Geldrop (Geldorp) Gortzius (1553-1619)

MÁŘÍ MAGDALÉNA, PENITENTIARY

around 1600
Oil on oak panel, 61.5x47.5 cm, framed, gilt Florentine frame. Figure of a woman with a long hair and only sparsely draped shoulders, with a distinctive pearl hanging in her left ear. An exceptionally fine painting rendered in warm brownish shades, which accentuate the golden gleams of light reflected in the hair, eyes and in the only adornment the woman is wearing. That is a large drop-shaped pearl hanging from a gold wire in the penitent`s ear. Marked on the reverse with a contemporary paper label with the inscription: " La Madeleine peint par Otto Venius, peintre et poète, né à Layden en 1556, fils du bourgemestre, vient ..du à Anvers, où sont ses plus be[aux] ouvrages ... sur la, pour expres et règles de la peinture et du clair..., il eu l´ honneur d´avoir Rubens pour élève. Il fut enterré à Anvers, le célèbre poète Puteinus fit de beaux vers sur son tombeau". Magdalena Painted by Otto Venius, painter and poet. He was born in Leiden in 1556, he was a son of the mayor. He came to Antwerp, where ... his most beautiful works, ... for expression (?) and the rules of painting and light ... He had the honour of having Rubens as a pupil. He was buried in Antwerp. The famous poet Puteinus composed a beautiful verse for his grave. The longitudinal cracks in the oak panel, the previous puttying and retouching in the immediate vicinity of the cracks. Condition C. If we consider the inscription on the reverse of the offered painting to be relevant information, the question remains, and it would be a surprisingly significant possibility even from the point of view of art history, whether this painting is the original, painted in Antwerp by Otto Venius and later copied repeatedly by Geldorp Gortzius (not very likely, to be honest), or whether it is a copy of Gortzius`s painting, the original of which hangs in the Mauritshuis collections and was painted by Otto Venius. Of course, it is possible that the attribution is a historical error, and that this painting is the author`s copy of Geldorp Gortzius, which, as the references to Van Mander in the medallion of the author (inventor?) suggest, cannot be ruled out. This possibility is supported by the existence of one variant archived by the RKD https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/record?query=Gortzius&start=62 in its database. This one is dated to 1610 and is only a slightly more chaste variant of the image we offer. There are many questions, the answers to which require detailed restoration research, comparison of the results with at least the painting in the Mauritshuis collections and, above all, genuine interest on the part of the future owner.