Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret's Presentation in the Temple

before long after becoming abbot of the Benedictine abbey of St-Vaast in Arras in 1428 Jean du Clercq commissioned for the chapel dedicated to Mary, behind the main altar in the choir of his abbey house of god of Notre-Dame, what is today the best documented of Flemish altarpieces. In 1431 he hired a metalworker to show copper columns to support curtains; the following year he purchased alabaster statuettes and commissioned fifteen brass chandeliers for the chapel; in 1433 he hired a sculptor to carve the Schnitzaltar frame; and between 1433 and 1435 he paid the Tournai painter Jacques Daret to gild and polychrome the statuary and architectural framework and to paint the made of wood altar frontal, the custodia, and the interior and exterior wings. [1] Although the altarpiece was dismantled, probably during the eighteenth hundred seventeenth-century descriptions inform us that Daret's wings, decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis against a sapphirine ground on the interior, render free of accessed to either side of a single line of polychromed sculpt ures of the twelve Apostles below a two-figure Coronation of Mary. All this is missing The exterior displayed Daret's now-lost altar frontal, of which we know nothing, along with five painted narratives, of which four survive: a two-panel Annunciation (lost) located above four panels with the Visitation (Fig. 1) the Nativity (Fig. 2) the Adoration of the Mat (Fig. 3) and the Presentation in the fane (Fig. 4). Abbot du Clercq along with his coat of arms, appears as the kneeling donor in the Visitation. The altarpiece was already in place by the agency of mid-July 1435, when it was first viewed by dint of visiting dignitaries in Arras, and High Mass was celebrated in brow of it later that year upon September 8, the Feast of Mary's Nativity, before another concourse of notables and clerics. At the same time, beginning in 1432 du Clercq initiated work upon his tomb, also located within this chapel.

Scholarly treatments of the Arras Altarpiece have been generally limited in approach. Remarkable because of its exceptional documentation, the altarpiece has figured greatest in quantity significantly within the puzzle surrounding the oeuvre of Daret's master in Tournai, Robert Campin, and Daret's comrade apprentice, Rogelet de la Pasture, usually identified with Rogier van derWeyden. The stylistic affinities between Daret's Arras Altarpiece panels and the works attributed in the twentieth hundred to the so-called Master of Flemalle underlie the still controversial identification of Robert Campin with that anonymous master, while the conjuncture of Daret's and Rogelet's documented apprenticeships in Campin's store corroborates Rogelet's identification with Rogier and illuminates scholarly understanding of his disentanglement as a painter. [2] Overshadoi4ed by means of the Flemalle-Campin group and those paintings commonly assigned to his more famous associate apprentice, Daret's four extant panels have been judg inferior by dint of scholars. It wa s sole when Vera Vines reassessed the Arras Altarpiece, in 1978 and, greatest in quantity recently, in 1996, considering its iconographic, stylistic, and contextual aspects, that evidence of Daret's hold considerable artistic powers emerged. [3]

My approach to the Arras Altarpiece differs greatest in quantity obviously from Vines's in its focus upon the Presentation in the fane and its analysis of audience, a methodology whose relevance has been demonstrated lately by a number of scholars of northern Renaissance art. [4] I consider the reception of the Presentation, individual of the least examined of the extant parts of the altarpiece, specifically investigating its ability to speak simultaneously to audiences of differing analytic abilities and backgrounds. The close attention of early Netherlandish painting has struggl in novel years with problems regarding by what means meaning is generated visually and in what way an audience interprets and understands that meaning. a certain number of have argued that scholarly analyses--commonly those by the agency of or influenced by Erwin Panofsky--produce meanings far too erudite and theologically mixed for any but the greatest in quantity elite and educated of the original viewers. [5] I wish to revisit this issue, on the contrary from a slightly different perspective, focusing upon the altarpiece's capacit y to address exactly those well-educated small in number but without ignoring the necessitys and experiences of the literate and illiterate lay viewers.

A contemporary account that remarks upon Abbot du Clercq's chapel and altarpiece confirms the wide range of audience, in metes of class and education, that viewed the of recent origin commission in the 1430s. It notes that among those first invited to examine the altarpiece were participants in the Congres of Arras, including ecclesiastical delegates from the meeting-house Council of Basel, present in the city to negotiate an extremity to the Hundred Years' War. [6] concerns in the altarpiece to the debate above Mary's Immaculate Conception, current at that true council, and evidence such as the Latin inscription place on the hem of Mary's robes in three of the four extant panels demonstrate the altarpiece's relevance to that highly educated collection The inscription's inclusion is also congruous with the elevated position of the patron--a Benedictine abbot--and his resident monks