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

Ghent, Museum of Fine Arts 607 3. Master of the Lineage of St Anne, pair of wings with the Lineage of St Anne : The Virgin, St Anne and St Joachim ; St Stollanus and St Emerencia . Closed: Annunciation in semi-grisaille on green-marbled background, c. 1500 Inv. no. 1961-H Provenance: Convent of the Jesuit fathers at Drongen, near Ghent. Gift of the Friends of the Museum. Bibliography: De Bruyn 1975, 192, nos. 33-34. Integral frames. Each wing consists of two boards, butt-joined with dowels (?); one of these boards is particularly narrow. Today the wings open on either side of a modern, empty frame. On the outside, the wings are flat, with trompe-l’œil painted frames and spandrels matching the carved ones on the inside. A cavetto moulding edges the right stile only. Scratches in the paint layer of the left wing show an underlying black layer. Was the outside of the wings originally uniformly black? Is the Annunciation , which appears to be by another hand, a later addition? On the inside, original carved floral motif in the spandrels. The polychromy of the integral frames has been redone. It may originally have been red. Traces of this colour appear in the gaps, both under the gilding and under the black paint of the present polychromy. The text on the lower rail may also have been redone.