From
Gustav Seibt
The Dutch painter Hugo van der Goes is one of the most enigmatic figures in art history. Alongside Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weiden, he is the third major master of early Netherlandish painting in the “Autumn of the Middle Ages”. Johan Huizinga used this metaphor to characterize this epoch in his classic, in competition with Jacob Burckhardt’s “Renaissance Culture in Italy”. Van der Goes was probably born in Ghent, Flemish, in 1440 and died in a monastery near Brussels around 1482/83. In the last years of his life he was considered insane, there was a suicide attempt. His despair, which was also articulated in religious terms, was documented, making him an early example of the European theme of “genius and madness”, with repercussions mainly in the 19th century, up to Vincent van Gogh.