Frames and supports in 15th and 16th-century Southern Netherlandish painting

CHAPTER I 12 65. Gorissen 1954, 153-221; Châtelet 1979, 43-45; Châtelet 1980, 14-16. 66. Klein 1987, 31. 67. Van Molle 1958, 7-17. the joints, though the best quality undressed trunks (no knots or other defects) were reserved for panels. Oak from the Baltic basin had these qualifications: slow-growing, it was not too hard and shrank only little. Its linear growth produced long boards. Certain examples of poor quality joinery of regional character suggest, however, that cheaper, locally-sourced woods were occasionally also used. A parallelism must have existed between the quality of the paint and the amount paid for support, with the initiative probably coming sometimes from the sponsor and sometimes from the artist himself. A text dated 1398 specifies that painter Malouel, after acquiring “5 tables de boiz pour autel” (five wooden panels for altars) from joiner Daniel Hobel, also purchased “grattoirs pour racler plusieurs tables et tableaux” (scrapers to scrape several panels and paintings) that he was painting for the altars of the church of the Carthusians [of Champmol in Dijon]. The same artist was paid in 1401 for the “l’entaillure de un grant pannone” (the cutting of a large panel), in fact adapting a painting to a new site. 65 It is difficult to specify exactly what the painter’s intervention involved in these particular cases, but it seems to be related to a work on the support, a task normally reserved for the joiners, assuming this is, that the scraping in question related to the wood of the support and not the ground. The mouldings of the frames used by Jan van Eyck are varied and point to the work of a plurality of joiners. It is hard to imagine that the somewhat course moulding of the frame of the Portrait of Margaret van Eyck (Bruges, GM , no. 2 ) and the highly refined moulding of the one of the Virgin at the Fountain (Antwerp, RMFA , no. 3 ) are from the same source. In the case of the Van Eyck’s altarpieces in Ghent, it has been shown that – curiously – a panel of the upper altarpiece had been attacked by woodworm even before being painted. The panels of Baudouin de Lannoy (Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, cat. no. 525 G) and those of the Arnolfini Portrait (London, The National Gallery, inv. no. NG186) contain elements from the same tree 66 and were therefore probably supplied by the same joiner. The original frames of these works are not preserved. Hans Memling, who introduced framing innovations in Bruges in the late 15th century, painted on supports with constant features suggesting that they were produced in Brussels. The Brussels frame-making of the second half of the 15th century is carefully done and technically effective, and one can understand an artist brought up in the Brussels school remaining faithful to it. The archives of the City of Leuven 67 contain information relating to the respective operations of the sponsor and the artist in producing the Justice of Emperor Otto III (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. nos. 1447-1448) and a Last Judgement (no longer extant), which were commissioned from Dirk Bouts for the City Hall. In 1467 the sponsor – in this case the City of Leuven – sent joiner Renier Cox to Antwerp to purchase wood for the furnishings and interior decoration of the new City Hall. Cox acquired the wood there at St Bavo’s fair, also obtaining 45 large