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

CHAPTER X 218 33. Coremans 1953, 41, no. 29. This text was written when the central parts returned from Paris with a destroyed “crowning”. 34. Michael Lomax suggests that long poles might also have been used, as still today for high-up candles in churches in the absence of electricity, as on Mount Athos. These would have had the double advantage of supporting the frame right through the opening and closing process, and of being less unceremonious (oral communication). crowning . ” 33 This crowning is the tracery, and not the canopy which was long gone. At the time of the Revolution, the altarpiece was already in the baroque outer frame. A medallion with an angel like Gossart represents one in his copy of the busts of the Divine Lord, the Virgin Mary and St John (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado), may have been part of the tracery. Examples exist of painted medallions inserted into the tracery of altarpieces. On the sides of his reliquary shrine of St Ursula (Bruges, St John’s Hospital, inv. no. O.SJ0176.I), Hans Memling painted tondi surrounded by tracery, either carved or painted in trompe-l’œil. · The opening and closing of the wings The bottom wings were easily accessible and could be manipulated without difficulty. They were probably closed with a swivel hook, replaced in the 16th century by a lock. To reach the upper altarpiece for opening or closing the wings would have required the use of a stepladder or a pole. 34 The altarpiece was first opened on the right hand side (Eve) and then on the left (Adam). The shape of the rebates required this sequence which also complies with the rules of precedence, Adam being positioned to the heraldic right. The opening of each pair of wings of this upper altarpiece would have been done in two stages, holding them by the woodwork itself and not by the fittings. The narrow wings were first pulled apart, then the frames of the large inner wings were unhooked from the pegs in the central frame. When closing, on the other hand, the hinges held the wings in a straight plane. First the large wing was closed, being hooked onto pegs, then the small one, held in place by the rebate. The ensemble – the lower altarpiece placed on a predella and the upper altarpiece crowned when open with gilded tracery on a blue background and surmounted by a canopy – had a monumental, vertically soaring, Gothic aspect, that Coxcie appears to have modernized.