University of Silesia in Katowice

Forgotten painter of the Renaissance

| Katarzyna Suchańska |

Court painter is a role that seemingly needs no further explanation. Every king or queen took care of their image, not only in comparison to other rulers, but also on canvas. The painter Michel Sittow was one of those artists who participated in the royal lives of Isabella of Castile, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VII, and Philip I of Habsburg. But how respected were the master painters of the 15th and 16th centuries?

‘They were highly respected,’ answers Oskar Rojewski, PhD, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Silesia, who is delving into the life of Michel Sittow and the phenomenon of courtly life as part of the ‘Research Freedom’ competition of the Research Excellence Initiative.

Michel Sittow was a painter from Reval (now Tallinn in Estonia), a student of the eminent artist Hans Memling, whose work ‘The Last Judgment’ is housed in the National Museum in Gdańsk. Sittow is a very intriguing personality, not well recognised in the history of Netherlandish painting. One of the reasons for his lack of popularity in our times is that his works were described among anonymous masters. It was known that such an artistic identity existed, but no one knew how to call it. It wasn’t until Max Friedländer, the most important scholar of 20th-century Netherlandish painting, connected the works of Michel Sittow, described his style, and named him Master Michel, later identified as Sittow.

‘The figure of Michel Sittow is fascinating not only because of his life but also due to the mystery surrounding him,’ says Oskar Rojewski, PhD. ‘The research I am currently conducting aims to shed light on the artist’s activities in Northern Europe after 1506. This year was marked as extremely significant in European history, as it saw the death of Philip I the Handsome, the first representative of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain. Sources suggest that Michel Sittow was most likely at the royal court at that time. Here, our knowledge of his subsequent fate ends. We have not yet found sources indicating where Sittow went or what activities he pursued after the death of his patron. My goal is to find documents that will tell us something about this.’

At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the role of a court painter looked very different from what it might seem. The researcher from the University of Silesia explains that the artist was responsible for the entire workshop he owned, from paints and tools to a group of students and their skills. ‘In fact, the court painter did not paint portraits himself – most of the tasks were performed by apprentices, while he only oversaw the supplies and supervised their work’ the scholar adds.

Among Michel’s most important works that we can admire today are: the Diptych of Diego de Guevara, divided between the Gemäldegalerie and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Assumption, also in Washington. The artist’s paintings can also be admired in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Luna family’s chapel in Toledo Cathedral.

Due to the late recognition of Sittow by art historians, his name does not appear in monographic studies on artistic or aesthetic history. It is known that he lived at the turn of the medieval and modern periods (circa 1469–1525). Analysing his paintings, one can see both motifs appropriate for 15th-century painting and his attempts to introduce new techniques, such as linear perspective, naturalistic landscapes, and depictions of human likenesses that prompt viewers to reflect on the emotional state of the portrayed person.

The specialist from the University of Silesia argues that the artist’s brush was guided by both the spirit of the time and the demands of the era.  ‘The works ‘on commission’ were dictated by pragmatism – the need to produce portraits of European monarchs to send to family members of future marriage candidates.

Nevertheless, religious works—depictions of the lives of Christ and Mary—dominated Sittow’s painting. Sittow worked on the creation of Isabella of Castile’s Polyptych, consisting of forty-seven small panels. This impressive collection most likely formed an altar created for Queen Isabella of Castile. The monarch could compose her own altar from the resulting paintings depending on the liturgical period, the saint’s feast day, or her own preferences. Sources tell us that the polyptych panels did not come directly from Sittow’s hand but were the result of the work of several artists. Unfortunately, only twenty-seven panels have survived to this day. Fifteen of them belong to the Royal Collections Museum in Madrid, and the remaining twelve are in various other museums around the world,’ says Oskar Rojewski, PhD.