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

MASTERS AND MASTERPIECES: the ghent altarpiece 227 49. Coremans 1953, 41, no. 29. This text was written when the central parts returned from Paris with a destroyed “crowning”. unhooking the wings. These had been stored somewhere away from the Commissioners’ greedy eyes. Removing the wings was an easy task: all that was needed was to withdraw the pin lodged in the hinge knuckles and pull the knuckles part. The disarticulated hinges freed the wings. This had already been done in the past to put the altarpieces out of harm’s way. The problem lay, rather, in the removal of the frames of the central panels. The Commissioners were trained to remove 17th century rebated frames and to remove canvases from their stretchers, but much less so 15th century grooved frames with pegged joints, especially when these were consolidated by strong hardware as in Ghent. After prising away the ironwork, the Commissioners sawed across the tenons of the joints. This made it possible to open the frame. But it meant cutting slightly into the unpainted edge of the original panel. To avoid cracking, the practice was to re-saw the corner of the panel perpendicular to the first saw-cut. This is why today a small angle is missing in the lower corners of the panels (at the top the original edge no longer exists, but the corners must have been missing there too). The same small corners are missing in other panels that were removed from their original grooved frames, such as that of the Last Judgement (Anonymous Master, first quarter of the 15th century, Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, inv. no. 4658). It was still very difficult to separate the frames from the carved tracery. The already cited document from 1816 says of the three upper panels: “The main items (panels)? were sealed with plaster and nails, so that to remove them [the panels] the French commissioners almost demolished the crowning.” 49 This crowning is the original tracery surmounting the three main panels attached with nails and embedded in plaster. The term crowning obviously does not refer to the canopy, which had been destroyed long before. The applied tracery was saved at this stage (although almost demolished), but would be destroyed in Paris as discussed below. Gilberte Émile-Mâle reports that there are frequent errors in the dimensions of paintings provided by the Commissioners. For the dimensions of the panel of the Lamb, we observe that there is an error, as can be verified by comparing the current measurements of the panel, that have remained unchanged, with the measurements of the Commissioners by a calculation of the proportions of height to width, which allows us to convert the old measurements into metres and centimetres. The dimensions given for the panels of the upper altarpiece are: for the Adoration of the Lamb: “7 feet wide and 3 feet 4 inches high.” The Divine Lord: “7 feet 9 inches high, 2 feet 9 inches wide.” The Virgin Mary and St John: “6 feet 2 inches high and 2 feet