Pseudo Jan Wellens de Cock
Habsburg Netherlands · Antwerp Mannerism
The story
The tall Calvary in the Rijksmuseum, painted around 1520, fits seven scenes of Christ's Passion onto a single panel, arranged on four levels. Soldiers cast lots for his clothes in the foreground, and in the middle the fainting Virgin is held up by Saint John. The design comes from a 1505 drawing by Albrecht Dürer, the German master, enlarged nearly three times and turned into colour.
Who painted it remains an open question. About a century ago the German scholar Max Friedländer gathered a small group of pictures with swirling draperies and fantastic rocky landscapes and gave them to Jan Wellens de Cock, a painter documented in Antwerp and the father of the print publisher Hieronymus Cock. The link to that real man never held, so the group now goes by the cautious label Pseudo Jan Wellens de Cock.
Later scholars saw how close these pictures stand to the workshop of Cornelis Engebrechtsz, the leading painter of Leiden. Some see one hand in them, others a circle of several painters, and the Rijksmuseum places its Calvary in Leiden.
