|
Grisaille and the Thresholds of
Early Netherlandish
Triptychs
Lynn F. Jacobs, University of
Arkansas
The phenomenon of grisaille is one
of the most intriguing issues in
the nexus of ties between sculpture
and painting within early
Netherlandish art. Everyone who
studies Flemish painting is aware
that grey-monochrome, pictorial
imagery – which imitates sculpture
to varying degrees – is often found
on the exterior of triptychs. But,
as Shirley Blum noted in her 1969
Early Netherlandish
Triptychs, “the reasons for its
[grisaille’s] use are not yet fully
understood.” And they remain so
even today.
To be sure, a number of theories
regarding the use of grisaille on
triptych exteriors have been
advanced over the years. Hans
Belting’s view, proposed in his
1994 Die Erfindung des
Gemäldes, probably comes
closest to representing the current
scholarly consensus. Belting argues
that grisaille was used to
establish an antithesis between
triptych exteriors – which were
conceived as closed stone walls
that limited the view to empirical
perception, either of living people
(e.g., donor portraits) and/or of
stone figures (in grisaille) – and
triptych interiors, which display
the transcendent, visionary world
that starts where empirical
perception ends. I agree with
Belting that grisaille could and
often did serve to distinguish and
divide the exterior from the
interior of the triptych. But in
this paper, I will argue that
grisaille also could be used to
create links between these two
zones of the triptych. And these
links had significant implications
for the meaning of the work.
On my view, the terminology used in
the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries to refer to triptychs,
that is, the term “painting with
doors,” expresses the
then-contemporary sense that the
fundamental role of the format was
to create doors that delimit
thresholds between different zones.
Netherlandish artists negotiated
these thresholds carefully and
consciously, because the meaning of
the triptychs, at least in part,
was bound up in the ways in which
these built-in boundaries were
structured. Very often artists
tried to illustrate meaning-laden
connections between the different
zones of the triptych by creating
visual links across the thresholds
between them.
This paper will examine the
treatment of grisaille on the
exteriors of several fifteenth and
sixteenth century triptychs (from
Campin through Bosch) and assess
ways in which the treatment of
grisaille helps break down the
divisions between exterior and
interior to create connections that
are essential to the meaning of the
whole. A major focus of the
analysis will be on how the growing
pictorialism of the grisaille over
the course of the fifteenth century
(that is, the increasing sense of
animation and color) represents an
increased concern for unification
across the threshold between
exterior and interior. The paper
will also consider how grisaille
images sometimes break down another
threshold – that is, the one
between the art work and the viewer
– through projection forward in
space. The paper will also examine
how the relations of exterior and
interior within early Netherlandish
painted triptychs compare to those
in sculpted altarpieces of the
time.
<<BACK
|
