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

MASTERS AND MASTERPIECES: Eyckian paintings 247 85. A similar composition with a donor and Virgin and Child on the wing of a diptych is conserved at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Massing 1993, 42. 86. “Il y a dans la sacristie des chanoines Notre-Dame un tableau digne de remarque. Il a environ quatre pieds de long sur deux pieds et demy de haut. C’est un ouvrage du fameux Jean de Bruges dont il a été parlé cy-dessus, qui représente dans un coin la sainte Vierge assise dans un thrône… Les peintres et les curieux disent que ce tableau, qui n’a qu’une bordure de bois sur laquelle il y a des lettres qui paroissent en bosse, mériteroit d’avoir une bordure d’or enrichie de pierreries.” Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, ms Montbret 216, Essay de l’histoire de la cité des Eduens appelée par les Latins Aedue et à présent Autun . I, 182 (f° 96 v °), published by de Charmasse 193, quoted from Comblen-Sonkes and Lorentz 1995, 74. 87. Reynaud 1990, 86-87; Comblen-Sonkes and Lorentz 1995, 1-10. We believe that, with its marbled reverse, the Rolin Madonna was not intended to hang against a wall as was the Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele , which was not painted on its reverse. The Rolin Madonna was probably a wing of an altarpiece. It may have been used, considering its reduced size, to close a central goldsmith’s work. 85 In a description of the Rolin painting dating from 1748, 86 based on notes taken in 1705, an anonymous spectator mentions that the painting has only a wooden frame with a text in relief, whereas it would deserve a more somptuous “golden frame studded with gems”. This remark might have been inspired by the aspect of the frame of a retable precisely adorned with gems. While the height given by the spectator for the Rolin painting is right (2 feet and a half, i.e. 70 cm for a foot of 28 cm), the width he mentions is twice that of the painting; it could match an open altarpiece (“environ quatre pieds” = approximately 112 cm, while the painting measures 65 cm in width); the time elapsed between the notes and their transcription possibly having blurred the memory of the dimensions of the painting. The Louvre Diptych with the Virgin and Child and St John the Baptist 87 (figs. 123-124): the diptych is carved in the form of a book. The originality of the form has been questioned and described as a late alteration, but without ever being properly argued. We believe that the book form is original. Fig. 123. Louvre Diptych with Virgin and Child and St John the Baptist .