Art and Ommegangen

This study investigates the interplay between painting and drama in the fifteenth-century Netherlands. Plays accompanied many local processions (called ommegangen), often appearing alongside local relics and/or miraculous statues. Artists were sensitive to the heightened importance and value of these dramas and painted allusions to the stage, perhaps to help assure that their images shared in that status. Investigating the power of these theatrical productions, this study reframes the art and-drama question by focusing on the performative vs. the literary nature of theater, suggesting that theatrical experience helped audiences interpret and understand other visual images, such as those found in paintings. The work begins by explaining general aspects of late-medieval drama: its form, its participants, its sources and theology, its international character, its impact. It then focuses on the Netherlands, using works by nineteenth-century archivists to outline its theater's history and pervasiveness. From there, the study discusses selected works by a small group of artists, each involved in dramatic productions, or active in town with strong theatrical traditions. It starts with Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden in Tournai, discussing their paintings in relation to that city's dramatized Procession of the True Cross. It then follows Rogier to Louvain, with its theatrical Kermis Ommegang, and to Brussels, where the artist, as city-painter, probably designed and decorated the carts for the Petit Sablon Procession and its 'Seven Joys of Mary' plays. Hugo van der Goes's later works, painted nearby in Oudergem's Rood Klooster, may also relate to Brussels's plays. That artist was also active in Ghent's civic and church theater, and his other works are discussed with that connection in mind. The study concludes with Bruges, its Procession of the Holy Blood, drawing possible connections to Hans Memling's works, and to paintings by Petrus Christus, who renovated its carts. In each case, the author focuses on how artists forged theatrical connections in their works, and on the status and meaning that viewers might have transferred from drama to art when confronted with such connections.