Master of Saint Giles
NG 1419 
Saint Giles and the Deer 
NG 4681 
The Mass of Saint Giles

Lorne Campbell, 2014

Extracted from:
Lorne Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2014).

NG 1419 
Saint Giles and the Deer

Oil on oak panel, 63.4 × 48.4 cm,
painted surface 61.6 x approximately 47 cm

On the reverse, A Bishop Saint (in grisaille),
painted surface 61.5 × 46.8 cm

Inscription

The word cruce, visible only in infrared reflectograms, is written near the top of the right edge of the reverse (fig. 2).

NG 4681  
The Mass of Saint Giles

Oil on oak panel, 62.3 × 46.0 cm,
painted surface 61.6 × 45.5 cm

On the reverse, Saint Peter (in grisaille),
painted surface 61.6 × 45.5 cm

Inscriptions

On the paper held by the angel in NG 4681 is written: Egidi me/rito re/missa sunt/ peccata/ karolo (By the merit of Giles remission of sins is granted to Charles) (fig. 5).

On the monument behind the angel is lettered: IVS (apparently meant for [SANC]TVS) LVDOVICVS. REX (Saint and King Louis).

On the reliquary at the base of the cross: de crv/ce d[omi]ni (from the cross of the Lord).

On the retable, around the blue jewel above and to our left of God: (P?)I∫SVI[…] (^?)II and then, descending vertically, CELI G∫ASV(N?). The meaning of this is not clear.

On the retable: SANCTV/S/ DEVS/ DOMINV[S]/ SABAOTH (Holy Lord God of Hosts – the literal meaning of Sabaoth being armies).

[page 778] [page 779] [page 780]

[page 781]

[page 782]

[page 783]

On the reverse, the mark lower right, which is like a merchant’s mark or a notary’s paraph, may be that of the painter or the donor (fig. 6); it is discussed on p. 802 below.

Provenance

NG 1419 was lot 51 of the sale in Paris on 17 December 1821 and the following days of the collection formed by Paignon‐Dijonval (1708–1792) and his grandson, the agronomist and man of letters Charles‐Gilbert, Vicomte Morel de Vindé (1759–1842).¹ It was sold for 200 francs to an unnamed buyer.² Paignon‐Dijonval, who amassed a vast collection of prints and drawings, was said to have acquired most of his finest pictures between about 1731 and about 1750.³ Since his grandson had added only a few pieces, it seems likely that the Saint Giles and the Deer belonged to Paignon‐Dijonval and that he acquired it during much the same period, around 1750, as the Duc de Tallard acquired the pendant Mass of Saint Giles, NG 4681. The dealer and collector Thomas Emmerson (c.1774–1854) was thought to have bought all Paignon‐Dijonval’s pictures and he definitely purchased at the 1821 sale.⁴ At the end of his life, Emmerson, then residing at 20 Stratford Place, Marylebone, certainly owned NG 1419, which he may have retained since 1821. It was among the ‘Select and Choice Portion’ of Emmerson’s collection which he sold at Christie’s on 27 May 1854 (lot 63).⁵ Bought by the dealer Webb for £51 9s., it was sold in the same year to Thomas Baring (1799–1873), MP. He bequeathed his collection to his nephew Thomas Baring (1826–1904), 2nd Baron Northbrook, created in 1876 Viscount Baring and Earl of Northbrook.⁶ NG 1419 was bought with several other pictures from the Northbrook collection in 1894.

NG 4681 was by 1752 in the collection of Marie‐Joseph d’Hostun (1683–1755), duc d’Hostun and comte de Tallart, known as the duc de Tallard.⁷ At the sale of his pictures in Paris (Rémy and Glomy), 22 March–13 May 1756, it was lot 132 and sold for 184 livres.⁸ It was afterwards in the collection of Sir Robert Bernard (1740–1789), Bart, MP, of Brampton near Huntingdon, whose pictures were sold soon after his death by Mr Christie in London on 9 May 1789. NG 4681 was lot *68 (‘Alberdurer … A priest saying mass, with the attendant person of one of the emperors of Germany, a most curious high‐finished piece of antiquity’) and was bought for 12 guineas (£12 12s.) by ‘Simpson’, evidently a dealer acting for the painter and collector Richard Cosway (1742–1821).⁹ In 1791, it was in the Breakfast Room of Cosway’s residence in the central section of Schomberg House in Pall Mall; in that year, Cosway’s entire collection was offered for sale by private contract.¹⁰ Though rumoured to have been acquired by the Prince Regent, NG 4681 passed, ‘a long time’ before 1817, to William Ward (1750–1823), Viscount Dudley and Ward of Dudley.¹¹ It was inherited by his only child John William Ward (1781–1833), created in 1827 Earl Dudley of Dudley Castle,¹² and went from him to his second cousin and heir male William Humble Ward (1781–1835), Baron Ward of Birmingham, and then to his son William Ward (1817–1885), created in 1860 Earl of Dudley. From 1850 he exhibited his paintings at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly,¹³ but in about 1857 he moved them to the picture gallery that he had built at the family’s London residence, Dudley House in Park Lane.¹⁴ His son William Humble Ward (1867–1932), 2nd Earl of Dudley, sold part of the collection at Christie’s on 25 June 1892, when the Mass, lot 29, was bought for 3,400 guineas (£3,570) by the dealer Vokins.¹⁵ It was almost immediately purchased by Edward Steinkopff (1837–1906), a millionaire businessman who was born in Frankfurt, settled in London and had a country house at Lydhurst near Hayward’s Heath in Sussex.¹⁶ It was Steinkopff who lent the painting to the BFAC exhibition in 1892. NG 4681 was inherited by his only child Mary Margaret (1862–1933), who married in 1899 James Alex Francis Humberston Stewart‐Mackenzie (1847–1923), created in 1921 Baron Seaforth of Brahan. On the death of Lady Seaforth on 17 February 1933, the painting was acquired from her trustees by the National Art‐Collections Fund and presented to the National Gallery.

Exhibitions

NG 1419: RA 1872 (224); BFAC 1892 (35); RA 1894 (181); Paris 2010–11 (178.1).

NG 4681: Manchester 1857 (provisional catalogue 473, definitive catalogue 381); RA 1871 (326); RA 1892 (173); BFAC 1892 (24); RA 1902 (9); Society of Antiquaries, London, 4 February 1915 ; RA 1927 (70); NG 1945–6 (26); Paris 2010–11 (178.2); ‘Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500’, NG , London 2011 (not numbered).

Copies and Versions (NG 4681)

• John Carter (1748–1817) made a coloured copy when the picture was sold in 1789 and retained his copy until the year of his death.¹⁷
• William Raphael Eginton (1778–1834), a glass painter of Birmingham, made, well before 1817, a copy in stained glass for a window in Dudley House, Park Lane.¹⁸
• Viollet‐le‐Duc included in the second volume, published in 1859, of his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française an illustration showing the altar without the figures (fig. 7).¹⁹
• The altar, retable and cross erected in or after 1896 in All Saints’ Church at Brixworth in Northamptonshire were probably based on Viollet‐le‐Duc’s plate rather than directly on the painting.²⁰

Technical Notes

When NG 1419 was acquired in 1894, it was described as being in ‘fine condition’, without ‘repairs’.²¹ The reverse was cleaned and restored in 1934, when various old labels were removed.²² Both faces of the panel were cleaned in 1974–5. The obverse is in excellent condition, losses being restricted to the left join in the panel and the lower right corner.²³ The painting on the reverse, in contrast, is much less well preserved; pitted areas may be the result of burn damage, probably from altar candles.²⁴

NG 4681 was treated by William Addison Holder (1883–1947) in 1933, before it came to the Gallery; ‘the surface dirt, which was considerable, was removed. A few blisters confined to the green curtain … were laid by Morrill … a few varnish stains were removed & the whole, back and front, given a new coat of varnish by Holder.’ An accident at the Gallery on 16 August 1933 caused four very small damages, which were retouched by Holder.²⁵ The obverse and reverse were cleaned in 1974–5. The painting on the obverse is in excellent condition, the one seriously damaged area being the green curtain between the king and the altar.²⁶ The reverse, in contrast, is very much less well preserved.

The panel of NG 1419 is formed of three boards of oak. It has been established that the oak was grown in western Europe; that the first board has 75 growth rings formed between 1377 and 1451; that the second board has 50 rings which have not been dated; that the third board has 136 rings formed between 1328 and 1463; and that the first board is from the same tree as the first board of NG 4681.²⁷ Unpainted edges and barbes survive on all four sides of the obverse and the reverse. As the edges of the painted surfaces of both the obverse and the reverse are not parallel to the edges of the panel, the unpainted edges would appear to have been irregularly trimmed. Nothing of the painted surfaces has been lost. The panel is about 0.6 cm thick at the centre of the bottom edge, thinned to about 0.3 cm at all four corners.

The panel of NG 4681 is formed of three boards of oak. It has been established that the oak was grown in western Europe; that the first board has 60 growth rings formed between 1404 and 1463; that the second board has 160 rings formed between 1279 and 1438; that the third board has 100 rings which cannot be dated; and that the first board is from the same tree as the first board of Saint Giles and the Deer, NG 1419.²⁸ Unpainted edges and barbes survive on all four sides of the obverse and the reverse. The unpainted edges are very much narrower than those of Saint Giles and the Deer. As its edges seem to have been irregularly trimmed, it would follow that even larger areas have been trimmed from the edges of NG 4681. Neither of the painted surfaces has been cut. The panel is about 0.7 cm thick.

The grounds of both panels are chalk in animal glue. No primings have been detected. The craftsmen who applied and smoothed the grounds have left in some areas ridges and grooves that make the paint on top look as though it has been combed (fig. 8).

On both faces of both panels, a great deal of underdrawing is visible to the naked eye, under the microscope and in infrared [page 785]reflectograms (figs 12–15). Not all of the visible underdrawing registers in the reflectograms, for example the hatching in the forehead of the bishop in NG 1419 (fig. 9), nor does the drawing which would have served to demarcate reserves left during the initial stages of painting. This confirms the impression that more than one material was employed in the execution of the underdrawing. This never seems very finished: fingers, for instance, are often suggested by scribbles rather than careful outlines. Though sketches may have been made and shown to the patron for his approval, most of the details of the compositions appear to have been worked out on the panels. There are limited areas of hatching in the folds of some of the draperies. None of the plants in NG 1419, including the large iris and mullein, has any visible underdrawing or a reserve; all are painted over whatever lies beneath. On the reverses, the straight lines of the architecture are ruled.

The greens in both the landscape and the draperies in Saint Giles and the Deer, as well as in the draperies and carpet in the Mass of Saint Giles, are based on verdigris, mixed with lead‐tin yellow and lead white in the more opaque lighter tones. The only blue pigment used is azurite, with evidence in the samples of two different grades: one of large particle size and intense colour in the brightest blues of the sky and highlights on the draperies, another of smaller particle size giving a more dull blue in the distant landscape of Saint Giles and the Deer and the darker tones of draperies. Cross‐sections of samples from Charlemagne’s deep blue mantle on the Mass of Saint Giles, and the deep blue cloak of the king in Saint Giles and the Deer, show a dark to mid‐purple‐red modelled underpaint, based on red lake mixed with varying quantities of vermilion, azurite, white and black. This lies beneath the upper blue paint, which consists of only azurite, in the darker areas, and azurite mixed with lead white, in the very lightest highlights. The darkest folds have been deepened with a further layer of red lake. A deep blue with a slightly purple hue seems to have been intended, given the strong colour of the pigment observed in the samples; the paint has probably darkened due to discoloration of the medium – as often occurs with azurite. The aubergine paint of the garment of the man with a candle, containing azurite and red lake, may also have become darker.

The wide variety of red hues, based on red lake, range from the deep saturated tone of the cloak of the attendant in the foreground to the purplish pink and duller red hues of the garments of the figures in the background in Saint Giles and the Deer, while in the Mass of Saint Giles the orange‐red in the carpet is juxtaposed with the more pinkish red of the altarcloth. The rich red of the attendant’s cloak has an opaque underpaint of vermilion mixed with an orange‐red pigment which may be red lead, on which is further modelling in more translucent paint containing mainly red lake, mixed with some lead white in the lightest areas. Both layers also contain some colourless powdered glass as an additive, confirmed also in several other red areas.²⁹ The altarcloth is painted in a similar way but using more red lake and lead white, while the more orange‐red of the carpet contains more vermilion. Analysis of the dyestuffs in the red lake in the altarcloth and in the attendant’s cloak identified both madder and kermes. Analysis of a cross‐section from the altarcloth indicated that there are two different lake pigments with different substrates, and the appearance in UV light suggested that the one used in the final glazes was that containing kermes, while that in the lower layers was based on madder.³⁰

In the grisailles on the reverses, red lakes have been mixed with the blacks and whites so that the stone depicted has a warm, slightly brown hue.

The binding medium is walnut oil in both light and darker areas of paint. On NG 1419, samples were examined from the pale blue sky, the translucent green foreground foliage and the red of the cloak of the man at the left on the obverse, as well as the greyish white of Saint Peter’s head in the grisaille on the reverse.³¹ Since analysis was carried out with GC only (in 1974), it was not possible to determine whether the oil had been heat‐bodied. On NG 4681, samples were examined from the green paint of the carpet, the dark blue of the king’s cloak, the off‐white of the architecture, the translucent red of a shadow of the cloak of the figure behind the king at the left and the deep brown or aubergine robe of the figure at the right, as well as the grey border of the grisaille on the reverse. GC–MS was used for these analyses, which in each sample showed evidence of heat‐bodying of the oil.³²

A great many alterations are clearly visible to the naked eye and more are made visible under the microscope, in the infrared reflectograms (see figs 10 and 11, where some of the underdrawn lines have been reinforced to make the changes more obvious) and in the X‐radiographs (though the last are difficult to decipher, as the images of the double‐sided panels can be confusing). The reflectograms, the X‐radiographs, the paint samples taken during cleaning and examination under the microscope show that these changes were made at all stages of the underdrawing and painting processes. Only the most obvious and significant alterations are mentioned here.³³

In the grisailles on the reverses (figs 12, 13), various alternative shapes have been tried for the architectural elements. The bishop saint once stood under an arch. Much of the drawing beneath Saint Peter bears no relation whatsoever to the painted image (fig. 4).

In Saint Giles and the Deer (figs 10, 15), the saint was drawn lower and slightly further to our right and the deer, too, was [page 788]different in the underdrawing. A red circle near the nose of the deer is now partly concealed under the grey of Giles’s habit and may have been the first idea for the serious wound that he suffered in his efforts to protect the deer. The artist has attempted to hide it, but the grey paint has become more transparent with age. A hunting dog that occupies the centre of the foreground in the underdrawing was never painted. The painted archer, who seems just to have shot the arrow that has wounded the saint, is not underdrawn and covers parts of a horse’s head that were at least underpainted (figs 10, 18). Underdrawn lines beneath and to our right of the archer can be resolved into a man wearing a large hat and raising his right hand to the level of his face. He was on a bigger scale than the painted archer and seems to have been touching his hat rather than shooting an arrow or even bending his bow. There is no trace of an underdrawn bow or arrow.

The king’s head was drawn to our right of his painted head; the thumbs of his praying hands were crossed; his drapery fell to reach the lower edge of the panel, and his right leg was drawn on a diagonal – presumably so that it would not be concealed behind the dog. The underdrawing beneath the young man behind the bishop has yet to be interpreted. The central tree seems also to have been an afterthought, painted on top of the blue sky and apparently also on top of the landscape. It is difficult or impossible to reconstruct the exact sequence of these additions and changes. Reserves were left for three of the buildings in the town.

In the Mass of Saint Giles (figs 11, 14), the alterations are perhaps still more dramatic. The cross of Saint Eligius was drawn and partially painted at a slightly different angle. The platform supporting Saint Louis’s shrine and the altar of Charles the Bald are not underdrawn but are painted over a drawing of an altarpiece with a raised semicircular top. It represented the crucified Christ between the Virgin and, presumably, Saint John the Evangelist. Saint Giles’s head was drawn to our right of the painted contour. In the underdrawing, the flying angel in the top left corner was contained within the frame; his right wing was lower and his draperies floated further to our left. The arches behind the angel were drawn and perhaps painted before the coloured hangings that cover them were included. Charlemagne’s head was drawn at less of an angle and his hands were joined in prayer. The subsidiary figures have been much altered. The head of the man on the left of the altar is drawn and reserved on a different scale and at a different angle. Between him and the left edge, two underdrawn heads have been suppressed, while the fair‐haired youth is not underdrawn or reserved. The man on the extreme right has also been added at a late stage, on top of the paint of the tomb.

Some of the contours of the altarpiece are incised into the ground; in the thirteenth‐century tomb of Dagobert, sometimes regarded as the founder of St‐Denis, the contour lines are indented into the wet paint. Grids of lines indented into the wet paint are used to suggest texture in some areas of the altar hangings and the carpet.

The tomb of Dagobert was there in the underdrawing, though it was smaller and was seen from a different angle. Dagobert’s tomb was, and remains, near the high altar of St‐Denis, but the most obvious references to the basilica – the cross of Saint Eligius and the altar of Charles the Bald – were added after the underdrawing had been completed. Such changes may be interpreted in many different ways. It does not appear, however, to have been the patron who changed his mind about the ways and the settings in which the narratives were to be presented. The Master, it seems, was accustomed to working out his ideas on his panels and to making radical alterations as he changed his mind at every stage of his work.

Description

Saint Giles and the Deer

The elderly man wearing a blackish cowl and a grey monk’s habit is Saint Giles; he is seated on a shelf of rock and embraces the roe deer which nourished him with her milk and which God, at his intercession, has saved from pursuit by the hounds of the royal hunt. The two kneeling men are a king (fig. 16) and a bishop (fig. 9), who has grey hair and brown(?) eyes and wears around his neck a blue, almuce‐like garment. His cassock is light red, trimmed(?) with brown fur; his surplice seems rather short. The king’s fair hair is pinkish brown and his eyes are probably brown; his hat is dark grey (painted over orange‐red). His robe is of blue velvet lined with red velvet cloth of gold and the lining is revealed at the lapels. The sleeve and armhole seams have not been completed; the hanging sleeves open to show more of the lining and are looped over the king’s forearms (fig. 17). Turned‐back cuffs expose further areas of cloth of gold.³⁴ The king’s hose are blackish. His boots are of soft leather; his left boot appears between him and the fashionably dressed youth who stands on the left but who has [page 792]not been identified. Smaller in scale than his companions, he is evidently a boy, not yet fully grown. He has fair, pinkish‐brown hair; his eye is brown(?); his dark grey hat is painted over pink, possibly the colour of the hair. His bodice is green velvet; his belt is pink; his rather large mantle is red; and his leggings and shoes are dark grey. The men behind are the royal huntsmen who have been pursuing the deer. The man in the centre, wearing a striped tabard and apparently the only figure with spurs (fig. 18), has just shot an arrow from his longbow and wounded Saint Giles’s right hand. In the distance, behind Saint Giles and on the extreme right, are two fashionably dressed young men with two dogs on a double leash (fig. 19): perhaps two of the hounds which the huntsmen had set on the deer but which had retreated howling. Some of the plants in the foreground may be understood as parts of the impenetrable thorn bushes that surrounded Saint Giles’s hermitage. Between the bishop and the saint, the spiny, climbing plant is a white rose. In the foreground are: on the left, blue pimpernels and mallows; in the centre, a purple iris, bellflowers or campanulas and a cinquefoil; and, on the right, a great mullein (verbascum thapsus).³⁵ The central tree has been identified as the holm oak that grew near the saint’s cave³⁶ but looks more like an elm.³⁷ The entrance of the cave, represented behind him, is protected by a crudely constructed thatched shelter where there hangs a white crucifix, schematically rendered. Behind Saint Giles, a jet of water spouts and splashes into the pool (fig. 20).

The town in the background has been identified by Montesquiou and Hinkle as Pontoise, 32 kilometres north west of Paris and nowhere near Saint Giles’s retreat.³⁸ Other authorities have accepted their conclusions, although Davies made the reservation that the town was ‘most probably Pontoise, only fairly accurately recorded’³⁹ and Sterling stated that it was ‘perhaps’ Pontoise.⁴⁰ Reference may be made to various descriptions of Pontoise, especially that published by Taillepied in 1587,⁴¹ and to various drawings and prints: a drawn plan of the town, apparently made by an Italian in 1589;⁴² a second plan apparently copied in the seventeenth century by F. de la Pointe after a lost sixteenth‐century original;⁴³ a seventeenth‐century watercolour;⁴⁴ a seventeenth‐century drawing;⁴⁵ and prints by Claude Chastillon (died 1616: fig. 22)⁴⁶ and Israël Silvestre (1621–1691: fig. 23).⁴⁷

Hinkle identified five buildings, none of which is still in existence. According to him, the church on the left is St‐André – though it bears not the slightest resemblance to Israël Silvestre’s print of St‐André;⁴⁸ the building above and on our right is the royal castle – and it does indeed look fairly like various representations of the castle; the church on our left of the central tree is the collegiate church of St‐Mellon – but it is not at all like a reconstructed view of St‐Mellon;⁴⁹ the building between and below the last two is the Hôtel‐Dieu – and it does indeed resemble various views of the hospital; and the gate on our right of the tree is the Porte de Paris – which was relatively similar to the painted gate. Whereas the Porte de Paris guarded the strategically important bridge over the Oise, the painted gate and the adjacent towers are reflected in the river but there is no indication of a bridge (fig. 21). While the site of the town, built on slopes above a river, is reminiscent of the site of Pontoise, the buildings identified by Hinkle stood in different relationships to one another. The church of St‐André, for example, was very close to the castle and the Hôtel‐Dieu was close to the Porte de Paris. According to Hinkle, Pontoise is seen from St‐Ouen‐l’Aumône, on the opposite bank of the Oise, which is certainly the point from which Claude Chastillon, looking down on the tower of the [page 793]church of St‐Ouen, took his view of Pontoise. Chastillon, however, included, on our left of the tower of St‐Mellon, the cathedral of St‐Maclou, which still exists. Hinkle claimed that only the upper part of its tower is visible from the opposite bank of the river; and that this tower fell in 1309 and was not completely rebuilt until 1525–40, long after NG 1419 was painted.⁵⁰ The building on the near bank of the river, behind the huntsmen, has been identified as the leper hospital founded by Saint Louis at St‐Ouen‐l’Aumône⁵¹ or as a ruined manor near Saint Giles’s retreat.⁵²

While the background of NG 1419 may indeed have been based on views of Pontoise, it is not an accurate representation of that town. Since the chief characteristic of Pontoise, the bridge that gave the town its name, is omitted, and since most of the course of the river is hidden, contemporary observers cannot have recognised it very readily as a ‘portrait’ of Pontoise.

The Mass of Saint Giles

Charlemagne⁵³ has committed a great crime that he dares not confess. Invited to visit Charlemagne, Saint Giles celebrates mass and prays for the king. An angel appears bearing a document with an inscription explaining that, because of Giles’s prayer, the king’s sin is forgiven (fig. 5).⁵⁴

Saint Giles, recognisably the same man who protects the deer in NG 1419, has grey hair and a wispy white beard. Here he wears a dark blue chasuble, its orphrey formed of a series of red and gold squares. Each shows a gold angel holding a cross from which hangs a crown of thorns (fig. 26). The boy standing behind the emperor is wearing a dull purple jacket with a blue sleeve, opening to reveal some of his white shirt. He seems to have pale brown leggings and dark grey shoes. He has intensely blue eyes and resembles, but is not identical to, the fair‐haired youth whose eye appears to be brown and who stands on the left in the Saint Giles and the Deer. No other figure from that painting seems to recur here. Charlemagne, who has brown hair, wears an imperial closed crown (fig. 25) and, over a garment with red velvet cloth‐of‐gold sleeves, a deep blue mantle lined with ermine. His prie‐dieu is draped with purple velvet cloth of gold (fig. 27). The angel’s paper or parchment is inscribed, in Latin: ‘By the merit of Giles, [page 794][page 795]remission of sins is granted to Charles.’ The bystanders seem highly individualised but their heads, though probably based on studies from life, do not seem intended to be recognised as portraits. Possible exceptions are the praying man behind Charlemagne, who has blue eyes and dark brown hair and wears a jacket with green lapels (fig. 28), and the praying man on the extreme right, who has dark brown hair and brown eyes with bluish whites and wears a red jacket lined with green under a robe with a brown fur lapel, both of whom may conceivably have been donors. The man holding the candle (fig. 29), who has blue eyes, wears a purplish‐brown or aubergine garment trimmed with brownish fur. The old man holding back the curtain is wearing a robe of a dull, dark purple. The laces from which the curtains hang are pink near the rails and blue near the curtains.

The scene is set in the basilica of St‐Denis as it was in about 1500; the painter has suppressed or simplified some of the detail. On our right is the tomb of Dagobert I (died 639), made in the mid‐thirteenth century, restored in the nineteenth century and still in the basilica, where it stands in its original position, next to the high altar (fig. 31). Dagobert was sometimes regarded as the founder of the abbey, to which he had made generous gifts. His tomb is a large freestanding gabled niche; only the feet of the effigy representing Dagobert are visible in the painting (he lies on his left side and faces east); [page 796]the standing woman wearing a crown and holding a book is believed to be Dagobert’s wife Nanthilde; above her are three of the six censing angels who stand in the archivolt. In the reliefs in the tympanum are scenes from the vision of a hermit named John as they are reported in the ninth‐century Gesta Dagoberti. In the lowest register, Saint Denis tells John to pray for Dagobert, who has just died; above, an angel with holy water (on the tomb there are two angels) accompanies two saintly bishops, apparently Martin and Maurice, who rescue Dagobert’s soul from a boat where it is being tormented by devils; above is the triumph of Dagobert’s soul, where only an angel and a saint are visible. Once again, the angel takes the place of two angels visible on the tomb itself. Not included in the painting are a male figure believed to be Dagobert’s son Clovis II (died 657) and the gable, where two bishop saints pray before Christ.⁵⁵

The altar is the high altar and the retable, originally an antependium, was given by Charles the Bald (died 877). Destroyed during the French Revolution, it is known from written descriptions.⁵⁶ In the centre is Christ enthroned holding a cross and a book. On both sides, a hand holds a ring from which is suspended, on three chains, a crown supported on both sides by angels. Below are saints holding books. The beauty of the retable was highly praised, as was the fabulous wealth of its jewels, some of exceptional size. The altar was surrounded by four copper columns on which stood four copper angels, made in about 1300 and removed in 1610.⁵⁷ Only one angel is visible here. The retable is surmounted by the cross believed to have been made by Saint Eligius (died 660) and to have been given by Dagobert I. It was the height of a man and was embellished in the thirteenth century, perhaps in 1284–5, taken down in 1610 and destroyed during the Revolution. It is [page 797]known from a very small fragment, preserved in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (fig. 34), from written descriptions, and from an eighteenth‐century painting. It was constructed of golden cloisons enclosing pieces of coloured glass and precious stones; at its centre was a cameo, encircled with eight emeralds and eight large sapphires. Inserted into the base of Eligius’s cross is a small reliquary containing a piece of the True Cross: this was probably added during repairs carried out in 1284–5.⁵⁸ Behind Eligius’s cross is the gilded brass platform that supported the shrine of Saint Louis. This was constructed in the 1390s by Pierre Rozette, given by Charles VI and destroyed in 1610.⁵⁹

Charlemagne’s crown resembles the ‘Sainte Couronne’ kept at St‐Denis and known from three other representations as well as written descriptions (fig. 32). Apparently made in Paris towards the end of the thirteenth century, it was mentioned in about 1350 as the ‘Crown of Saint Louis’. It contained part of the Crown of Thorns and some of Christ’s hair and was destroyed in 1794.⁶⁰ The arches closing the crown seem to have been invented by the painter.

The rug, which is out of perspective, is a Turkish carpet of the ‘Holbein’ type (figs 33, 35). The pattern is rather similar to that of the table carpet in Holbein’s Ambassadors of 1533, NG 1314.⁶¹ The other textiles are silks or velvet cloths of gold and seem not to be particularly remarkable (figs 17, 36). The folded hangings below the triforium gallery are purple, green, blue and orange‐red. A small section of a similar blue hanging is visible behind a candlestick on the platform for the shrine of Saint Louis.

The Saints on the Reverses

The saint on the reverse of NG 1419 is a bishop but has no identifying attribute. He has been called Lupus, Loup or Leu, Bishop of Sens;⁶² or Remi, Bishop of Rheims.⁶³ The saint on the reverse of NG 4681, who carries two keys, is undoubtedly Peter, to whom Christ entrusted the keys of the kingdom of heaven.⁶⁴

Iconography

Saint Giles and the Deer

In 1821, the saint was identified as Hubert; according to an old label formerly on the reverse, he was Saint Eustace. By 1854, he was recognised as Giles.

The Mass of Saint Giles

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the painting was usually described in vague terms as ‘A priest saying Mass’. Mariette, who saw it at the 1756 sale, misread the inscription on the angel’s paper or parchment as the Latin for ‘Seigneur, conservez Charles’ (‘God save Charles’ = Dominus servet Carolum?) and suggested that the picture was painted for Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.⁶⁵ It seems to have been John Carter and Richard Cosway who first realised that the interior represented the basilica of St‐Denis; Cosway called the picture ‘St. Thomas Aquinas performing mass, in the abbey of St. Denis, to Louis IX. King of France’, while Waagen and others described it as ‘The Mass of St. Gregory’.⁶⁶ Weale in 1889 correctly identified the subject as the Mass of Saint Giles.⁶⁷

The legend of Saint Giles, which appears to have exceedingly little basis in fact, seems to have been created in a much‐copied Vita Sancti Ægidii.⁶⁸ It has been convincingly argued that this Vita was written early in the tenth century by a monk of the abbey of St‐Gilles in Provence, south of Nîmes and west of Arles.⁶⁹ It so abounds in inconsistencies of chronology that attempts to relate it to historical events have inevitably failed. Later authors have repeated or condensed this biography, and have occasionally added variations.⁷⁰ In the Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine abridged the Vita without contributing very much of his own.⁷¹

Essentially, the Master of Saint Giles has followed the Vita. Giles, having cured by his prayers the sterility of the soil of Provence, lived in a cave on weeds, the water of a nearby spring and the milk of a deer sent by God to visit him at regular intervals. Huntsmen employed by Flavius, King of the Goths, saw the deer, which was of surpassing beauty, and set their dogs on her. She fled to Giles, who prayed for her safety. The dogs retreated howling. The next day, the same thing happened. On the third day, King Flavius and the Bishop of Nîmes joined the hunt. When the hounds retreated, huntsmen surrounded the impenetrable thicket in which the deer had taken refuge and one of them, firing an arrow into the thicket with the intent of driving out the deer, hit and gravely wounded Saint Giles as he prayed for the animal that had become his fostermother. The huntsmen cut their way into the thicket and found Giles, an old man wearing a monk’s habit, with the deer lying at his knees. Giles was too seriously wounded to kneel in prayer. The bishop and the king, ordering the rest to stay back, came to him on foot and questioned him. After the incident, the king came frequently to visit Giles and gave him money to build a monastery and two churches: one dedicated to Saint Peter and the rest of the apostles; the other, next to Giles’s cave, to Saint Priscus or Saint Privatus.⁷² He also ceded to the monastery all the lands within a radius of five miles.

Afterwards King Charles, clearly Charlemagne, sent for Giles, who travelled through Orléans, where he healed a demoniac in the church of Ste‐Croix. He then spent several days with the king, who mentioned his sin too terrible to confess. The next Sunday, as Giles was saying Mass, an angel appeared and placed on the altar a document in which the king’s sin was described and where it was stated that, by Giles’s prayers, the sin was remitted, provided that the king expressed adequate penitence and did not commit it again. Indeed any sinner who invoked Saint Giles could be sure of forgiveness, as long as he stopped sinning.⁷³

In Saint Giles and the Deer, the painter has followed fairly accurately the Vita or one of its paraphrases, though the setting bears no resemblance to St‐Gilles in Provence. The verdant landscape, however, could refer to the saint’s achievement of curing the sterility of the soil of Provence. Giles is seated, as in the Vita, but seems to have intercepted the arrow with his right hand in order to save the deer. The Vita implies that his injury was more severe, as it may have been at an earlier stage in the process of painting, when there appears to have been a bloodstain across his chest. The deer should be lying at Giles’s ‘knees’ and the boy on the left is an intruder, for the writer of the Vita emphasised that the king and the bishop were not accompanied when they first approached Giles.

In The Mass of Saint Giles, the painter departs from the Vita by setting the incident in the basilica of St‐Denis. The author of the Vita did not name the church where the miracle took place but, as Saint Giles had, some days before, visited the church of the Holy Cross in Orléans,⁷⁴ many assumed that the angel had appeared in the cathedral of Ste‐Croix at Orléans. Indeed the document itself was reported to have remained in the cathedral until the building was destroyed in 1562.⁷⁵

Only one text has been discovered that places the incident at St‐Denis: the Life of Saint Denis written by Ivo, a monk of St‐Denis, and commissioned by the abbot Gilles de Pontoise. A copy of Ivo’s text was presented by Gilles in 1317 to Philip V, King of France.⁷⁶ Ivo’s account of the miracle is copied, with minor changes, from the passage in the Vita Sancti Ægidii: Ivo merely adds ‘he was praying in the same church of Saint Denis for the king and in his presence’.⁷⁷ Hinkle, however, did not mention Ivo’s source and made much of the importance of Ivo’s text and the connections between Gilles de Pontoise, the name of the saint represented in the London panels and the view of Pontoise supposedly included in Saint Giles and the Deer.⁷⁸ Hinkle was nevertheless unable to show why in about 1500 the patron of the Master of Saint Giles should have taken any interest in Gilles de Pontoise, who died in 1326, or in the Life of Saint Denis that he had presented in 1317 to Philip V.⁷⁹

The Washington Panels

Two paintings in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, are so like the two London pictures that they are considered to be from the same workshop and the same complex. They are The Baptism of Clovis (fig. 38: oak panel, 63.3 × 46.7 cm, painted surface 61.5 × 45.5 cm) and the Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint (fig. 41: oak panel, 63.2 × 47.5 cm, painted surface 61.5 × 47 cm). Each panel is of three boards.⁸⁰ It has been demonstrated that the oak was grown in western[page 799]Europe, that the third board of each panel is from the same tree and that the last ring, found in the second board of the second panel, was formed in 1462.⁸¹ The reverses of the panels once bore representations in grisaille of Saint Denis and Saint Giles. Known only from old photographs, they seem to have been destroyed when, shortly before 1937, the panels were thinned and cradled (figs 39, 40).⁸² The Washington panels were by 1823 in the collection of the Chevalier Alexandre de Lestang‐Parade at Aix‐en‐Provence and were attributed to John of Bruges, that is, Jan van Eyck.⁸³ The Chevalier was a miniature painter who exhibited at the Paris Salons between 1802 and 1817. He may well have acquired the two paintings in Paris.

The baptism of Clovis by Saint Remi or Remigius takes place in a building resembling the Ste Chapelle of the palace on the Île de la Cité in Paris. It is in fact a curious amalgam of the upper and lower chapels; the underdrawing, however, gives an accurate representation of the lower chapel.⁸⁴ The grey stone bath in which Clovis kneels is based on the Roman porphyry bath now in the Louvre which came from St‐Denis and which was described in 1517 as ‘the porphyry vessel in which Clovis was baptised’ (fig. 37).⁸⁵ In the Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint, the background is the square outside the cathedral of Notre‐Dame in Paris. The saint stands outside the church of St‐Jean‐le‐Rond, which served as a baptistery. The west front of Notre‐Dame is behind; on the right is the Hôtel‐Dieu.⁸⁶

The settings in all four paintings have attracted much interest and are at the root of much confusion over the iconographies of the four scenes. The Mass of Saint Giles, thought to have been performed at the cathedral of Ste‐Croix in Orléans, is set in the basilica of St‐Denis. The Baptism of Clovis took place at Rheims but is imagined as happening in the Ste Chapelle in Paris. Though the Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint appear to occur outside Notre‐Dame in Paris, that does not give a compelling reason for associating the saint with Paris. He has been identified as Remi, Bishop of Rheims, who was believed to have baptised Clovis at Rheims in 496, or as Lupus, Loup or Leu, Bishop of Sens, whose feast day, like Saint Giles’s, falls on 1 September. It is possible that he is the same saint who appears on the reverse of Saint Giles and the Deer and whose vestments and features are very similar. The Saint Giles formerly on the reverse of the Episodes is likewise fairly similar to the figure of the saint in Saint Giles and the Deer.

Various conclusions may be drawn from this discussion. The four panels are from the wings of a folding polyptych. Open, it showed scenes from the lives of several saints; closed, it showed representations in grisaille of several standing saints. All the securely identified saints, except Saint Peter, are from the Merovingian and Carolingian periods. There are many references to kings of France who had been canonised (Charlemagne, whose canonisation in 1165 by the anti‐Pope Pascal III has never been ratified by the Holy See, and Louis IX) or who were sometimes regarded as saints (Clovis, Dagobert I). The saint on the reverse of each panel has little or nothing to do with the saint on the obverse. Just as the saint on the reverse of the Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint is Giles and echoes the figure of the saint in Saint Giles and the Deer, so the saint on the reverse of Saint Giles and the Deer may echo the figure of the saint in the Episodes. The saints on the reverses of the other two panels, Peter and Denis, may perhaps have recurred in other, now lost narrative paintings from the series. The accurately represented locations in or near Paris in which events are situated need not be the places where those events were believed to have taken place. Anachronisms abound. In The Mass of Saint Giles, for example, Charlemagne (died 814) prays near the shrine of Saint Louis (died 1270); Clovis is baptised (in 496) in the Ste Chapelle of Saint Louis. All the fashionably dressed lay people in the four panels are wearing clothes datable around 1500.⁸⁷

Reconstruction

Studying the shapes of the niches represented on the reverses of the panels and the angles from which they are observed, Colenbrander and Girault have argued plausibly that all four panels are from the wings of a folding polyptych.⁸⁸ They claimed that each of these wings comprised four panels, arranged in two tiers of two. The Saint Peter and the Bishop Saint on the reverses of the London panels would have formed the lower tier of the left wing of the closed polyptych; the Saint Giles, the only panel showing an arched niche, would have been the left panel of the upper tier of the right wing of the closed polyptych; the Saint Denis would have been the right panel of the lower tier of the right wing. That would entail placing the Saint Giles and the Deer and The Mass of Saint Giles as the lower tier of the left wing of the open altarpiece; the Episodes on the right of the upper tier in the right wing; and The Baptism of Clovis on the left of the lower tier of the right wing. Unfortunately, this does not make chronological sense, since Charlemagne on the left wing, who died in 814, precedes Clovis on the right wing, who died in 511. As two panels are allotted to the life of Saint Giles, should not Saint Peter, Saint Denis and the unidentified bishop saint, as well as Saint Remi, also have two narrative scenes? If each saint represented on the reverses of the wing panels has to have, like Giles, two scenes on the obverses, a happier solution might be to imagine a polyptych, where six saints could have been represented on the reverses of the wings, three scenes on each of the interior wings and six scenes, symmetrically divided, in a central compartment. [page 800]If allowances are made for frames about 5 cm wide, the framed central sections would have measured about 215 × 115 cm. Alternatively, the panels could have been arranged to make an inverted T‐shaped altarpiece of the Brabantine type, with three scenes arranged in tiers of one above two on the wings and six panels arranged in a tier of two above a tier of four in the centre. If allowances are again made for frames about 5 cm wide, the inverted T of the central section would have measured about 215 × 230 cm.

The Original Setting

Attempting to show that the London and Washington panels were painted for the church of St‐Leu‐St‐Gilles in Paris, Hinkle gave ingenious and erudite, but in the end unconvincing, explanations of their subjects. He used the locations represented in the Washington panels to identify their subjects. Though the first panel depicts the baptism of an adult French king, who must in fact be Clovis,⁸⁹ Hinkle argued that, on the contrary, the subject is Saint Denis baptising Lisbius, an important noble of Paris. He again referred to Ivo’s Life of Saint Denis; Lisbius is crowned not as a king but rather as a martyr; the Ste Chapelle evokes the royal palace mentioned in the legend of Lisbius.⁹⁰

Hinkle identified the subject of the second Washington panel as Saint Lupus, Bishop of Sens between 610 and 623.⁹¹ Paris was to form part of the archdiocese of Sens and Lupus was said to have visited Paris. He is seen curing an epileptic and children afflicted by excessive timidity, the mal de peur; the bearded man in the foreground is interceding on behalf of the child behind him. Hinkle observes resemblances between the Washington panel and a silver relief of Saint Lupus curing the Sick (Sens, Cathedral), made in 1698 by Guillaume Jacob, a Parisian goldsmith.⁹² These resemblances, however, are very general and could be coincidental.⁹³ The ‘epileptic’ is clearly a demoniac and the setting is not necessarily the real location in which the events occurred. The bearded man in the foreground, whose head is bandaged into a sort of turban and whose exotic appearance distinguishes him from all the other [page 801]figures represented in the four pictures, occupies a central position and must be one of the principal protagonists: his prominence must be explained.⁹⁴

Though there are no compelling reasons for identifying the saint in the Washington panel as Lupus, an association can undoubtedly be made between Lupus and Giles, who share the same feast day and the dedication of the important church of St‐Leu‐St‐Gilles in Paris. Established in 1235, it stands on the rue St‐Denis and was near the Porte St‐Denis. Though there are no good reasons for associating the London and Washington panels with the church, nevertheless Sterling in 1990, calling the Washington panels the Baptism of Clovis and Saint Lupus curing the Sick, reconstructed the four panels as parts of two triptychs, one of the legend of Saint Giles, the other of the legend of Saint Lupus. He accepted that the association of all four panels with the church of St‐Leu‐St‐Gilles was very probable.⁹⁵

Girault identified the Washington panels as Saint Gregorian of Le Mans baptising ‘Defensor’ and Saint Lupus curing the Sick; he agreed with Hinkle and Sterling that the panels come from St‐Leu‐St‐Gilles and tried to strengthen his case by finding disguised portraits in all four panels and by interpreting as symbolic the flora in Saint Giles and the Deer.⁹⁶ Following van Regteren‐Altena and Sterling, Girault saw the king in Saint Giles and the Deer as Louis XII (1462–1515), the bishop as Cardinal Georges d’Amboise and Saint Giles as Saint Francis of Paola (1416–1507), who, like Giles, kept a pet deer.⁹⁷ According to Girault, the boy on the left could be Francesco Sforza (1492–1535), who returns in The Mass of Saint Giles. The bishop in the first Washington panel is probably Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II, while the king could be the exiled Aragonese king of Naples, Frederick IV (1452–1504). Girault claims that, in the second Washington panel, the saint is probably Tristan de Salazar (1440–1520), Archbishop of Sens between 1474 and his death in 1520.⁹⁸ Girault believes that the panels were commissioned by Louis XII for St‐Leu‐St‐Gilles and that Louis is invoking both Saint Giles and Saint Francis of Paola against sterility. Saint [page 802]Francis of Paola was credited with securing the conception of Louis’s daughter Claude (born in 1499), of his stepson the Dauphin Charles‐Orlant (1492–1495) and of his heir the future Francis I (born 1494); the flowers and tree are thought to relate to such pleas for fertility.⁹⁹

Though resemblances exist between the figures in the four panels and portraits of the persons listed, these theories cannot be sustained. The King of the Goths in Saint Giles and the Deer, for example, has fair, pinkish‐brown hair and brownish eyes; whereas Louis XII, in the portrait at Windsor attributed to Perréal¹⁰⁰ and in the miniature by Bourdichon in the Getty Museum (fig. 42), has dark brown hair and blue eyes¹⁰¹ and there are further differences between the shapes of their features. The resemblances noted by Girault are probably coincidental.

The London Panels: Problems of Iconography

Two unresolved questions complicate the study of the London panels: the uncertain identity of the sainted bishop on the reverse of Saint Giles and the Deer; and the reason for setting The Mass of Saint Giles in the basilica of St‐Denis. The bishop in the grisaille looks rather like his counterpart in the Washington Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint and could be the same man. Until the subject of the Washington panel has been explained, however, and until the central figure, the bearded man with the bandaged head, has been identified, this possible connection is not helpful. Because Saint Giles appeared on the obverses of two of the four surviving panels and on the reverse of a third, it is possible, though by no means certain, that he was the principal subject of the polyptych. According to the Vita Sancti Ægidii, the two churches which the King of the Goths built for Giles in Provence were dedicated to Saint Peter and to Saint Priscus (or Saint Privatus).¹⁰² As Saint Peter appears on the reverse of The Mass of Saint Giles, the possibility should be raised that his companion on the reverse of Saint Giles and the Deer could be Saint Priscus. Priscus was identified as the goodman, or householder, who lent to Christ and the apostles the large upper room where they ate the Last Supper.¹⁰³ Priscus supposedly went to Rome with Saint Peter and was the first Bishop of Capua. He performed various miracles, cured the deaf and the blind and cast out demons.¹⁰⁴ His feast day, like Giles’s, falls on 1 September.¹⁰⁵

The Master of Saint Giles not only set The Mass of Saint Giles in the basilica of St‐Denis but also, in The Baptism of Clovis, placed the king in a font resembling the porphyry bath in which Clovis was supposedly baptised at Rheims but which was preserved at St‐Denis. Not all the objects from St‐Denis formed part of the Master’s original plans. In the Mass, the retable of Charles the Bald is painted over an underdrawing for a representation of the Crucifixion, while in the Baptism of Clovis the font is underdrawn as a hexagonal object decorated with an image of the Baptism of Christ.¹⁰⁶ In other pictures attributed to the Master, he does not show the same interest in topographical or archaeological exactitude and it has been argued that the impulse to include in the London and Washington panels views of sites in or near Paris must have come from the patron rather than the painter. If it did, the patron must have changed his mind as work on the panels progressed. The Master may not have seen all the objects at St‐Denis but could have worked from drawings by other artists. He depicted Clovis’s porphyry font as if it were made of greyish stone; and he showed Dagobert’s tomb uncoloured, although it was in fact polychromed.¹⁰⁷ Neither the patron nor the painter planned with particular care. The archaeological and topographical detail may not be as significant as some art historians have believed.

Attribution and Date

Saint Giles and the Deer was sold in 1821 as a Lucas van Leyden, in 1854 as a Jan van Eyck. Crowe and Cavalcaselle in 1857 recognised that it was a pair to The Mass of Saint Giles and assigned both paintings to an imitator of van Eyck working after his death.¹⁰⁸Saint Giles and the Deer, exhibited in 1872 as by Lucas, was catalogued by Weale in 1889 as Early Netherlandish¹⁰⁹ and exhibited in 1892 and 1894 under that description. Von Tschudi, reviewing the 1894 exhibition, created the Master of Saint Giles.¹¹⁰ At the National Gallery, the painting was catalogued between 1894 and 1906 as Flemish, between 1911 and 1913 as French and from 1915 as by the Master of Saint Giles.

The Mass of Saint Giles was attributed in 1752, 1756 and 1789 to Dürer. This attribution was rejected by Mariette, who thought that the picture was by an Early Netherlandish painter,¹¹¹ and by Cosway, who gave it to Gossart.¹¹² Carter correctly judged the costume to be from ‘the time of our Henry VII’ (1485–1509).¹¹³ In the nineteenth century, it was often ascribed to van Eyck,¹¹⁴ but Passavant¹¹⁵ and Crowe and Cavalcaselle¹¹⁶ demurred and Waagen gave it first to Jan Joest and afterwards to an unidentified Dutch painter of the latter half of the fifteenth century.¹¹⁷ Crowe and Cavalcaselle had recognised it as the pair to the Saint Giles and the Deer;¹¹⁸ von Tschudi, seeing the two panels reunited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition of 1894, called the painter the ‘Master of Saint Giles’.¹¹⁹

Both Châtelet and Leproux have taken the mark on the grisaille Saint Peter on the reverse of The Mass of Saint Giles to be the Master’s monogram or signature (fig. 6). Fancying a resemblance to the mark used by Daniel de Crane, Châtelet concluded that the Master was Daniel’s father, Wouter de Crane, a Bruges painter who settled in Lyon.¹²⁰ Leproux, however, found that the mark resembled one found on the stained‐glass window of The Weigh‐House in Tournai cathedral – one of a series of windows illustrating the feudal privileges of the bishops of Tournai. Leproux attributed the series to Gauthier de Campes, saw the mark on The Weigh‐House as the monogram of Gauthier and interpreted the mark on Saint Peter as an adaptation of the same mark, Gauthier’s signature. The two marks are indeed similar, though the top of the London mark, a cross and two chevrons, does not occur in Tournai and the G is absent which in Tournai decorates the tail of the P. The Tournai mark, which is on a barrel, could be that of a merchant, like the marks on the sack alongside; the resemblances between the Tournai and London marks could be coincidental and neither need be a signature.¹²¹ Girault has observed that [page 803]Gauthier de Campes is probably to be identified as the Wouter Campe or van Campen who was apprenticed in 1480 to a painter of Bruges and who in 1490 became a master of the Bruges guild. Wouter was not mentioned thereafter at Bruges, so he probably left the town and settled elsewhere.¹²²

Any discussion of the attribution of the panels in London and Washington is complicated by the fact that the eight pictures on the obverses and reverses of the four panels appear to have been painted by at least four artists: the Master himself and three principal assistants. The Master was responsible for most of The Mass of Saint Giles and The Baptism of Clovis, much of Saint Giles and the Deer and perhaps also the Bishop Saint on its reverse, as well as for the design of the other four pictures. The first assistant, working on the Master’s design and evidently in collaboration with others, made the underdrawing for and painted the Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint and perhaps also the Saint Peter on the reverse of The Mass of Saint Giles. A second assistant seems to have contributed to Saint Giles and the Deer the background figures behind the archer, who are less boldly conceived and executed than the comparable bystanders in The Baptism of Clovis. Finally, a third and less gifted assistant seems to have painted the grisailles once on the reverses of the Washington panels, the Saint Giles being an incompetent repetition of the figure of the saint in Saint Giles and the Deer. As both grisailles were badly damaged and are known only from photographs, they cannot be accurately evaluated.

The Master himself had several marked idiosyncrasies. There are strong vertical divisions at the centres of the compositions, particularly noticeable in Saint Giles and the Deer, where a vertical drawn through the centre of the composition neatly divides the king and the bishop from the saint and the deer and where the large tree, centrally placed, emphasises the division. The composition is punctuated by a series of echoing verticals and there are relatively few diagonal accents, except in the deer. Alternations of red and green order the design; blues and yellows are used sparingly. Similarly, in The Mass of Saint Giles, a central vertical, marked by the left contour of the cross of Saint Eligius, divides Charlemagne from Saint Giles; there are strong vertical accents, stressed by alternations of red and green. In The Baptism of Clovis, the central vertical separates Clovis and his attendants from Saint Remi and his attendants. The division here is slightly less rigorous, in that the left side of Clovis’s body and Saint Remi’s right arm cross the division, though their contours do not meet but merely interlock. Again the vertical accents are stressed by alternations of red and green; again there are only limited areas of blue, which is rarely intense and often dull or dark. As the Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint follows the same principles of composition and colour, it was probably designed by the Master. The grisailles, too, are similar: the assistants who painted Saint Peter, Saint Denis and Saint Giles were apparently following principles worked out by the Master in the Bishop Saint.

The Master took great pleasure in patterned textiles and rich textures: consider The Mass of Saint Giles or the cleric behind Saint Remi in The Baptism of Clovis. He was also interested in contrasts of light and shade. In the background of The Baptism of Clovis, the heads of the bystanders are boldly modelled in simplified areas of light and shadow. In all three of his paintings, reflected lights are carefully studied and often provide light lines that define or stress contours. The Master’s figure types are easily recognised. Though contemporary fashions emphasised bulk and rectangular shapes, his men have narrow and slanting shoulders. Their faces are broad, with widely spaced eyes that do not always look in exactly the same direction. The Master’s profiles are strangely mismanaged. He is more interested in movement and gesture than many of his Netherlandish contemporaries and hands are given great importance, though they are sometimes out of scale with each other – disturbingly so in the Bishop Saint on the reverse of NG 1419. Fingers are neither narrow nor elegantly positioned.

His choice of materials may reflect local availability rather than personal preference – western European rather than [page 804]Baltic oak for his panels, walnut oil as his only medium. The most striking difference between the Master’s and contemporary Netherlandish painting is his habit of making important changes at every stage of the underdrawing and painting processes. He was capable of careful planning: the composition of the Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint (fig. 41) must have been based on a finished sketch on which his assistant then based his underdrawing and painting, where there are few changes. The Master also differs from his Netherlandish contemporaries in his methods of composition and his less exacting treatment of detail. The plants in Saint Giles and the Deer, for example, are not all easy to identify and they are superimposed upon, rather than integrated into, the greensward of the foreground.

The differences between the Master’s methods and what can be taken as standard Netherlandish practice suggest that he was a French artist who received his initial training in France, probably in Paris, but who was familiar with the recent achievements of the Netherlanders: the work of Hugo van der Goes must have impressed him deeply. It is hard to see him as an emigrant Netherlander. The monogram or mark on the grisaille Saint Peter is not necessarily a signature. As the grisaille seems to be the work of an assistant, this would be an unlikely place for the Master to sign.

Many of the people in the London and Washington panels are wearing clothes that were fashionable in about 1500.¹²³ There has been general agreement that the four panels were painted in Paris in about 1500.

I am grateful to Albert Châtelet, to Pierre‐Gilles Girault and particularly to Martha Wolff for help with this entry.

Notes

Infrared reflectography was carried out using a Hamamatsu vidicon. For details see p. 18, note 22.

NG 4681 was subsequently examined using SIRIS (InGaAs digital sensor; see p. 18, note 23) and this is the image used for figs 11 and 14 above.

79. This manuscript was afterwards in the possession of Jeanne de Laval (1433–1498), second wife of René of Anjou (see V. Wylie Egbert, On the Bridges of Mediaeval Paris, A Record of Early Fourteenth‐Century Life, Princeton 1974, pp. 2–17; L’Art au temps des rois maudits, Philippe le Bel et ses fils 1285–1328, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris 1998, pp. 285–6 no. 190). Hinkle thought that a fourteenth‐century copy, BNF MS lat. 5286, might have been the same ‘consulted in deciding the iconographic details’. Illustrations were added towards 1500 and above one of them, depicting the coronation of Charlemagne (fol. 176v: Hinkle, cited in note 38, p. 129), is a note: Hic fuit per pictura[page 806][page 807]Egidii et Karoli peccatum dismissum suum. This is on the verso of the account of the Mass of Saint Giles. No illustration of the Pardon of Charlemagne was included; the note was written before the illumination was drawn. (Back to text.)