strong similarities to an engraving by German artist Martin Schongauer (c.1440/53-1493), which is usually dated to the 1470s. There are also compositional echoes with a painting of the Judas Kiss by a follower of Dirk Bouts now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, dated to the 1480s.

Dimensions:
(Panel) 23.5 in. (H) x 18 in. (W)