The lost original

Hugo van der Goes was born in Ghent around 1440. He became master of the painters' guild in 1467, the most powerful painter in the city after Joos van Wassenhove left for Italy. His only fully documented work is the Portinari Triptych — commissioned in Bruges around 1473 by Tommaso Portinari, the Medici's agent in the Low Countries, and now in the Uffizi. But a corpus of around fifteen paintings is attributed to him with high confidence.

What distinguishes van der Goes is a psychological realism without precedent: faces that carry grief, doubt, exhaustion. Monumental figures in close-up, filling the entire surface in a format he pioneered — the half-length narrative composition, like a painted tabernacle pressed against the viewer.

Around 1477, at the height of his career, he entered the monastery of the Rouge-Cloître near Brussels as a lay brother. He continued to paint. In 1481–1482 he suffered a severe depressive crisis: he declared himself damned, attempted to harm himself, and died shortly after. His last years transformed him into a legend before the paint had dried.

The original hung on the high altar of Sint-Jakobskerk — Saint James's church in Bruges, one of the most important churches in the city, frequented by the Burgundian court and the international merchant community.

It was painted around 1475–77, at the peak of van der Goes's productivity, in the technique of the Tüchlein: distemper on linen. This is why it is gone. Tüchlein panels do not survive the centuries as oak does. The support that made it radiant when new made it fragile over time.

The painting is documented at Sint-Jakobskerk until 1782. Karel van Mander (c. 1604) and Sanderus both mention it. The Wierix engraving of 1586 confirms the composition was still accessible — or at least remembered — in the late sixteenth century.

In 1586, Hieronymus Wierix — Antwerp engraver, 1548–1624 — published a print of this composition for the Antwerp publisher Hans van Luyck (Hollstein Dutch 382-1(2), 171 × 192 mm). This engraving became the principal vector of propagation across Europe.

It explains why copies continue appearing into the seventeenth century and beyond. By then, copyists were no longer working from the original — already inaccessible — but from the Wierix print, or from copies of copies.