Michiel Coxcie's Artistic Quotations in the Death of Abel

CHAPTER 10 Michiel Coxcie’s Artistic Quotations in The Death of Abel

Christopher D. M. Atkins

Despite being in the Spanish royal collection since the late sixteenth century and having inspired Peter Paul Rubens, Michiel Coxcie’s (1499–1592) Death of Abel (Fig. 10.1) has yet to be the subject of sustained inquiry, perhaps because, until recently, it has been in desperate need of cleaning and therefore resided in storage at the Museo del Prado.1 This essay will shine new light upon this newly cleaned picture by focusing on how it reveals Coxcie’s complex use of artistic sources. The Death of Abel was painted after 1539. Coxcie spent the 1530s in Italy before returning to Mechelen where he joined the guild of St. Luke on 11 September 1539.2 Upon his return north, Coxcie applied the rules and aesthet- ics he had seen in Italy but employed them with traditional northern European methods, shifting from fresco to painting in oil. Miguel Falomir has argued that the Death of Abel was painted after 1548 due to its correspondences to Titian’s Tityus that was commissioned in 1548 by Mary of Hungary for her palace at Binche.3 Indeed the intense focus on an upended heroic figure whose heroic form had been subject to brutally painful physical assault is shared by the two pictures. In 1546, Mary of Hungary appointed Coxcie to the position of court painter following the death of Bernard van Orley. Coxcie who contributed sev- eral canvases to the decorations at Binche no doubt had the pleasure of seeing Titian’s monumental painting in situ, but it is not clear if this opportunity hap- pened before he painted the Death of Abel.

1 Due to its need for cleaning The Death of Abel did not appear in the 2013 monographic exhibition dedicated to Coxcie at the Museum Leuven. The picture was cleaned by the Prado in advance of the exhibition The Wrath of the Gods at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2015. 2 Coxcie may have arrived in Italy as early as 1527. He certainly was there by 1534 when he finished frescoes in Santa Marie dell’Anima and joined the Roman Compagnia di San Luca. Koenraad Jonckheere and Ruben Suykerbuyk, “The Life and Times of Michiel Coxcie 1499– 1592,” in Michiel Coxcie and the Giants of His Age, ed. Koenraad Jonckheere (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2013), 22–49. 3 Miguel Falomir, Las Furias. Alegoría política y desafío artístico (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2014), 176.

Figure 10.1 Michiel Coxcie, Death of Abel, 1539, oil on canvas, 151 × 125 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado. PHOTO: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.

The first documentation of Coxcie’s Abel dates from 1584 when it arrived at El Escorial, eighteen years after Mary of Hungary’s pictures arrived in Spain.4 Likewise, Abel did not appear in the inventory of Mary’s possessions taken

4 Julian Zarco Cuevas, ed. Inventario de las alhajas, relicarios, estatuas, pinturas, tapices y otros obje- tos de valor y curiosidad domados por el rey don Felipe II al Monasterio de El Escorial. Anos de 1571– 1598, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 97, cuaderno I (julio–septiembre 1930): 143–144.