The Columba Altarpiece and the time of the world

Pictorial manipulations of time, ranging among moments, lifetimes, and centuries, were a chief concern of late medieval and Renaissance painters. Countless sacred and secular images propose one or more distinct temporal dimensions, as in the ages collapsed by a donor's presence at Golgotha, the stories unfolded by narrative mural cycles, or the fugitive motion of a censer depicted in midswing. For varied reasons, however, pictorial time has drawn limited attention in modern scholarship on art of the period. Unlike Renaissance pictorial space, which has come to be a prime object of historical analysis, pictorial time has been engaged in a piecemeal fashion, and often in oblique terms. This is particularly so for the largest and smallest dimensions of depicted time, which embody spans either of many years or of passing moments. So often do fifteenth-century donors, costumes, and buildings appear among gospel narrative scenes, for example, that it seems fair to believe that their inclusion was unremarkable in their own day, a matter more of convention than of purposeful anachronism. The same is true of the ways in which simple transience can appear, for example, among the ongoing motions of a striding figure, turning page, or rolling tear - all of which may seem a matter of representational habit rather than of significant temporal invention.

Art historians have been more consciously concerned with the realm of pictorial narrative, which encompasses temporal dimensions between these poles of large and small time. Recent work on pictorial narrative, which generally entails depictions of sequence with the recurrence of one or more figures or scenes, has recognized an immense breadth and often polemical sophistication of such tactics among different cultures and artists.(1) This scholarly focus more on narrative than on other depictions of time must be due in part to the relative concreteness of narrative within the nearly infinite scope of temporal thought and expression. Larger and smaller temporal dimensions in images can seem like matters less of time than of its absence or arrest, an anachronistic conflation at one extreme or time stopped in its tracks at the other. In contrast, when a figure recurs in a single setting or when a setting recurs to build a certain sequence, finite periods are bracketed into the stillness of pictures. Such narrative strategies allow us to describe the selection of moments and to compare their deployment to the narrative decisions of other images. The results can parallel textual forms in ways susceptible to kindred kinds of narratological analysis; a pictorial solution can be measured against either a known text to which it refers or a provisional verbal chronology of the events it conjoins. Comparisons between pictorial narrative and film have also heightened a critical consciousness of the former in modern eyes.(2)

But the consciousness and expectations of modern eyes cannot be assumed for earlier ones. With this in mind, this essay examines the unusually expansive temporal rhetoric of the Columba Altarpiece, one of the most influential works of fifteenth-century European painting [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, when it became widely known as a major work in the Boisseree collection, there has been a strong consensus for the attribution of the triptych to Rogier van der Weyden and his shop, for a date in the 1450s, and for an original location in Cologne, probably in the church of St. Columba.(3) Its compositions of the Annunciation, Adoration of the Magi, and Presentation in the Temple had begun to echo in painting, prints, stained glass, and other media in and around Cologne already by the 1460s. In addition to a preponderance of scholarly efforts that have sought mainly to clarify its original context and the place of the triptych in Rogier's stylistic development, important studies in the last generation have investigated its Eucharistic symbolism, the possibility of royal portraits for each of the Magi, associations with early rosary devotions, and the character of the underdrawings, which suggest the collaboration of Rogier's shop and late additions to the composition that were not foreseen in the original stages of design(4)

Beyond these contributions there has been relatively little interpretation of more comprehensive meanings in the triptych, which may seem apt for an alignment of three of the most familiar scenes of Christ's Infancy. This is true generally for Rogier's work: while much attention is paid to original and affective solutions of composition and expression, subject matter and its implications have often seemed relatively self-evident - relative, that is, to the rich symbolic mode now most closely associated with Jan van Eyck, via Erwin Panofsky. It has become a familiar refrain in survey accounts of the artist that "Rogier avoids disguised symbolism,"(5) or that he "sweep[s] most of the secondary symbolism from his paintings."(6) Such phrasings are recurrent and important, since to claim that a painter is avoiding or removing something is to ascribe a certain primacy to that something, which in this case makes disguised symbolism a norm to be accepted or rejected - despite the rise of serious reservations about the very concept in the last generation. This is one of several angles from which Rogier van der Weyden has come to be centrally defined by the extent to which he is not Jan van Eyck.(7)