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

CHAPTER X 254 105. Escallier 1852, 488. 106. Ibid., 244. 107. Baligand 1977, 38-40. From the altarpiece’s history we narrate here a few elements linked to the disappearance of certain of its components which help reconstitute the overall appearance of the ensemble. All trace of the gold and silver reliquary, long coveted for its precious metals (gold and silver, 350 precious stones, including 3 unusually large sapphires) is lost after 1579. The carved surround was also lost at an unspecified point in time. Given that all the paintings were mobile to permit the exhibiting, from time to time, of the reliquary concealed behind it, the carved decoration could not have been attached to the frames of the paintings, but rather to the solid box in which the reliquary was kept. This suggests that the box and the carved surrounds went missing simultaneously. The paintings were relegated to the Abbey treasury in 1726 and dismembered in 1803. 105 The wings were exhibited in Paris in 1822. A wealthy Douai citizen acquired them in 1832. He then went on to purchase the central part and in 1852 published the ensemble he had reconstituted. His description is as follows: “it is a diptych or painting painted on two sides: it is around six and a half feet high, and occupies a total width of eleven and a half feet [….]. The mobile, rotating wings, painted on their front and their back, are not, as in ordinary diptychs, attached to the outside edges of the base painting, but are strap-hinged to the mouldings of the compartment frames; their proportions and positioning are such that, depending on whether they are closed or open, the painting presents a different face without changing dimension.” 106 In his description, our wealthy Douai citizen pertinently notes an important particularity of the altarpiece: the way the wings are attached, not to the outside of a central part, but to interior uprights, thereby permitting the altarpiece to retain the same dimensions. In 1857 the polyptych was bequeathed to the Church of Our Lady of Douai. In 1896 it was classified a historical monument, 107 entering the Musée de la Chartreuse after 1918. The altarpiece, with the wings pivoted to cover the Trinity, shows four paintings of equal size, each with an upper extension, deploying a full iconographic programme, all in colour (fig. 125a). We do not have here, as often elsewhere, modest wings opening onto a larger programme on the inside of the altarpiece. Here there is no outside face painted in dull colours and decorated with marbling, grisailles in niches or other architectural items, eventually presenting scenes with perspectives shifted to the left or the right, as if the wings were already part-opened, to invite us to open them, a situation which is occasionally found (see Chapter IX Articulated works with instructions for use ). The programme here is rich. For this reason we opt to speak of the first position of the altarpiece (wings closed over the Trinity) and the second position of the altarpiece (wings rotated outwards to reveal the Trinity) (fig. 125b) rather than of a closed and open altarpiece. The iconographic “step-up” from the first