Meditate with Nicolas de Hoey (v. 1540-1611)

An abyss. This is what the painting of the Dutch painter practicing in France, Nicolas de Hoey, realizes. Two parallel scenes are shown there. In the background, in a large room where the light enters three large windows, a painted artist, standing, an idealized landscape, while a few acolytes work on their drawing and engraving table. We will have understood: we are in an artist workshop, with its share of apprentices.

In the foreground, the owner shows himself. Sitting in a comfortable armchair, legs crossed, he realizes, sure of his art, a portrait on the heart of a woman and her naked child whom she holds in front of her. A servant, at the rear, keeps the delicate habit of the infant in her hands. Two winged children also serve him, presenting him with a green parakeet and a fruit, as if to make him wait.

It is the Virgin and her divine child who pose here. An ancient tradition says that Saint Luke, who was able to harvest the accounts of the childhood of Jesus, also hosted in him Mary at the end of his life, a direct source of these precious memories. Writing and painting are, in the evangelist, a same way of giving flesh to a memory.

This first pictorial work – at the origin of the tradition of icons – is a gesture of reverence and contemplation. Because re-emerging here, the “firstborn”, an embodied child and an adult resuscitated in the same momentum. In the same nudity. From Hoey, himself, stands up to give Saint Luke a face. Both look at us and challenge us. Missing moving pictorial abyme, distant echo of the extraordinary theological abyss of the humanity of Christ.