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

CHAPTER X 194 6. Doursther 1840. l’œil evocation of stones separated by a joint. Each stone measures roughly 13 cm in length (which is about half the Ghent foot of 29.77 cm), 6 adopts the width of the frame and continues over onto its inclined sill. Each stone has speckled effects, alternatively one stone with green speckling, a second stone with reddish speckling and a third with black speckling. The alternation of the speckling colours is repetitive but with irregularities. All the speckling runs from top left to bottom right. The size of the specks varies. The black effects are produced by lines of varied length and thickness, the reddish or greenish effects by strokes of variable thickness, each time edged with shadowing to the right, inversely to the shadowing of the figures, which is to the left: what we have is depressions in the stone, contrary to the figures, that are painted in relief. The light that illuminated the altarpieces in the Vijd Chapel came from the window on the right hand side. The joints between the stones consist each time of a fairly broad black line, with an intentionally irregular whitish line down its centre. In the vertical elements of the frame, the upper high edge of the stone is marked with a beige or pink line. This trait defining the edges of the stone is also present on the horizontal elements. The speckling is placed on top of a fine layer of brown paint, with the original paint layer showing through. The latter seems to us to be painted directly on the wood. The lower horizontal members carrying the quatrain do not have this stone imitation (no speckling, nor joints, and the background with the inscription resembles a whitish cartridge, a sort of banner). The execution of the text does not evoke any cutting into stone, nor any relief effect as in other frames of Van Eyck works. In some places, the paint layer appears to be applied directly onto the wood (joint painted between the stones in the upper right corner of the Vijd panel, or greenish flecking in a small gap in the upper left part of the frame of St John the Baptist). We have searched in vain for traces of the multiple layers described in L’Agneau Mystique au Laboratoire, pl. LVII , sample 1. Unfortunately the location where the sample was taken is not specified. In the places we examined, the microscope shows neither metal foil nor a red base. Nor have we been able to track down traces of the green colour described previously, nor of the brown colour that supposedly served to make the text stand out. We would remind readers that the original frames of the central parts are no longer extant. For the wings, only the frames surrounding Adam and Eve (in closed position: the narrow central wings of the Annunciation) remain in a state close to the original. The frames of the other wings were sawn along the grain, then glued onto a pinewood support in Berlin in 1894 to allow the simultaneous presentation of the inside and the outside of the wings. The panels of the wings too, were sawn along the grain for the same reason, and then cradled on the reverse. The history of the presentation of the altarpieces in the Vijd Chapel (part three of this chapter ) provides additional information and helps us understand certain peculiarities of the joinery.