Art: Hidden Treasure

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The village of Zoutleeuw goes unmarked on most maps; it lies some 40 miles from Brussels. In the early Middle Ages, Zoutleeuw was a bustling commercial center, pitched at the intersection of trade routes between the Rhineland, the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant. Then alliances and frontiers shifted, and trade with them. By the end of the 16th century, Zoutleeuw was on the way to becoming a ghost town. Religious wars, famine, flood, fire and the plague almost finished it off, and it ended as an isolated country hamlet inhabited by about 2,600 people.

What Zoutleeuw kept, however, was St. Leonard's Church, dating back to the 13th century, and in it an extraordinary collection of religious art. The treasure of St. Leonard's was saved by the obscurity of its village; it was not looted during the interminable wars that rolled back and forth across the lowlands from the 16th century to the 20th century, and it was spared the fury of Protestant iconoclasm. The result is the finest intact collection of religious Flemish carving from the 12th to the 16th centuries that can be found anywhere.

Pain into Wood. In the days of its prosperity, Zoutleeuw could afford the best artists available, and drew them from centers like Louvain, Antwerp and Brussels. The earliest major piece in the church, a 12th century Crucifixion carved in lindenwood, has all the pathos of a spiritualized image discovering the resistances of the body: the long oval face, the crudely gouged hair, the hacked spear wound and the thin, knob-bled torso almost physically displace the pain of nailed flesh into the pain of wood attacked by a chisel.

As the fortunes of Zoutleeuw rose, so did the rate of commissions—and the burghers' desire to see themselves echoed, if not specifically portrayed, in their altarpieces. A 15th century triptych carved in oak, probably by a sculptor from Louvain, retains some of the hieratic frontality of Gothic art in its left-hand figure, St. Catherine; but Mary, in the center, decorously extends her hand to her child, whose eager little arm is poking over the edge of the strict Gothic frame, while St. Joseph, with purse, rich robes and amply confident gestures, is already a Flemish businessman.

It was rare, at this period, to give such prominence and independence to a figure of St. Joseph; usually he was relegated to the background of paintings and carvings. In terms of the advances made in Italian art by the end of the 15th century, a work like Zoutleeuw's carving of St. Anne and the Virgin seems archaic, even naive. But it is a stunning design, the deeply cut folds, strict as metal, building up a system of pyramids that finishes in the smooth, serene, Gothic arch of St. Anne's wimple. By the 16th century the church was commissioning more elaborately naturalistic works. There is still a trace of Gothic rigor in the sweeping cloak of its lindenwood Mary Magdalene, but in all other respects she is almost a portrait, down to the look of pleased anticipation on her broad face as she uncaps the flask to anoint Christ's feet.