Focus on The Martyrdom of St Erasmus (Bouts) and explain the Critical response.
The historian Johan Huizinga called the composition "clumsy and inept," and the entire scene "dermwinderken" ("gut-wrenching"), because the central panel shows how, according to legend, the intestines of Saint Erasmus were extracted from his body with the help of a windlass. The literature about the Bouts picture notes how the figure of Erasmus undergoes his suffering without betraying any emotion. The executioners likewise "carry out their duties seriously," in "disturbing silence," while the Emperor Diocletian and his three companions witnessing the event appear to stand in a meditative state, much as the saints on the side panels, "anachronistically attending the same event." The "sobriety and restraint" in the "calm atmosphere," and Diocletian's "amiable indifference" create a tableau of rather inappositely decorous balance and harmony. A newspaper in observed in 2006The martyr himself is pinioned, but passive. He lies there, stripped to a cloth, his bishop's mitre set on the ground next to him, his face slightly hardened, his body relaxed and unresponding. Even his flesh is without any natural resistance. From a neat opening in his belly, a thin line of innards is extracted bloodlessly and vertically from the horizontal man, with no more strain than drawing a thread through a needle.Max Friedländer sums up the content of the panels as "relating a story, not of cruelty as such, nor of suffering and defiance, but rather of judicial equanimity and of submission. The repulsive scene is rendered tolerable, not by the introduction of an element of passionate agitation, but by documenting it with unvarnished and sober clarity, as though it were a surgical operation. Yet its realism is overlaid with so much supernatural detachment, is so stiffly symmetrical, so pedantically clean that it has the effect of a symbolic tableau in a medieval mystery play."Works in the oeuvre of Bouts often contain "spacious outdoor settings." In discussing the continuity of the unified landscape background across the three parts of the painting, Lynn Jacobs notes how "all three panels of the triptych's interior are situated within one continuous landscape space that spreads, seemingly without interruption, across the joints between the center and wings. This allows Saint Jerome and Saint Bernard in the wings, in a mystical transformation of history, to become present as witnesses to Erasmus's martyrdom. Such a demonstration of connections through space and time ultimately offers the same kinds of connections, and transcendence into the realm of the sacred, to the viewers of the triptych." Bernhard Ridderbos likewise observes a "Mondrianish sense of balance constructed out of horizontals and verticals and colors."
mystic Jerome windlass Erasmus Johan Huizinga Max Friedländer Mondrianish triptych martyr Diocletian