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

XVII Introduction Since 1961, when Jacqueline Marette published her Connaissance des Primitifs par l’étude du bois du XII e au XVI e siècle , the attention paid to the frames and supports of the paintings of the Flemish Primitives has steadily grown. Marette’s main concern was to identify the species of wood; for her the construction of the supports was of more limited interest. This vision has evolved. The importance of studying the technology of the supports of the paintings of a particular school today seems obvious for reasons of both authentication and conservation. To describe the frames and supports of the Flemish Primitives in order to ensure their better conservation, and contribute in so doing to the dialogue between art historians and restorers were the objectives of the first edition of this work, published in 1989 out of a doctoral thesis defended two years before. At the time, the technology of the supports was largely ignored and this ignorance was the cause of many degradations. Today, in contrast, the best museum and exhibition catalogues, often the acme of scholarship, also record information on supports and frames. The present, second edition is a corrected and augmented version of the 1989 work, with the addition of various articles published in the years that followed. Its ambition is wider: to describe also how the joinery was devised in symbiosis with the painter’s narrative. For example, some diptychs open from left to right, others from right to left. Why? Conventions existed, particularly in the colour or in the perspective adopted in the painting or in the mouldings of the frames. The support and the frame are there to serve the content. The dynamics of a work are at once material and spiritual. This requires us to perhaps re-think the frozen presentation of works in today’s museums. This could be improved, documented, brought closer to the original reality, at least for the most sophisticated works. The question arises specifically in respect of the Ghent Altarpiece, the presentation of which has over the centuries distanced itself from what it was originally. Many diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs unfold their story beginning with the wings closed and ending with them wide open. The frames, with their crescendos of colours, mouldings and other trompe-l’œil devices, play a role in this deployment. The polychromy of the frames participates in the narrative and, as such, falls within the scope of the iconography, and yet this aspect of the work remains largely unstudied! Where does polychromy begin and end? The artist’s brush has sometimes decorated the frame, sometimes the frame continues in trompe-l’œil onto the panel. Where the wings are closed, the viewer is sometimes explicitly invited to open the shutters (we will see what devices justify the word “explicit”), as if opening a cabinet or a book. The viewer is then guided in his path by other artifices.