Sensory Piety as Social Intervention in a Mechelen Besloten Hofje

Fig. 1 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Sa, 1513–24 (?) (center cabinet), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, Brussels; on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 1 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Sa, 1513–24 (?) (center cabinet), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, Brussels; on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 1 Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint Ursula, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1513–24 (?) (center cabinet), polychromed wood, silk, paper, bone, wax, wire, and other materials in a wood case, 134 x 97.5 x 22.2 cm. Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, inv. GHZ BH/2, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, www.kikirpa.be on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 2 Unknown Mechelen, "Bone relic of the 11,000 virgin martyrs labeled, “This comes from the bones of the 11,000 martyred [virgins] (Dit es tghebennte vande[n] xim merteleere[n])” (detail of fig. 1)"

Fig. 2 Unknown Mechelen, "Bone relic of the 11,000 virgin martyrs labeled, “This comes from the bones of the 11,000 martyred [virgins] (Dit es tghebennte vande[n] xim merteleere[n])” (detail of fig. 1)"

Fig. 2 Bone relic of the 11,000 virgin martyrs labeled, “This comes from the bones of the 11,000 martyred [virgins] (Dit es tghebennte vande[n] xim merteleere[n])” (detail of fig. 1), © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, www.kikirpa.be, cliché X002679, photo: Jean-Luc Elias [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 3 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Sa, 1513–24 (?), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, Brussels; on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 3 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Sa, 1513–24 (?), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, Brussels; on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 3 Detail fig. of 1. [side-by-side viewer]

Besloten hofjes demand close looking. Composed of upright cabinets brimming with handwrought flora, fauna, and fruit arranged in verdant gardens, these lush topographies become visually and conceptually intelligible only though careful observation (fig. 1). Among the information gleaned from such vigilance is that the cabinets are embellished by relics (fig. 2).¹ These fragments of “holy matter” complement the sculptures of saintly figures that dominate the gardens, sanctifying the fictive terrain and clarifying the devotional intent of the works. Further observation reveals that the hofjes share a particular thematic emphasis. Running along the lower foreground in most examples are fences made of wood, paper, or fabric, which are usually punctuated by gates (fig. 3). This feature points to a specific passage from the Song of Songs that was interpreted by medieval theologians as a reference to the Virgin Mary’s purity: “a garden enclosed, sister my bride/a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed” (4:12).² The descriptive title Besloten hofjes (enclosed gardens) was assigned to the works by art historians who picked up on this connection.³ However, even as a hofje’s fence marks the garden as impenetrable, the rich array of dense minutiae all but obligates visual entry. It also invites a measured ocular pace: the eye may quicken momentarily across the varied forms, yet the cabinet’s remarkable content soon compels it to linger. This meticulous way of looking ostensibly sharpened the beholder’s spiritual focus and prolonged the meditative activity.⁴ The result: a more intimate and efficacious devotional experience.

If Besloten hofjes are visually insistent and visually rewarding in devotion, a detail from an example produced in the early modern Low Countries seems at odds with this premise. A woman kneeling in prayer in one of two portrait wings attached to the work (fig. 4) is depicted with her eyes closed and with malformed ocular orbits (fig. 5), most likely to indicate that she is blind, or at the very least visually impaired.⁵ This condition would have necessarily precluded her from entering the hofje’s garden visually, from engaging ocularly with the garden’s botanical elements and relics. She could neither see the sculptures of the holy figures that populate it—in this case Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint Ursula, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria—nor reap by sight the spiritual rewards promised through meditation on its rich landscape and hallowed content.

The depiction of a visually disabled person in the wing of a hofje provides a rare opportunity to consider in tandem the sometimes conflicting socio-religious views of disability in the sixteenth century and the social experiences of disabled people. Historians of disability in the early modern world are in fact calling for new studies that unite metaphor with practice in this way.⁶ This approach is taken up here, while also setting in motion a new line of inquiry for Besloten hofjes on the whole: the socio-spiritual resonances of the works have yet to be considered, despite the presence in some key examples of portrait wings that invite it. Indeed, portraits have yet to be integrated interpretively with any of the hofjes that have them. Two other investigative paths have arisen instead. One attends to the spiritual meaning of the gardens and the other addresses the works’ production and quality. As for the former, Paul Vandenbroeck, in his essay for the exhibition catalogue Hooglied: De beeldwereld van religieuze vrouwen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, vanaf de 13de eeuw (Enclosed garden: The imagination of religious women in the southern Low Countries since the thirteenth century) published in 1994, explored the relationship of enclosed gardens to notions of the soul, paradise, and expectations for conventual enclosure.⁷ That essay and others in the catalogue, by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Birgit Pelzer, were largely psychoanalytic in approach. This method was taken up again later by Barbara Baert. In an article published in 2009, Baert argued that female beholders could circumvent the patriarchal tethers of monasticism by meditating on the hofjes’ dense imagery and potent relics.⁸ More recently, she proposed a “new, multiple hermeneutics” for the hofjes that defines the gardens as, in part, “psychic location[s] of the indescribable membrane within chthonic art.”⁹ Alternatively, in light of the turn toward the material in the humanities, Kathryn M. Rudy argued that the sensory experiences evoked by convent hofjes containing Crucifixions and Holy Land relics made the passion of Christ more immediate for nuns who were unable to travel and could only experience pilgrimages mentally.¹⁰

The second thread in the scholarship, on artistic production and qualitative discernment, attributes the complex floral elements and wrapped relics of the gardens, wrought by hand from various materials, including silk, paper, and wire, to nuns, including the Augustinian sisters at the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis (Hospital of Our Lady) in Mechelen. In this scenario, the sisters created the handwork elements for the hofjes in their possession, installed them in the cabinets, added sculptures produced serially in workshops in the city of Mechelen (most sculptures in the hofjes are stamped with Mechelen makers’ marks, including those in the one investigated here¹¹), and contracted with local artists, whose names remain unknown, to paint the wings.¹² By contrast, Horst Appuhn argued that the hofjes’ decorations are of such high technical achievement that they must have been manufactured serially, in a professional setting.¹³ Hartmut Krohm supports this position but proposes that nuns at Mechelen convents, including those at the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis, produced the adornments for a hofje industry that stretched across the urban landscape.¹⁴ Dagmar Eichberger carries this discussion into matters of taste with hofjes owned by Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands whose governmental seat and residence were in Mechelen, a discerning patron and collector of the visual arts.¹⁵

The present study, by contrast, begins the process of interpreting the gardens together with their portrait wings as a means of exploring the social dynamics of Besloten hofjes. The example depicting the blind woman, and most other Netherlandish hofjes with preserved portraits, were formerly in the possession of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis in Mechelen.¹⁶ A total of seven hofjes from the hospital are known, four with extant portrait wings. This is the largest group of hofjes associated with any particular community in the southern Low Countries.¹⁷ (The Mechelen hofjes hold exceptional cultural value in contemporary Belgium: in 2011 they were added to the list of Vlaamse Topstukken [Flemish masterpieces] that includes such canonical works as Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece.) The flora, fauna, and fruit of the hofjes necessarily implicate sensory devotion in every case, yet the example with the blind woman does so under very specific circumstances that merit close scrutiny in relation to her condition. As will become evident, the work invokes for its audiences not just the sense of sight but the other senses as well, in ways that cast the impaired sister as a spiritually-abled member of her religious community despite her impairment.

Ultimately this and other conclusions offered here lend substance to an underexplored premise in Netherlandish devotional art: sensory piety as social intervention.¹⁸ I will make three main points along this line. First, the figures represented by the portraits can be reasonably identified using previously untapped visual and archival evidence. They are individuals who resided in Mechelen in the early sixteenth century: Jacob Van den Putte, his wife Margaretha Svos, and their visually disabled daughter Maria Van den Putte. I will argue that Jacob and Margaretha commissioned the hofje to mediate positively with the community—the hofje’s provenance with the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis strongly suggests the work’s presence there from its inception—on behalf of themselves and their disabled daughter, whose blindness rendered all three spiritually suspect. In so doing, they laid claim in the hospital context to charitable and pious practices that merited Maria’s acceptance into the profession as well as her and her parents’ salvation. For Maria in particular, the hofje claimed devotional understanding not through the privileged sense of sight, despite the garden’s visual pull, but rather by multisensory devotion and the possibilities for healing implied by the hofje’s content. Second, the hofje reminded the hospital sisters of their commitment to Maria, whose presence carried an expectation of lifelong care that was in addition to their supervision of an already demanding public infirmary. Jacob and Margaretha may have had reason to worry about the quality of that care, since the hospital had a history of resisting reforms that required a renewed commitment to the infirm. Accepting Maria as a professed sister benefitted the community in a crucial way, however, for it imbedded the sisters more securely into a spiritual economy considered advantageous to the bodily abled and disabled alike. Finally, I will build contextual evidence into previous writings about the serial fabrication of the floral adornments in order to recast the hofje from a presumed product of the sisters’ labor (the garden) and patronage (the painted wings) to one of professional manufacture. This conclusion bears not only upon the particular hofje under investigation here but also upon the intersections of lay and monastic piety and religious women’s art-making activities in the early modern Low Countries.

Portraits, Patrons, and Audiences

Visual evidence culled from the hofje’s wings nullifies a supposition about the depicted figures that has persisted in the scholarship for over a century. These writings insist that the two women on the right-hand wing were sisters professed at the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis in Mechelen and that the man on the left was their priest (fig. 6 left, fig. 6 right).¹⁹ Yet the male and female figures closest to the garden are depicted not in habits that would convey monastic status but rather in lay attire: both wear fur-lined garments over brocade. Furthermore, the woman’s form is laden with luxury objects. A belt around her waist terminates in a gold buckle, and she wears a gemmed ring and holds a rosary of coral and gold beads punctuated by a gold cross. Rich bodily adornments of this kind were in fact prohibited at the hospital by statutes of reform that were enforced starting in 1509.²⁰ By contrast, the female figure on the far right is not rendered in luxury fabrics and furs; neither is she portrayed with forbidden sartorial adornments or opulent devotional aids. Rather, she appears in the simple dark habit and white wimple described in the statues. This figure must therefore represent a professed sister, as has been maintained. But what, then, is the relationship of these figures to one another? Early Netherlandish conventions for portraiture strongly suggest that the lay figures are a married couple and the nun is their daughter.²¹ Many examples of this type of triptych representing spouses and their children were produced in the early modern Netherlands. A well-known example by Hans Memling, dating to 1484 (fig. 7), depicts Willem Moreel and Barbara Van Valenderberch with sixteen of their eighteen children. Visual evidence for the relationships of the figures in the hofje strongly suggests that it too is a family triptych. The wrinkled brows, sagging jowls, and crow’s feet of the hofje’s male and principal female figures signal middle age. The nun bears no such telltale signs, however, and she appears comparatively younger than her lay companions. These pictorial features seem intent on conveying a parent-child relationship by point of contrast.

The figures in the hofje’s wings can be identified as individuals who resided in Mechelen in the early sixteenth century. The evidence is both iconographical and archival. Starting with the former, in all probability the married couple share their given names with the saints with whom they are shown—their patron saints—as was customary in Netherlandish portraiture of the period.²² In the case of the hofje, the saints are James the Greater and Margaret of Antioch, as determined by the figures’ attributes: pilgrim’s attire for James and a dragon for Margaret. The layman’s name was therefore James or Jacob, and the laywoman’s Margaret or Margaretha. Preserved at the Stadsarchief in Mechelen are three documents from the hospital’s archive in which the names Jacob and Margaretha appear together in ways that signify marriage. They all pertain to the same two individuals, namely, Jacob Van den Putte and Margaretha Svos. Jacob and Margaretha lived on Hanswijkstraat at the corner of Potterijstraat, a short walk from the hospital, on Onze-Lieve-Vrouwestraat (fig. 8).²³ Jacob Van den Putte coadministered the Heilige Geesttafel (Confraternity of the Holy Spirit), a charitable organization at the nearby priory of Hanswijk: with one Jacob de Vos, he supervised its revenues, as recorded in a bound volume, dated 1523, also at the Stadsarchief.²⁴ The three documents in the hospital’s archive that pertain to the couple address matters of their estate while incidentally identifying by name the second female figure depicted in the hofje. The first, a will for the couple dated April 9, 1524, provides for their daughter, Maria Van den Putte, who is described as a professed sister at the hospital.²⁵ The second, a testament from April 9, 1527 [1528], arranges for each of the couple’s three children to receive an equal share of their estate upon their deaths.²⁶ The third, an entry in the hospital’s financial register from 1541, states that the community had come to own a share in Margaretha and Jacob’s house through inheritance from Maria.²⁷ When considered together, the evidence for patterns of portraiture in Netherlandish familial triptychs and the content of the documents pertaining to Van den Putte and Svos leave little doubt that the hofje depicts Jacob, Margaretha, and their professed daughter Maria.

Fig. 8 G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Plan of the City of Mechelen, from Civitates Orbis, Stadsarchief, Mechelen, beeldbankmechelen.be

Fig. 8 G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Plan of the City of Mechelen, from Civitates Orbis, Stadsarchief, Mechelen, beeldbankmechelen.be

Fig. 8 G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Plan of the City of Mechelen, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Liber primus (Cologne, 1574) Mechelen, Stadsarchief, beeldbankmechelen.be, B.6522 [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 8 detail G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Plan of the City of Mechelen, from Civitates Orbis, Stadsarchief, Mechelen, beeldbankmechelen.be

Fig. 8 detail G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Plan of the City of Mechelen, from Civitates Orbis, Stadsarchief, Mechelen, beeldbankmechelen.be

Fig. 8-detail G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Plan of the City of Mechelen, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Liber primus (Cologne, 1574) 1) Residence of Jacob Van den Putte and Margaretha Svos, on Hanswijkstraat at the corner of Potterijstraat. 2) Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis. Mechelen, Stadsarchief, beeldbankmechelen.be, B.6522 [side-by-side viewer]

While the hospital’s archive has yielded important evidence about the persons portrayed in the hofje’s wings, it is frustratingly silent about other key issues. Among these are the patronage and production of the work, its entry into the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis, and its mode of display and use.²⁸ These issues can be explored through other means, however. For example, what we know about the patronage of family triptychs in the early modern Low Countries strongly suggests that Jacob Van den Putte and Margaretha Svos commissioned the work: they appear in the positions and attitudes normally assigned to patrons in family diptychs, such as those in Memling’s Moreel/Valenderberch triptych. Furthermore, the hofje’s hospital provenance and Maria’s depiction as a professed sister at the community, as indicated by her habit, make it likely that Jacob and Margaretha commissioned the work for that context, where it functioned both devotionally and socially.

The depiction of lay supplicants Jacob and Margaretha in the wings of the hofje in the positions and attitudes conventionally reserved for patrons also throws into doubt the enduring premise that the sisters of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis commissioned the shutters. (The painter(s) for these and other wings from the Mechelen hofjes remains a mystery: presuming local production, guild records for Mechelen that could have helped to resolve this problem do not survive for this period.) It hardly seems possible that the nuns would collectively order wings that represent lay supplicants in a conventional family arrangement for a devotional work they ostensibly intended to keep at the hospital. Neither is it likely that Maria (or another sister) did so independently, since one’s profession usually if not always limited the resources that would enable such activity. The patronage of the wings by Jacob and Margaretha suggests in turn that they commissioned not only the panels but the work as a whole.

Certainly the arrival of the hofje at the hospital would not have escaped notice. The visual pull and thematically sanctified nature of the garden would compel attention at that moment; its themes intersect with those of conventual devotional literature, cited below, in ways with which the sisters likely identified. It also seems probable that the hofje was visually accessible to the professed sisters at large. This and other hofjes in the hospital’s possession could have been installed in several different spaces within the built environment. That environment was demolished in the 1860s when the sisters moved to a modern facility, yet it can be at least partially understood through a plan made in 1857 after an earlier one, from 1784 (fig. 9). The plan illustrates a nun’s choir (“choor der nonnen”) adjacent to a choir proper, which opened up onto the church. The latter space was accessible to the public and visible from the infirmary. However, I would suggest that the depiction of the blind sister in the hofje was perhaps too intimate for the publicly accessible areas of the hospital. It seems more plausible that it was installed in the nuns’ choir or in spaces reserved expressly for the sisters, where images might be kept, such as in their refectory: the statutes of reform state that a sculpture was located there.²⁹ Whatever the case, the work was likely regularly if not consistently visible to the sisters. Jacob and Margaretha must have depended upon that access to enable a communicative role for the imagery: as argued here, the hofje makes spiritual claims for them and for Maria, while also reminding Maria’s sisters about their commitment to her care as a disabled person.

Evidence for the date of the hofje’s production and, by extension, its arrival at the hospital can also be gleaned from the work. A wax medallion at the upper center of the garden (fig. 10), dated 1513, is integrated so deeply into the adjacent flora and fauna that it could not have been a later addition. The terminus post quem for the hofje is therefore 1513. Nor could the work have been commissioned after 1541, the date of the hospital’s financial register that describes Jacob and Margaretha as deceased. If the two presented the hofje to the hospital as proposed, perhaps they did so at the time of Maria’s profession, which occurred in or before 1524, when she is described in her parents’ will as professed. If so, the hofje was made between 1513 and 1524.

Sight, Sightlessness, and Suspicion

Maria’s closed eyes render her figure exceptional among Netherlandish devotional portraits of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In only three of the 707 Netherlandish devotional portraits surveyed by Ingrid Falque are figures depicted in this way.³⁰ They are clerics and nuns, as evidenced by their religious habits. These unusual renderings may convey for the figures a deeper spiritual skill-set than the lay devotees shown with them,³¹ who gaze up at Christ or saints or down at prayer books. Such a reading initially seems plausible in Maria’s case, for her devotional skill was of considerable concern, as we will see. Yet the closed eyes in these four portraits, and perhaps especially Maria’s, may in fact convey something else: visual impairment. Indeed, by the fifteenth century closed eyes had become a common pictorial convention for blindness. Examples abound across artistic media, in panel painting and manuscript illumination, and also in single-sheet prints and printed books that circulated widely. For now, I highlight three such works to be discussed in greater detail below, along with additional examples. The first is a woodcut from a printed version of Ludolph of Saxony’s Speculum vitae Christ, translated by the late fifteenth century into Dutch as Tboeck vanden leven ons heeren Jesu Christi (The book of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ), that shows Christ healing a mad man and two blind men; the latter figures’ eyes are shut to convey visual impairment (fig. 11).³² Second, the Master of Alkmaar’s Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity of 1504 (fig. 12) portrays a shut-eyed blind man seeking alms, whose forward movement is guided by a child strapped to his head (fig. 13). Third, some images of the Crucifixion include the Roman soldier, later called Longinus, who disavowed Christ by piercing his side (John 19:34–35) and whose sightless status prevented him from seeing the divine truth; Christ’s blood restored his sight. In a Crucifixion painted in Utrecht around 1505 (fig. 14), Longinus points to the closed eyes that signaled his blindness, to ask for assistance in raising his lance to pierce Christ’s side.³³

Fig. 11 Attributed to the Master of Antwerp, Christ Heals Two Blind Men and a Mad Man, from Lud, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 11 Attributed to the Master of Antwerp, Christ Heals Two Blind Men and a Mad Man, from Lud, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 11 Attributed to the Master of Antwerp, Christ Heals Two Blind Men and a Mad Man, from Ludolph of Saxony, Tboeck vanden leven ons heeren Jesu Christi (The book of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ) (Zwolle (?), 1485–91). Hand-colored woodcut, 9.2 x 12.4 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-P-1961-717 [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 12 Master of Alkmaar, Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, 1504, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop

Fig. 12 Master of Alkmaar, Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, 1504, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop

Fig. 12 Master of Alkmaar, Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, 1504, oil on panel, 119.1 x 469.5 cm (with frame). Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, inv. SK-A-2815, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 13 Master of Alkmaar, Distributing Bread to the Blind and Needy (detail , Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop

Fig. 13 Master of Alkmaar, Distributing Bread to the Blind and Needy (detail , Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop

Fig. 13 Distributing Bread to the Blind and Needy (detail of fig. 12), oil on panel, 103.5 cm _ 55 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. SK-A-2815-1 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 14 Circle of Master of the Figdor Deposition, (Utrecht), Crucifixion (detail), 1505, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop

Fig. 14 Circle of Master of the Figdor Deposition, (Utrecht), Crucifixion (detail), 1505, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop

Fig. 14 Circle of Master of the Figdor Deposition, (Utrecht), Crucifixion (detail), 1505, oil on panel, 104.1 cm _ 84.9 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. SK-A-2212 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Thus, Maria’s closed eyes directly associate her depicted figure with an iconographic convention for blindness to, it seems, convey visual impairment. This point is leveraged by additional technical and visual evidence culled from the hofje’s wings. In terms of the former, recent infrared reflectographic studies have revealed that Maria was represented with open eyes in the panel’s underdrawing.³⁴ The decision to represent her with closed eyes in the final painting must therefore have been deliberate. In terms of the latter, Maria’s closed eyes contrast with the other four figures represented in the wings, whose eyes are not only open but also, it appears, focused: Saint James fixes his gaze on Jacob Van den Putte, Saint Margaret’s is on Margaretha Svos, and the couple look down, at their clasped hands and open prayer books. Maria’s visage is further distinguished by the modulated rendering of her ocular orbits, as if they are swollen or malformed. Saint Margaret is rendered without such effect, and neither she nor Maria have the sagging flesh and crow’s feet that convey middle-aged status for Margaretha Svos. Such distinctions demonstrate that the modulation of Maria’s sockets cannot be dismissed as a clumsy handling of paint and brush by an inexperienced or unskilled artist. Clearly, the painter conceptualized her features, and those of her companions, with a real purpose. That these choices were made to convey sightlessness for Maria is suggested by yet another aspect of the hofje’s imagery. The dragon in the shadows at the far right attends not to Saint Margaret, whom it represents as an attribute, but rather to Maria.³⁵ It does so by means of sight: a singular luminous eyeball, defined by a large, bulbous shape, piercing black pupil, crimson iris, and gleaming white highlight, is trained on her face. This is quite unlike most other representations of Margaret’s dragon, which either focus on her or the works’ viewers.³⁶ This unusual approach to the rendering of a saint’s attribute must have been deliberate: it inventively attends to closed-eyed Maria’s situation and to the hofje’s larger emphasis on sight and seeing. In sum, the hofje’s imagery blends convention with invention to prioritize vision and visual impairment.

The sightless state conveyed for Maria by her portrait helps to illuminate both her parents’ motivations in commissioning the hofje and the reception of the work within the hospital context. It is important to acknowledge from the outset that the perspectives of the patrons and audiences of the work may not have aligned with one another: individual beholders of the hofje did not necessarily agree about its purpose or interpretation.³⁷ This is all the more likely given that conflicting attitudes about disability and the disabled were circulating in various sociospiritual contexts. On the one hand, biblical scripture and related writings encouraged both empathy for the blind and the modeling of empathetic behavior toward those so afflicted. In the healing of a man blind from birth, described in John 9:2–3, Christ’s disciples ask Jesus whether the man or his parents were to blame for his condition. Jesus replied that neither was culpable. Rather, the man was sightless so that “works of God might be made manifest within him.” These “works” were made evident by the enactment of a miracle: Jesus healed the man’s blindness. Images of this and other episodes in which Christ healed the sightless helped to advance a compassionate perspective toward the visually impaired. Compassion was crafted and expressed as well through a late-medieval spiritual economy that elevated the disabled while helping to ensure the salvation of the able-bodied. In her study on the rewriting of false miracles in England, Lindsey Row-Heyveld concludes that late-medieval disabled persons held an “important role in a system of spiritual exchange in which the non-standard body served as a conduit for God; this exchange granted people with non-normative bodies a level of subjectivity and spiritual agency. . . . Able-bodied Christians gave [the disabled individual] alms . . . and, in return, experienced an encounter with the divine facilitated by the disabled person.” In the late-medieval charitable economy, then, people traded “salvation for alms, alms for salvation.” Disability was “the crux on which this commerce balanced.”³⁸

Images illustrated and encouraged an alms/redemption economy built around disability. One such work is the Master of Alkmaar’s Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity (see fig. 12), in which the disabled and the poor are depicted as recipients of alms.³⁹ The first panel portrays a group of needy individuals, including the blind man already discussed, who seems pleased to accept a gift of bread from a layman and his wife (see fig. 13). The themes of the polyptych were inspired by Matthew 25:31–46, in which undertaking merciful deeds, such as distributing food to the indigent, is described as a pathway to salvation. An inscription beneath the first panel leaves no doubt as to the reciprocal nature of this system: “Be charitable to the poor / God shall once again have mercy on you (Deelt mildelick den armen / God zal u weder ontfarmen).”⁴⁰ Perhaps even more to the point is that Christ appears behind the couple who distribute bread, drawing attention not to the act of charity but rather to the tangible space of the panel’s viewers: his gaze meets theirs. He thereby implicates the beholders in an expectation of charity and, by extension, provides assurance that charitable actions will raise one’s prospects for redemption. “Salvation for alms, alms for salvation” did not rest easily with everyone, however. As we will see, efforts were underway in some Netherlandish urban centers to decouple relief for the disabled from the expectation of redemptive almsgiving.

Sitting alongside the faith-driven ideologies of compassion and reciprocity toward the disabled were other ways of thinking that cast disabled people as sinful and therefore suspect.⁴¹ To take Maria’s visual impairment as an example, suspicion was fueled by the deployment in texts and images of corporeal blindness as a metaphor for spiritual blindness. In this way of thinking, Maria’s disability precluded her from reading and understanding the Word: hearing the scripture via recitation was not as potent as reading it oneself. Moreover, theologians such as Saint Augustine prioritized vision over the other senses in devotion. Augustine, in his conception of pathways to God, writes that sight required only light and not matter, which could dangerously arouse carnal desire (carnis appetitus): “So let us use for preference the evidence of the eyes; [sight] is the most excellent of the body’s senses, and for all its difference in kind has the greatest affinity to mental vision (visio mentis).”⁴² Sight controlled the other, more unruly, bodily senses and a sixth sense Augustine called the “eye of the mind” (oculus mentis) that kept the other senses in check to enable love of God.⁴³ Such emphases necessarily disadvantaged the sightless by prioritizing vision to their exclusion. Relatedly, blindness precluded access to scriptural lessons presented in visual form and to images that could instruct viewers in other aspects of the faith, as advocated for the laity from the time of Gregory the Great. Some pictorial depictions of blindness helped to form and sustain biases against the blind by stigmatizing them, whether directly or by association. In personified figures of Synagogue, for instance, a blindfold and the blindness it produced signaled Judaism’s errant rejection of Christian doctrine,⁴⁴ and closed-eyed Longinus tortured Christ. The disabled persons depicted in the Rohan Hours, produced in northern France in the 1420s, are cursed by Moses in one miniature and moralized negatively in another.⁴⁵ In this moralizing of disabilities—what Ruth Mellinkoff has aptly termed “the bonding of disease and sin”⁴⁶—afflicted persons were considered highly disadvantaged: their sinful states kept them from forging social relationships, contributing to the common good, and pursuing their own salvation.

Sensory Redemption

The Van den Putte/Svos hofje departs from other family triptychs, including the Moreel/Valenderberch triptych, in its focus on a couple with only one of their children: as revealed in the Van den Putte/Svos testaments, the two had produced other children who do not appear in the wings. The work thus pertains first and foremost to the parent-child triad and not to the family as a whole. In light of Maria’s apparent visual impairment and the negative conceptions of the blind and blindness that were circulating, the Besloten hofje seems intent on situating the spirituality of Jacob, Margaretha, and Maria favorably, to position all three as worthy of salvation; moreover, it asserts that Maria was deserving of profession at the hospital. This favorable presentation takes various forms. On a very basic level, all three supplicants are in prayer before the saints who appear in the garden, namely, Saints Ursula, Elizabeth of Hungary, and Catherine of Alexandria, which suggests a broad understanding of the various values they exemplified. For Maria these values included purity, charity, and wisdom, which were particularly emphasized in religious women’s communities. Maria’s brown habit and white wimple are those of a reformed hospital sister, which implies her acceptance by those women already professed at the hospital, her attire asserts her understanding of the specific spiritual values and charitable activities emphasized there, and her prayers imply devotional insight despite her impairment.

The sculptural nature of the garden plays into this conception. Exegeses and conventual prayer books demonstrate that the laity and perhaps especially religious women deployed not just the privileged sense of sight (and visualization) but their other senses as well, in various and sometimes blended ways, to become closer to Christ.⁴⁷ In the case of the hofje, smell is invoked by the blossoms that laden the space; hearing by the parted lips of Saint Margaret that suggest speech or song and by the dragon’s gaping jaws and fiery breath; taste by the grape clusters; and touch by the tactility of the garden’s flora, fauna, sculptures, and relics. Perhaps Margaretha and Jacob chose to commission a sculptural work rather than a triptych with a painted central panel precisely because its tangibility better prioritized variety in sensory-based spirituality. One can even imagine Maria gently touching its sculptural elements to engage more directly with the holy objects and figures represented therein (the glass panes visible in some recent photographs of the hofje that would have precluded touch are later additions). Reindert Falkenburg has uncovered considerable textual evidence for a spiritually potent tactility and acts of touch in devotional tracts for the Netherlandish laity during this period, some aspects of which are illustrated in printed books. For instance, supplicants described as “souls” would pick fruit from trees or gather it from the ground, as in a woodcut of Christ and the Soul in the Garden of Gethsemane (fig. 15) from a tract called Die geestelicke boomgaert der vruchten daer die devote siel haer versadicht vanden vruchten der passien Christi (The spiritual orchard where the devout soul is satiated with the fruit of Christ’s Passion), which was printed in seven editions between 1515 and 1546.⁴⁸ In some manuscripts owned by religious women, supplicants are described as metaphorically reclining with their bridegroom Christ in a flower-strewn bed. Some women are described as undertaking interactive, materially based piety by dressing, caressing, and kissing sculptural representations of the Christ Child as expressions of veneration. A Christ Child, made ca. 1500 in Mechelen with a provenance of the Kloster zum Heiligen Kreuz in Rostock, Germany, is one such work (fig. 16); it was recently restored with a blue velvet and ermine mantle, alabaster rosary, and pearl-studded crown of the era and type that the sisters would have provided.⁴⁹ In the context of Maria’s disability, the materiality of the hofje makes a stronger case for tactile piety despite its visual pull than a work composed strictly of painted surfaces.

Fig. 15 Unknown Netherlandish, Christ and the Soul in the Garden of Gethsemane, f, 1521, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

Fig. 15 Unknown Netherlandish, Christ and the Soul in the Garden of Gethsemane, f, 1521, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague

Fig. 15 Netherlandish, Christ and the Soul in the Garden of Gethsemane, from Die geestelicke boomgaert der vruchten daer die devote siel haer versadicht vanden vruchten der passien Christi (The spiritual fruit garden where the devout soul is satiated with the fruit of Christ’s Passion), woodcut from an edition printed in Utrecht by Jan Bernsten, 1521. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, inv. 150 G 44, fol. 17r [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 16 Unknown Mechelen, Christ Child, ca. 1500, Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Schloss Güstrow

Fig. 16 Unknown Mechelen, Christ Child, ca. 1500, Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Schloss Güstrow

Fig. 16 Mechelen, Christ Child, ca. 1500, polychromed wood, gold, alabaster, velvet, ermine, pearls, and other materials, h. 30.5 cm . Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, Schloss Güstrow. © Staatliches Museum Schwerin, photo: Hugo Maertens (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Other aspects of the hofje help to illuminate more deeply the relationship between Maria’s problematic body and the hope for her salvation. One is her hands (see fig. 5), which are held together in prayer in conventional fashion. The dorsum of her left hand is the most prevalent feature. The smallest finger and right edge of the left-hand palm peek out from beneath it at the lower edge, and the tip of the thumb of the right hand is also partially depicted. Unusually, Maria’s hands are rendered in larger scale and with longer and broader digits than would be expected in relation to the scale of her figure. Her hands are nearly as large as her head, and they are markedly larger than the hands of her parents despite the ampler scale of their figures. In fact, Maria’s hands are comparable in size and even slightly broader than Saint Margaret’s, whose figure is comparatively much larger, rendered in hieratic scale, to emphasize her import: her hands are proportionate to her own frame. In this presentation, which seems as carefully planned as the rendering of Maria’s ocular orbits in contrast to those of the other figures, Maria’s hands are relationally emphasized. Such emphasis may have signaled the practice of devotion-by-feel discussed above. It also connects Maria to trends in spiritual meditation that activated piety through the hands. These bodily features were put to meditative and mnemonic use in prayer through the association of its individual elements—the palm, digits, joints, and nails—with specific devotional exercises.⁵⁰ For instance, Latin inscriptions in a woodcut of 1466 depicting the palm-side of the left hand (fig. 17) identify the thumb—the privileged digit—as symbolizing God’s will. The four fingers represent four stages of contemplation, namely, examination, repentance, confession, and satisfaction. The joints are identified as steps a devotee would undertake in each meditative stage. A similar image, a Chiropsalterium (handpsalter) (fig. 18), was developed by the Augustinian canon and reformer Jan Mombaer for his Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum meditationum (Rosary of spiritual exercises and sacred meditations) and printed at Zwolle in 1494. Here again, the fingers and joints are inscribed with meditative cues. The inscriptions above and below the image, which are culled from the Psalms and other books of the Bible, invoke and encourage sensory-driven devotion by emphasizing hearing, through references to music and those who produce it. “Praise him with the sound of the trumpet, psaltery, and harp,” the text urges; the reader should rejoice in “embracing musicians of all kinds in the Holy Spirit.”⁵¹ Maria’s body may not have been as abled as the bodies of other supplicants, but her out-scaled hands align her viably with a spiritual memory practice that privileges a type of piety she could in fact enact.

The enclosed garden helps to counter another enduring negative association with blindness and the blind, namely, sexual misbehavior.⁵² Such ideas were inspired by two primary contexts about sexual acts that powerfully condemned the visually impaired. The first was in the form of narratives revived from antiquity, which grew in popularity among the laity in the fifteenth century and that were expressed in textual and pictorial form. An example is the story of Oedipus and Jocasta: Oedipus gouged out his own eyes for marrying and having intercourse with his mother, Jocasta, from whom he had been separated as an infant and who he did not recognize as an adult. This episode circulated widely in Boccaccio’s On Famous Women of ca. 1360, printed in Ulm in 1473, Louvain in 1487, Strasbourg in 1488, and in Antwerp in 1525 as Poeet ende Philosophe, bescrivende van den doorluchtighen, glorioesten ende edelsten vrouwen. The printers relied on the same or very similar sets of woodblocks to illustrate their volumes.⁵³ A woodcut from the 1473 edition (fig. 19) depicts Oedipus’s abandonment as a baby in the left foreground; on the right, the adult Oedipus blinds himself while Jocasta commits suicide as self-inflicted punishments for their incest (although neither was aware of the sinful nature of their contact until later). The second context was Judeo-Christian critiques of sexual behavior and activities, which assigned blindness as a punishment for various transgressions of the kind. In Genesis 19:1–11, for example, sodomites are struck down by blindness to keep them from committing a carnal act declared sinful by Lot.

In contrast to these negative perspectives, the enclosed garden of the hofje carried associations of sexual restraint. The passage in the Song of Songs that eventually came to signal the Virgin Mary’s purity—“a garden enclosed, sister my bride / a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed”—ultimately inspired numerous depictions of Mary in walled gardens, such that by the fifteenth century the theme was pervasive in northern European representation. Examples are found in painting, drawing, sculpture, manuscripts, prints, and the fiber arts. In an ivory carving made in the Netherlands at the close of the fifteenth century, Mary is shown in an enclosed garden surrounded by symbols of her purity (fig. 20).⁵⁴ Women who professed in religious communities, as Maria had, took a vow of virginity (or chastity if they had already been married). This commitment is addressed in the reform statutes from the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis, in part by imposing a modified enclosure for the hospital sisters, which kept contact to a minimum while allowing access to the infirm to administer care.⁵⁵ The connection between enclosed spaces and virginity is made explicit in a fifteenth-century devotional text that Kathryn Rudy calls the Spiritual Bedroom, which in all likelihood belonged to sisters at the Augustinian hospital at Geel, reformed by the Mechelen sisters in 1552.⁵⁶ The Spiritual Bedroom instructs its reader to build in her heart a bridal chamber in which she would receive Christ, her beloved. The sister is to paint the walls green and adorn the edges with painted blossoms to construct an enclosed garden. The green of the walls is described as virginal, thereby connecting the garden directly to sexual propriety via color.⁵⁷ Once the room was furnished, Christ would lay with the supplicant and their flesh would metaphorically conjoin in a virtuous expression of conjugal fulfillment. The green foliage in the hofje, albeit faded with time, may have carried similar symbolic associations for its patrons and audiences thus claiming for Maria its positive values.

Medieval exegeses and medical treatises attributed healing properties to tastes and fragrances, which in the hofje connect Maria to notions of bodily and spiritual healing. Influenced by the Galenic conception of the six non-naturals, the traditional medieval health regimen (regimen sanitatis) encouraged the consumption of healthy foods and the inhalation of sweet fragrances to promote sound health, prevent disease, and encourage healing.⁵⁸ Such ideas received attention as well in the highly influential Isagoge (Introduction to medicine) written by the Arabic physician Hunayn Ibn Ishaq al-‘Ibadi in the ninth century, which assigned healing properties to floral aromas; the text was translated at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino near Rome in the eleventh century and disseminated widely in the Christian world thereafter.⁵⁹ The Isagoge and the writings it influenced identified ambient air or smell as the most important of the senses, for it more than any other sense was thought to preserve life. Pleasing scents and tastes could not only heal the body but also the soul. Fragrances in the prelapsarian Garden of Eden were considered by medieval authors to enable just this.⁶⁰ Healing the spirit by scent was taken up in certain fifteenth- and sixteenth-century devotional tracts, including Die geestelicke boomgaert.⁶¹ In one passage, Christ presents the soul with a red rose, to “pluck if you love me as I have loved.” He directs the soul to “always bear in your heart the odor of the red rose for my sake as I have suffered for you.” The fragrance of the rose binds the soul of the reader to Christ, to strengthen the memory of his sacrifice for human salvation and, ultimately, to lead the devotee to redemption. Such connections were made visually evident in woodcuts, such as Christ and the Soul in the Garden of Gethsemane (see fig. 15); in this Holy Land image, the figures are set in an enclosed garden, thereby linking the themes of the text to those of the Besloten hofjes. Inhaling sweet scents in walled gardens was in fact considered a more effective way to promote health and healing than doing so in open gardens, for the barriers retained and intensified the fragrances of the plantings therein.⁶²

Fig. 21 Unknown Mechelen, Jawbone relic labeled, “This is from the bones o, Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, Brussels; on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 21 Unknown Mechelen, Jawbone relic labeled, “This is from the bones o, Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, Brussels; on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 21 Jawbone relic labeled, “This is from the bones of the 11,000 virgins (Dit es ghebe[e]nte vande[n] xim mechde[n]),” (detail of fig. 1) [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 22 Hans Memling, Saint Ursula Shrine, 1489, St. John’s Hospital, Bruges

Fig. 22 Hans Memling, Saint Ursula Shrine, 1489, St. John’s Hospital, Bruges

Fig. 22 Hans Memling, Saint Ursula Shrine, 1489, oil and gilt on wood, 9991.5 x 91.599.2 x 41.5 cm. Bruges, St. John’s Hospital, © Lukas – Art in Flanders VZW, photo Hugo Maertens, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

It was not only the blossoms and their implied fragrances in the hofje that held restorative possibilities, however, but also the relics. Over three dozen relics are included in the garden, more than any other hofje in the hospital’s possession (albeit some original components of the works may have been removed over time).⁶³ As with other relics, these objects were assigned curative possibilities for physical and moral defects, if not in the material world then in the afterlife.⁶⁴ Cataloging the relics in the hofje through their authentiques, paper banderoles with inscriptions that ascribe them to saints and thus declare their authenticity, reveals that some pertain to particular saints, including Saints Jerome, Dorothy, Bartholomew, and Barbara.⁶⁵ Some authentiques attribute their relics to the Holy Land, and seven identify relics of the legendary 11,000 virgin martyrs (see fig. 2 and fig. 21), who accompanied Saint Ursula on a pilgrimage to Rome and who were put to death with her in Cologne on the return journey. The legend received widespread attention, in part through Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea of ca. 1260 and through many images that convey the narrative or present the figures devotionally. In terms of the latter, Ursula’s role as a protector—she is portrayed in the hofje shielding four of her virgin companions—was invoked on behalf of the caretakers and the infirm. Images of Saint Ursula were present in some other hospitals, suggesting that this imagery played a role in promoting these connections more broadly. For example, administrators at the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges commissioned a shrine of Saint Ursula to hold relics in the institution’s possession (fig. 22). Ursula is shown on one end safeguarding her virgin companions under her cloak, while two hospital sisters appear with the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child on the other. The reliquary, housed in the institution’s chapel, would have been visible to most patients from their sickbeds;⁶⁶ prayers recited in the presence of the relics would have been considered especially potent in their healing and hope for salvation. Tales of the miraculous appearance of the 11,000 virgins to the dying, and their intercessory role in the process of death and salvation, were also prevalent: Voragine’s Legenda aurea connects the virgins to the illness, death, and reception of a monk in heaven:

A certain religious who had great devotion for these virgins was gravely ill, and one day saw a most beautiful virgin appearing to him and asking if he recognized her. . . . [S]he said, “I am one of the virgins for whom you have such devotion. We want you to be rewarded for this, and so, if for love of us and in our honor you will recite the Lord’s Prayer eleven thousand times, you will have us to protect and console you at the hour of your death.” She disappeared, and the monk fulfilled the condition as fast as he could. . . . [A] little later . . . he had migrated to the Lord.⁶⁷

Themes of restoration and redemption of the ill pertain in the hofje in another way as well, through the wax medallion of the resurrected Christ that appears at the upper center of the garden (see fig. 10). The medallion draws Maria into the proximity of the restored body of the Savior, just as she is also drawn into proximity to the relics in the hofje’s sanctified terrain. In linking her to a representation of the savior’s resurrected flesh, the same status is claimed for her body and soul in the next world. In sum, the hofje presents Maria as a spiritually abled if not a visually abled member of the hospital community, one who is deserving of profession and redemption.

Parental Anxieties and the Audiences of the Hofje

The hofje claims salvation not only for Maria but also for her mother and father in their positions as her charitable providers. Doing so may have seemed crucial, since parents such as Margaretha Svos and Jacob Van den Putte, who produced children disabled from birth or who became so later, were looked upon unfavorably by some: their children’s afflictions were considered punishment for their own sinful behavior. This perspective was expressed in John 9:2, discussed above, in which Jesus heals a man blind from birth. This miraculous episode may have aroused sympathy for the disabled as we have seen, but the question of whose sin was to blame for the man’s disability, his or his parents’, points to a blame-game in which parents were deemed morally suspect because of (and along with) their stricken children.

In the hofje, by contrast, Margaretha and Jacob appear as ideal supplicants and ideal parents, as generous providers for their daughter. Their presence facilitates pictorially and symbolically Maria’s access to the sanctified, healing garden (even if Maria could not see that herself), as though they and especially Margaretha are interceding for her as the immediate conduits for their daughter’s spiritual well-being. The figures of Elizabeth of Hungary, with a disabled man at her feet—she was known to bathe lepers—and Ursula protecting her virgin companions, reinforce notions of charity and caregiving. Certainly it was Margaretha and Jacob who arranged a place for Maria at the hospital, an institution that by its very nature would cultivate her piety. The prayers of nuns, furthermore, were considered especially efficacious—as were the healing properties of rosaries and the coral from which Margaretha’s beads were made⁶⁸—perhaps even more so those of hospital sisters, who at this time were among the most appreciated agents of physical and spiritual health for the infirm.⁶⁹ The Besloten hofje thus conveys a charitable spiritual provision for Maria on the part of her parents, as a visual parallel of sorts to the couple’s temporal charitable provision for her in their will. The hofje was perhaps also intended by Maria’s parents as a devotional aid—Maria could activate her piety through the sense of touch as described previously—such that it made a means of sensory devotion viable for her despite her impairment. Such actions represent the couple’s concern for their disadvantaged child. They are also consistent with a broader commitment to the benevolent activities exemplified in Jacob’s role as “master” of the Confraternity of the Holy Spirit at Hanswijk, which provided relief for those in need.

Jacob and Margaretha may have considered themselves especially pressured to provide for their daughter, as deeper anxieties about the disabled, including the blind, were surfacing in mainstream thought during this period. To be specific, the major urban centers of the Low Countries were debating ways in which health care for the needy was administered and regulated. The aim was to reduce mendicancy, which was increasingly seen as a public nuisance. Proponents of this cause proposed retaining the urban monastic infirmaries that traditionally administered care for the ill and destitute, so that the Christian principle of love for one’s neighbor would be retained.⁷⁰ But these institutions would operate under stronger surveillance and greater intervention by the city governments. A formal strategy of this kind was proposed by the humanist author Juan Luis Vives in his treatise, De subventione pauperum sive de humanis necessitatibus (On assistance to the poor or, on human necessities), which was commissioned by the city of Bruges and published in January of 1526.⁷¹ De subventione pauperum was focused primarily on the poor, but it also addressed issues pertaining specifically to the sick and disabled in hospitals, where the infirm, orphans, and “the mentally ill are kept and [also] the blind.”⁷² Vives makes a case for scrutinizing the conditions of institutionalized persons with the purpose of putting to work those who were able. Of the sightless he writes:

I should not allow the blind to sit around or wander about idly. There are many things in which they could be employed: some are good at letters, let them study (in some cases we have seen considerable advancement in learning); others are gifted for music, let them sing, strike at the lyre, blow on the flute; some can turn the grain-mills, others work at the presses; others can blow the bellows in the forges. We know that the blind can make little boxes, chests, baskets, and cages; blind women spin and wind yard. Let them not wish to be idle or avoid work; they shall easily find things with which to occupy themselves. Laziness and sluggishness are the reason why they say they cannot do anything, not a physical defect.⁷³

Historians are currently re-evaluating the social, religious, and economic pressures that brought about the revision to humanitarian efforts on behalf of the destitute and infirm.⁷⁴ Of importance here is that Vives and at least some of his contemporaries believed that the visually impaired were resistant to undertaking productive work that contributed to the common good. Such thinking no doubt helped to marginalize disabled individuals such as Maria Van den Putte even more deeply. At the same time, however, her situation was better than those of impaired persons whose families did not have the means or desire to care for them. Jacob and Margaretha were not only willing and able to provide for their daughter financially, as evidenced by their will, but they also commissioned and arranged for the presence of an expensive devotional work packed with relics of high value to the community that had accepted her as one of their own.

Margaretha and Jacob also may have hoped that the hofje would mediate socially with the sisters, whom they certainly understood as viewers of the work, on behalf of Maria’s physical and spiritual well-being. Surely the couple trusted them to provide exemplary spiritual and physical care for their daughter or they would not have chosen this particular community as her perpetual place of residence. Its recent history did not necessarily support that perspective, however. Prior to the reforms the sisters had been accused by the bishop of Cambrai of significant lapses in the hospital’s commitment to the infirm. The preface to the reform statutes, written by the Mechelen-born reformer Jan Standonck, reports that in a visitation made by the bishop in 1500, “various deficiencies of all kinds [had been found in] the women and nuns of the aforementioned hospital, in their religion, rules, and the three vows they professed [poverty, chastity, and obedience], and also in the care, service, and protection of the sick.”⁷⁵ Subsequent visitations revealed that “the aforementioned women and nuns failed profoundly in compliance, in maintaining and following the way of life conveyed in the rules,” despite the fact that they had “promised to do this to the best of their ability.”⁷⁶ A third assessment revealed that the situation had worsened even further: “But in our times [ca. 1509], [the sisters] not only despised, forgot, and abandoned all the rules and ordinances, but also their spirituality and discipline in the aforementioned hospital, and they performed worse in the service of the sick and poor than before. All this is a heavy burden and a danger to their souls and a great disadvantage and damage to the aforementioned hospital and to the detriment of the poor and sick.”⁷⁷ Under these deteriorating conditions, Jacob de Croÿ installed at Mechelen two sisters from the Augustinian hospital of Sint-Jans near Brussels to enforce the reforms. They were Cornelia Andries and Sozijne Van Coolene, whose portraits appear in the wings of a Crucifixion hofje also in the Mechelen hospital’s possession, which is discussed below.⁷⁸ If Margaretha and Jacob commissioned the hofje between 1513 and 1524 as proposed, they did so relatively soon after the institution of the reforms, of which they likely were aware as neighbors to the hospital. The hofje’s portraits kept Maria, Margaretha, and Jacob under the sisters’ eyes and in their minds, reminding them about their commitment to their disabled sister and her family.⁷⁹

Margaretha and Jacob may also have intended the hofje as a gesture of gratitude to the community for accepting Maria as a professed member. The sisters in fact made a certain sacrifice by doing so, for Maria was unable to contribute to the most arduous and unpleasant aspect of daily life at the community, namely, the work of the infirmary. The reform statutes reveal something of the extent of this burden. The community comprised sixteen sisters who were charged with carrying out the work of the infirmary on their own, without hiring assistants; novitiates who could or would not pull their weight were to be expelled before profession. On the other hand, taking in Maria was a means by which the sisters could demonstrate their commitment to the reformed hospital’s mission. It would embed them into a spiritual economy that diminished the “danger to their souls” identified earlier by Jan Standonck as a consequence of the community’s prior negligence. The hofje may have encouraged a communal devotional practice of sorts, with the sisters engaging with Maria (or on their own) in a tactile-driven practice of touching the garden. The garden was indeed potentially transformative, as Kathryn Rudy describes: “It is a vehicle that transforms the hospital sister’s surroundings, full of the dead and dying, the suppurating and putrescent, to the world of the idealized saint’s body, whose bones are preserved among the relics from the Holy Land and do not decompose.”⁸⁰ The holy matter of the Van den Putte/Svos hofje promises rejuvenation not only to its patrons and their daughter but to her caretakers as well.

Rethinking Production

Having now identified Jacob Van den Putte and Margaretha Svos as likely responsible for commissioning the hofje—they are represented in positions and attitudes normally reserved for patrons—certain enduring perceptions about the work’s origins and manufacture must be revised. As discussed above, the sisters of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis have been credited with producing the hofjes in their possession, including the Van den Putte/Svos example. In this model, the sisters made the botanical elements; assembled and installed them in the wood cabinets with prefabricated sculptures and relics; and commissioned the painted shutters from local artists, whose identities remain unknown. Aspects of this proposal make considerable sense at first glance, for it is certain that some Netherlandish nuns in this period produced handwork for and assembled hofjes. For example, Margaret of Austria commissioned a small garden (jardinet) made of “flowers of silk and other minutia” from the convent of Galilea in Ghent, a community of contemplative Windesheim canonesses. Margaret dispatched her court illuminator, Gerard Horenbout, to Galilea to supervise the lengthy project—he was there for twenty days—probably to ensure the hofje’s quality, as Dagmar Eichberger has proposed.⁸¹

Yet it is no longer possible to accept this standard model of production for the Van den Putte/Svos hofje. Certainly it was Jacob and Margaretha, not the sisters of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis, who commissioned the shutters, with imagery that so clearly conceptualizes the hofje as a family triptych. The imagery pertains deeply, precisely, and personally to the couple and their daughter, not directly to other sisters at the hospital or to the community at large. It is also unlikely in this specific situation that the sisters produced the hand-wrought elements of the hofje and assembled the garden: it would have made little if any sense for Jacob and Margaretha to have asked them to do so. Indeed, a collaborative effort seems out of the question in the case of this family triptych, with its very clear emphasis on a couple and their daughter. Furthermore, thinking practically, it seems unlikely that the hospital sisters could have accomplished such arduous work while also caring for the infirm, a round-the-clock occupation. Although the Mechelen statutes of reform advise the sisters to engage in sewing and spinning in any spare time that happened to arise,⁸² it is unlikely that these activities reached past the basic sewing and repairs that were necessary in a hospital context. The situation was comparatively very different from that of Galilea in Ghent, a contemplative convent where conditions better enabled activities of the kind.

In fact, a survey of the Mechelen hospital’s financial registers has not revealed the purchase of silk, thread, wire, or beads (the materials from which the hofje’s flora and fauna are made), nor do they mention the acquisition of relics or sculptures.⁸³ It may not have been necessary to record such things, however. The relics, for instance, could have been given to the community or acquired from the hospital’s patients,⁸⁴ especially since the sisters were permitted to retain possessions left at the hospital by the deceased.⁸⁵ Yet the registers do reveal that the sisters did not make, but rather bought, in 1519, a “crown” (“croone[n]”) made of wax and flowers that hung in their refectory.⁸⁶ The express purchase of the “crown” strongly suggests that the sisters procured hand-worked items externally. This is not to say, however, that they avoided manipulating the hofjes in their possession. In the case of the Van den Putte/Svos example, they may have added some of the relics that appear along the inner lateral sides of the cabinets. They also may have been the ones to remove wings that once adorned one of three Crucifixion-themed hofjes at the hospital (fig. 23)⁸⁷: perhaps the work did not originate with the patronage of the community or its associates, and therefore the pictorial content of the shutters, which may have included portraits, did not suit them.

It seems evident, then, that the sisters participated neither as patrons nor makers in the production of the Van den Putte/Svos hofje. This new perspective unravels certain assumptions about the manufacture of other hofjes at the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis. For example, the fruit and flower elements of the Van den Putte/Svos hofje, and the arrangements of these adornments in trellises along the back wall of the cabinet, are so alike in manufacture and composition to two other hofjes from the hospital that all three must have been made at the same workshop if not by the same sets of hands. The similar works are, first, a reform-related Crucifixion hofje (fig. 24) and, second, a hofje with Sint-Anna-ten-drieën (“Saint Anne in threes,” a reference to the three generations represented by the figures of Anne, Mary, and the Christ Child) (fig. 25), both of which are discussed further below. If the sisters did not produce the handwork for the Van den Putte/Svos hofje, then neither did they create it for the Crucifixion and Saint Anne hofjes.

Fig. 24 Unknown Mechelen (?), Crucifixion Hofje (central cabinet), ca. 1525–28, Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 24 Unknown Mechelen (?), Crucifixion Hofje (central cabinet), ca. 1525–28, Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 24 Mechelen, Crucifixion Hofje (central cabinet), ca. 1525–28, polychromed wood, silk, paper, bone, wire, paint, and other materials in a wood case, 109 x 89.7 x 19.5 cm. Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, inv. BH/3, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen, © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, www.kikirpa.be, cliché KN008410, photo: Jean-Luc Elias (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 25 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, a, 1529 (?), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 25 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, a, 1529 (?), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 25 Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the Christ Child (Sint-Anna-ten-drieën), Saint Augustine, and Saint Elisabeth (center cabinet), 1529 (?), polychromed wood, silk, paper, bone, wax, wire, and other materials in a wood case, 150 x 120 x 38 cm. Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, inv. BH/6, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen, © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, www.kikirpa.be, cliché KN008403, photo: Jean-Luc Elias (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

If these three hofjes were not products of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwegasthuis, it seems likely that they were manufactured in professional workshops, perhaps with nuns at one or more of the contemplative convents in the city contributing the topographical adornments of the gardens. This premise corresponds with Appuhn and Krohm’s proposal, discussed above, that the extraordinary technical skill demonstrated by these elements points to such circumstances. Yet this hypothesis may soon be revised. The Mechelen hofjes are undergoing restoration in preparation for an exhibition titled In Search of Utopia, organized by the Illuminaire Center for the Study of Medieval Art at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Museum-M Leuven.⁸⁸ It is possible that the restoration process will uncover new material evidence, and that additional archival work will reveal heretofore undiscovered written records, which will compel the revision of my argument. It seems safe to say, though, that at least two and probably three of the hofjes were made in Mechelen. My preliminary examination of the hofjes’ cabinets in 2013 revealed the stamps of professional carpenters from Mechelen on the lateral exterior sides of the reform-related Crucifixion and Sint-Anna-ten-drieën hofjes⁸⁹; the stamps take the form of the Mechelen drie palen (three poles), a motif drawn from the city’s heraldry (fig. 26 left, fig. 26 right),⁹⁰ which indicate that the cabinets were made in the city. Together with the works’ Mechelen provenance, the stamps strongly suggest that the two hofjes were locally made. If so, then the Van den Putte/Svos hofje was as well, for its botanical elements and trellislike forms echo those in these works.

Where To?: New Investigative Paths

The revised premise about the manufacture of the Mechelen hofjes offered here obliges a fresh conception of the hospital sisters’ activities in the visual arts. This new model emphasizes patronage and reception rather than production. In that regard, I will argue in a future article that the reform-related Crucifixion hofje from the hospital, which dates to c. 1525–28, was commissioned by Cornelia Andries, the community’s “moeder” (mother, a role akin to abbess) during the early years of the reforms.⁹¹ Four individuals with their patron saints are depicted in the hofje’s wings, two on the interior (fig. 27) and two on the exterior (fig. 28). They are identified by inscriptions that include their administrative roles in the reform that was initiated at the hospital with the statues of 1509.⁹² Cornelia appears on the interior right-hand wing, with Peeter Van Steenwinckel, the first “rentmeester” (financial steward) on the left; Sister Sozijne Van Coolene appears on the right wing of the exterior, with Marten Avonts, the second “rentmeester” after the reforms (that is, Peeter Van Steenwinckel’s successor), on the left.

Fig. 27 Unknown, Crucifixion Hofje, overview of center cabinet and ,

Fig. 27 Unknown, Crucifixion Hofje, overview of center cabinet and ,

Fig. 27 Crucifixion Hofje, overview of center cabinet and wings, oil on panel, 109 x 151.5 x 19.5 cm (see fig. 2423),. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, www.kikirpa.be, cliché KN008410, photo: Jean-Luc Elias [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 28 Unknown, Crucifixion Hofje, exterior wings, (see fig. 2423),

Fig. 28 Unknown, Crucifixion Hofje, exterior wings, (see fig. 2423),

Fig. 28 Crucifixion Hofje, exterior wings, oil on panel, 109 x 89.7 cm (see fig. 2423), © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, www.kikirpa.be, cliché KM009587, photo: Jean-Luc Elias [side-by-side viewer]

Fig. 29 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, a, 1529 (?), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 29 Unknown Mechelen, Besloten Hofje with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, a, 1529 (?), Musea & Erfgoed Mechelen, Collectie Gasthuiszusters, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Waver, on long-term loan from the Augustinian Sisters of Mechelen

Fig. 29 Besloten Hofje with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the Christ Child (Sint-Anna-ten-drieën), Saint Augustine, and Saint Elisabeth, overview of center cabinet and wings, 150 x 120 x 38 cm, © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, www.kikirpa.be, cliché KN008402, photo: Jean-Luc Elias (see fig. 25) [side-by-side viewer]

Among my conclusions in that article is that the hofje emphasized the durability of the reforms during a potentially disruptive transitional period in its leadership, after the death of Peeter and the appointment of Marten. The hofje mediated with its internal audiences to keep the reform’s leadership, values, and practices alive in the collective memory of the institution. This emphasis on internal conventual life is also apparent in the Saint Anne hofje, which includes portraits of two women who wear habits, both in the right-hand wing (fig. 29). I had surmised preliminarily, with considerable caution, that they are Catharien Van den Putte and Catelyn Van den Putte, both of whom professed in 1529. The choice of Saint Catherine to appear with them makes sense as a namesake saint for both women. Saint Catherine appears between and gesturing toward both sisters, albeit slightly favoring by her glance the sister depicted in the place of greater privilege, closest to the holy garden (the reason for Saint Jerome’s appearance on the left-hand panel, for which no viable explanations have been offered, may eventually be explained with more research into the sisters’ spirituality). It is possible that Catharien and Catelyn were related not only to each other but also to Jacob Van den Putte and Margaretha Svos.⁹³ However, when observing the panels afresh in January of 2017 after their cleaning, it is now clear that the two sisters are depicted in very dark gray or black habits, not the brown habits of the Mechelen hospital. Furthermore, technical studies have revealed that the two figures were later additions, which also may in part account for their diminutive scale.⁹⁴ Perhaps, then, this hofje was not destined for the hospital at its inception but came into the community later. Whatever the case, the internal nature of these other hofjes is markedly different from the external concerns represented by the Van den Putte/Svos hofje, presented by a lay couple on behalf of their daughter’s and their own salvation. Study of the latter reveals by point of contrast the profound socio-religious complexities that underlie such works, complexities that we have now begun to recognize and understand.

Several other investigative paths remain open for the future. The scholarly landscape could benefit from more interdisciplinary, collaborative work on hofjes and on Netherlandish conventual art in general, including projects that bring art historians and cultural historians together with conservators and materiality specialists, as with the conservation project for the hofjes and the exhibition at the M-Museum Leuven. Art-historical inquiry could also intersect more deeply with the social sciences and with other humanities disciplines. In terms of the hofjes, disability specialists have called for integrating metaphorical disability with the lived experiences of disabled persons, as we have seen. By linking these areas of inquiry with the Van den Putte/Svos hofje, I hope to have shown the value of such investigation.

Similarly, it is important to attend to the specific characters of women’s religious communities, to make clearer distinctions between the lived experiences of women in contemplative convents and those in working communities. Women in the former rather than the latter were simply more likely to have time to produce works of art. If we had understood earlier that the Mechelen sisters’ obligations toward the infirm left them little if any opportunity to make handwork of the type represented by the gardens, we may have realized sooner that not just the painted wings but also the gardens were likely produced in professional settings or in contemplative convents.

Furthermore, Margaret of Austria’s commissioning of a hofje from Galilea highlights the need to explore more fully the relationships between laywomen and professed women as they relate to visual culture and, as well, to identify and explore networks of religious women, both inside and outside specific religious orders. For example, Jan Pascha, the spiritual advisor for the Mechelen hospital sisters starting with the reforms, also advised contemplative Carmelite nuns at Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Troost (Our Lady of Consolation) at nearby Vilvoorde. Under Pascha’s guidance, the Mechelen sisters were granted permission to practice Carmelite spirituality in 1519.⁹⁵ The nuns at Vilvoorde were active producers of devotional woodcuts (for example, fig. 30), and perhaps some of the prints made their way to the Mechelen hospital and into the sisters’ devotional practices.

To better understand these and other issues pertaining to religious women and their lives, about whom sometimes comparatively little was written or has survived, we must consider all the evidence at hand: visual, material, and textual. Finally, more work needs to be done with issues of gender in the patronage, production, and reception of Besloten hofjes. The Van den Putte/Svos hofje and the reform-related Crucifixion hofje depict not only women but also men. While much is understood about the relationship between women and enclosed garden imagery, the hofjes ask us to consider the male perspective as well. Indeed, it was not only some women but also some men for whom the enclosed garden’s references to purity were meaningful: hagiographic sources identify sexual abstinence as a practice of some saintly men, after whom some early modern Netherlandish men modeled their own behavior.⁹⁶ Such questions suggest the distance to which modern scholars must reach to appreciate the complex social dimensions of the Besloten hofjes.