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

MASTERS AND MASTERPIECES: the ghent altarpiece 201 When the altarpiece is open, the gilded curved edge above Adam and above Eve is irregularly and clumsily sawn, leaving with a sharp edge. There is no bevel here. Here there was something other than painting, and we suggest that it was carved tracery. Fig. 103. Detail of the frame of the Eve wing as dismantled in 2013. The pegs have been removed and the two tenons extracted from their mortises. The edge of the left stile has a cavetto moulding, widening towards the bottom. The outer edges of the stiles of the Adam frame and of the Eve frame next to the wings with the angels are gouged back, which is unusual for a 15th century frame (fig. 103). The resulting cavetto is matched by a similar hollow moulding in the frames of the angels, with the two hollows forming a groove. Jean-Albert Glatigny and his team have suggested that the groove would have served to cover a colonnette in the middle frame. This hypothesis is attractive. We should add that the groove widens at the bottom, forming the recess which would have housed the base of this colonnette. This also explains the holes in the cavettos of the frames of Adam and of Eve (fig. 110). These holes were part of a closing system. The holes would have corresponded with pegs embedded in the columns. In this way the altarpiece was closed in two stages: first the wide wings were fixed by pegging to the colonnettes of the central frame and then the narrow wings were closed with overlapping rebates. This double closing system helped both to avoid the sagging of the wings and keep the Adam and the Eve panels well shut. This system did not resist the passing of time. The sagging of the wings was a concern from the late 15th century onwards. The longer stiles of the frame of Adam and of that of Eve must have continued by more or less 22 cm, the equivalent of the part deemed to be missing above the central panel (see below, the historical presentation of the altarpieces: interventions in the 16th century and during the French Revolution). These long stiles were, as we said, rebated. Today, they are tapered in a spindle shape towards the top, and the rebate has been recut in spindle shape also. This spindle shape was aimed at preventing, on closing, the overlapping of the central stiles, which was a negative consequence of the sagging of the wings (fig. 112). We can also note that the rebate was cut so that the opening and closing of the wings complied with the correct order of precedence. First the wing at the right (Eve) was opened, followed by the left (Adam). And conversely, the first wing closed was