HORTUS CONCLUSUS

Nikola Benin

HORTUS CONCLUSUS
Chapter One

Lochner’s Madonna of the Rose Garden
A Masterpiece of International Gothic Style

The Madonna of the Rose Garden by Stefan Lochner !
Just thinking about this extraordinary painting, posted at least five times this calendar year, makes my blood boil. It is always a sublime joy to behold and contemplate.
To me, it is the archetypal Hortus Conclusus, the enclosed garden, in which we find the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus.

“Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus" ("A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up”) from the Canticum Canticorum (Song of Songs it Song of Solomon) in which King Solomon’s nuptial song to his bride was transmuted in the Christian metaphor to represent the enclosed and impenetrable womb of Mary and the parthenogenesis of Jesus.

Painted in that wondrously delicious, delicate and detailed International Gothic Style, which flowered in the Northern Renaissance as the Italian quattrocento was unfolding, it is always a joy to see it.
The intricacy within this work- the layers of meaning- theological and optical - are astonishing.

Stefan Lochner was one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the quattrocento, and like many artistic geniuses that didn’t make it into the arbitrarily decided upon canonical art textbooks over the years ,is not as nearly well known as the usual suspects.
A pity, because his works, virtually all of them, are absolutely spectacular.

We learn from the Wallraf-Richart museum website that:
“Within the painting are flowers at the Virgin’s feet, angels with musical instruments, the precious brooch and the heavenly crown, all the way to the decorations of the gold ground, and none of these things is an end in itself.
“Look at the ornamentation worked into the Virgin’s halo. It is a simplified representation of the lunar cycle, and relates to the medieval link between astronomy and theology.
“The tiny brooch symbolically takes up the main picture by showing a virgin with a unicorn. The two are linked in their gestures in much the same way as the Virgin and Child – an allusion to the mystical union between Christ and His church.
“In addition we have the ingenious geometry of the picture. It relates to the connection between mathematics, music and heavenly architecture, identifying the modest bower as paradise.

“Like a complex clock movement, all these elements intermesh to produce a theological statement of great density. Behind the ‘pretty’ whole, the artist has concealed a gigantic programme: the phases of the divine plan of salvation are wonderfully compressed. In this way the picture transcends human concepts of time – and human techniques of art reproduction.”

The Madonna of the Rose Bower
Stefan Lochner
c.1442
Wallraf-Richartz Museum
Cologne