THE ERRANT IMAGE: ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN'S DEPOSITION FROM THE CROSS AND ITS COPIES

Abstract

This article is an account of the copies made during the fifteenth and sixteenth century of Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition from the Cross (c. 1430–35), as that altarpiece migrated from the chapel of Our Lady Outside the Walls in Louvain to the monastery of El Escorial in Spain. My primary concern in describing the journey of the Deposition from the Netherlands to Spain and the copies that it left in its wake is to show how these events and images bear on the concept of originality, and on the art‐historical practice of reconstructing what is commonly designated as original context – a practice that, I use this material to argue, is more problematic than it is sometimes taken to be. Amy Powell is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in art history at Columbia University. She is working on a book about northern European images of Christ's deposition from the cross, made on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, and the ways in which those images picture their own disappearance.