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

catalogue 614 LEUVEN, CHURCH OF St PETER (SP) 1. Anonymous, Edelheere Triptych . Closed: The Holy Trinity ; Swooning Virgin. Open: centre: Descent from the Cross ; wings: Donors , 1443 (dated on the grisaille on the outside of the wings) Inv. no. S/85/W Provenance: the triptych was painted for the Church in which it is conserved, in honour of Willem Edelheere and his wife Alydis Cappuyns. The central panel is a copy of the Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, inv. no. P02825). Bibliography: Comblen-Sonkes 1996, 118-156; Verougstraete-Marcq et al. 1981, 119-129; Dubois et al. 2012, 194-205. Jozef Vynckier (1987) and Pascale Fraiture (2007), report on dendrochronology: Baltic oak. Vynckier arrives at a terminus post quem of 1420 for the painting and Pascale Fraiture, using a slightly different calculation method, arrives at an earliest date of 1414 for the felling of the tree (KIK-IRPA, file no. 2006.09075). Panels: the central panel has five vertically-placed boards, each wing has three. The boards are butt-joined with dowel reinforcements. These do not appear in the X-radiography; some appear on the reverse of the central panel that has been thinned for cradling. Today the central panel is 0.6 cm thick and the wings 1.6 to 1.8 cm. The centre panel has, right round the unpainted edge, holes for small pegs (0.4 cm) probably intended to hold the panel better in the frame (?). On the closed triptych, the support of the wings is flat and painted right up to the edges. Right round the wings are holes for large diameter (0.9 cm) pegs, used for applying the frames to the panel. Frames: this is how the frame of the central panel looked in 1985: in soft wood, consisting of two thicknesses of wood nailed together, plus a moulded batten nailed to the front. The choice of soft wood and the superimposition of several layers point to a frame of later date. It is possible however, that this frame evoked, at least partially, the original frame, for example the black polychromy with an inner edge in oil gilding. In 1985 the wings still had, on the open side, their original oak frames. These were applied frames, pegged to the support. As was customary with applied frames in the inside, the support on the outside of the wings was originally completely flat, unframed, and painted to the edges. At the time of our examination ( c. 1985), the support of the wings had already been sawn all around, and the outer sides hidden by a modern frame in naked wood without mouldings. At that time one could summarize the sequence of operations as follows: after an initial separation of the frame and the support (state 1), the support had been trimmed back on all four sides, a second frame had been nailed to the reverse of the applied frames, and the panel set in this frame with nails (state 2). This system, which did not particularly respect the grisailles, was modified during the restoration of 1961 by pegging, on the grisaille side, an additional frame on the existing frames (state 3). This last frame consisted of four pieces with mitred joints and pierced with large pegs. Since that intervention the frames appear