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

MASTERS AND MASTERPIECES: the ghent altarpiece 211 23. Van Asperen de Boer 2004, 107-118. resulted in inexhaustible controversy. The relationship between the two altarpieces is deeply fraternal, and exhibits a common piety, but the iconographic link may be more limited than has been thought. The circumstances of the tribute to the deceased brother also invite us to assign to Jan the authorship of the scholarly quatrain painted on the closed side of the lower altarpiece frame. Only Jan could state that Hubertus was the greater painter, while he himself was second in art. In any other mouth, these words would beggar belief. Whether or not the quatrain was painted on the stone coloured background decorating the frames changes nothing. The hypothesis that the quatrain was written by Jan is the most natural one. Jan signed his works. The careful hand in which the script is written is comparable with other texts in Eyckian works like that in the Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife (London, The National Gallery, inv. no. NG186). b) The shadows of the frames (fig. 109) The shadow of the frames is painted in trompe-l’œil at two locations in the upper altarpiece: Adam/Eve and the Annunciation. This is an unusual approach, and undoubtedly intentional. On the Adam and the Eve panels, the shadow of the frame, painted against the right hand vertical of the frame, was projected in this way only when the panels were placed perpendicular to the window of the Vijd Chapel. The painted shadow is to be interpreted as an instruction for opening these wings at right angles to the wings of the angels, and perpendicular to the window. In the Annunciation, the shadow is cast obliquely on the floor of each of the four compartments, which indicates that the ensemble is intended to be closed flat. The positioning of this shadow corresponds to the shadow that would be thrown by the light coming from the right of the altarpiece. The angled articulation of the Adam and the Eve wings had already been suspected. 23 Without doubt this was a solution for exposing the wings to best advantage in the narrow confines of the chapel, but we should also expect there to be an iconographic interpretation. In terms of pictorial conventions, the artist used the frames as if representing a column, pillar, in order to structure or give hierarchy to the space. In this altarpiece there is a whole system of hierarchisation of the spaces (the frame and its shadow, the wall opening onto a vaulted or unvaulted niche) which is probably significant. There may also be a correspondence to be established between the lower and upper altarpieces via the system of vaults and of closed or open spaces. Adam and Eve are shown in vaulted niches, while the donors are in open niches and their patron saints to their sides are represented in niches with a strongly downward perspective. Nothing of this is painted by chance, but the task of interpretation remains largely still to be done.