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

CHAPTER IX 162 The lines of perspective described by the tile floor fan out around a central vertical axis. The Divinity is enthroned on a dais covered with the same tiles as those painted below the enthroned Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist. These three figures therefore occupy a unified space, hierarchically arranged by virtue of the step. The floor tiles in the panels depicting angels, on either side of the Virgin and St John, are decorated with a different motif. Moreover, they are organized following oblique lines not at all continuous with those of the central panels. Achieving a harmonized spatial field would require the slight elevation of the three central panels (with the Divinity, Mary, and St John) so as to produce a continuity of perspective with the fanning lines of the angels’ floors. This mental exercise leads us to deduce that the three central figures should be placed higher, positioned at a level superior to the angels according to the celestial hierarchy. As one can readily see, Adam and Eve do not belong to these celestial realms; they occupy another space altogether, their feet firmly grounded on earth. Adam’s left foot even appears to vanish below the shadowy niche, and his right foot extends over the lower edge of the niche, perhaps signifying that he occupies the same earthly realm as the spectator. The artist has inverted the perspective with so much insistence that we cannot ignore its symbolic impact. Everyone is at their own level, on a step, on a first paved floor, on a second paved Fig. 78. The discontinuity of perspective from one panel to another is an invitation to read a hierarchised world (top). The unified beam created in the viewers’ mind’s eye by the extended perspective lines places the figures in the desired hierarchy (bottom). The Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, 1432.