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

ANTWERP, ROYAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS 329 3. Jan van Eyck, Virgin at the Fountain , 1439 (Motto, signature and date on the cavetto mouldings of the lower rail) Inv. no. 411 Provenance: Mechelen, Collection of Margaret of Austria (1526-1523) (?). Collection of Jean de Marnix, treasurer of Margaret of Austria (?). Purchased in 1830 from the priest of Dikkelvenne (West Flanders) by F. Van Ertborn. Part of the Van Ertborn legacy to Antwerp Museum in 1841. Restored in 1998 at KIK-IRPA (Livia Depuydt). Bibliography: Cammerer-George 1967, 70-73; Vandenbroeck 1985, 174-178; Bosshard 1992, 4-11; Depuydt-Elbaum 2002, 8-20. Exhibited in 2001 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp alongside a copy from the period from the Noortman Collection in Maastricht. Dendrochronological examination gives a terminus post quem of 1411 for the Van Eyck work and of 1419 for the Maastricht copy not dated by its author. Semi-integral frame (the stiles carved in the painted panel, rails glued and pegged to it). The system adopted here is the same as for the Portrait of a Man (London, The National Gallery, inv. no. NG222). This structure, which allows for mitred corners to accommodate the moulding, does not hide any joints. The trapezoidal shape of the upper and lower rails relates to the wood being quarter-split. The frame has its original polychromy: grey-pink marbling flecked in a dark colour and decorated with white veining. The black fillet moulding covering half of the outside flat side was deemed unoriginal (roughly executed, it was superposed on top of varnishes) and was removed in 1998. On the reverse, the support is in blank wood, with remains of a whitish wash encrusted in the veins of the wood, telling us that a polychromy layer has been removed. Livia Depuydt supposes that the reverse was marbled like the Maastricht copy (Private Collection). The copy was originally the same size and constructed the same way as the Antwerp original. Its dimensions have since been slightly altered and the original frame replaced by a recent one, but the reverse still has the original marbling. Of a reddish colour, with large flecks and little whitish spots in whitish and reddish colour, this marbling is similar to that observed on the reverse of other Van Eyck paintings. The sides of the frame are black on top of a whitish covering. The imitation marble found on various Van Eyck paintings, and which was adopted frequently for the polychromy of 15th and 16th century frames, is supposedly of Italian origin. We find it on a work of Pietro Lorenzetti around 1330 ( Christ of Sorrows , Altenburg, Lidenau Museum, inv. no. 48) and in Giotto’s frescos at San Francesco in Assisi. On the cavetto mouldings of the lower rail: ALS ICH XAN JOH[ANN]ES DE EYCK ME FECIT + [COM]PLEVIT AN[N]O 1439°.