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Nowadays it may take some time and a little patience before we can cast ourselves back to the year 1377 and look at the picture with the eyes of the person who painted it. Let us begin with a search for his purpose and meaning at least. The picture is a diptych that is to say, it is a painting done upon two wings or shutters hinged, so as to allow of their being closed together.
"The verses amuse me, and I find them most edifying. That is all. Hand me the tablets." The command was so positive, that Alexander drew out the little diptych, with the remark that painters wrote badly, and that what he had noted down was only intended to aid his memory.
Later Quentin Metsys was to paint him and Erasmus, joined in a diptych; a present for Thomas More and for us a vivid memorial of one of the best things Erasmus ever knew: this triple friendship. In the summer of 1516 Erasmus made another short trip to England. He stayed with More, saw Colet again, also Warham, Fisher, and the other friends. But it was not to visit old friends that he went there.
I shall give the characteristic details, in particular instances, further on. They are sometimes in several pieces or compartments. A Diptych is an altar-piece composed of two divisions or leaves which are united by hinges, and close like a book.
Giorgione saw his picture in his mind's eye as a blaze of rich colour; he did not see the figures sharply outlined against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael's 'Knight's Dream. That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard II. diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione's eye outline was nothing without colour and light and shade.
A portrait of Martin van Nieuwenhoven, the donator of the diptych, La Vierge aux Pommes, is as superb a Memling as one could wish for. The little hairs are a sign of clever, minute brush. The ductile, glowing colours make this a portrait to be compared to any of the master's we have studied at London, Berlin, Dresden, Lübeck, Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels.
This, or the original painting, formed a wing of the so-called diptych painted to adorn the tomb of Etienne Chevalier and his wife in the Cathedral of Melun, the other wing now in the Royal Museum, Berlin representing Etienne Chevalier himself, in the attitude of prayer, his patron saint, St. Stephen, beside him.
In the Epistles of Symmachus, the writer says: "To my Lord and Prince I sent a diptych edged with gold. I presented other friends also with these ivory note books." While elephant's tusks provided ivory for the southern races, the more northern peoples used the walrus and narwhale tusks. In Germany this was often the case.
This is decorated with three figures, and is a most interesting diptych. The earliest diptych, however, is of the year 406, known as the Diptych of Probus, on which may be seen a bas-relief portrait of Emperor Honorius. On the Diptych of Philoxenus is a Greek verse signifying, "I, Philoxenus, being Consul, offer this present to the wise Senate."
In the Richard II. diptych there is just a suggestion of brown earth for the saints to stand upon, but the rest of the background is of gold, as was the common practice at the time. The great innovator, Giotto, in some of his pictures had attempted to paint landscape backgrounds. In his fresco of St.
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