BELLEGAMBE, Jean

The archangel Gabriel’s greeting to the Virgin Mary and her response is often represented on the exterior of winged altarpieces, as it signals Christ’s conception. Indeed, these two panels were originally the exterior wings of an altarpiece featuring, on the interior, a Madonna and Child in the centre (now in Brussels) and Sts. Catherine and Barbara on the two side wings (Art Institute of Chicago). While the interior was painted in naturalistic colours to create an illusion of reality, the painter has followed a long tradition of painting the exterior in “grisaille” (shades of gray) to resemble carved stone statues in a niche.

Jean Bellegambe’s shop was in Douai, which was then near the border of the Netherlands and France. While his patrons came mainly from northern France, his style was deeply influenced by late medieval styles of Antwerp.

Bellegambe was a Flemish painter of altarpieces, known as “the master of colour”, working in Amiens and executing altarpieces for churches and abbeys of other French cities. He was influenced by Italian painting in such works as the polyptych.

On this triptych the kneeling donator is Guillaume de Bruxelles, the abbot of the cloisters of St Amandus in Valenciennes and St Trudeaux in Luttich. Accordingly, St Amandus and St Trudeaux are on the left and right wings, respectively. The triptych was commissioned when Guillaume de Bruxelles left the cloister in Valenciennes for the cloister in Luttich.

In this triptych the artist employed both late-Medieval and High Renaissance manners, the latter derived from secondhand sources such as Marcantonio Raimondi’s reproductive prints.

The upper left corner of the central panel shows the ascent of the blessed into heaven. This passage is organized around two remarkable buildings: on the earth, a substantial spiral edifice surrounded by stairs and turrets; at the end of the journey, a heavenly palace designed as the epitome of Flamboyant architecture. This circular, insubstantial palace is formed of tall, slender arcades with elaborate tracery and delicately articulated buttresses and pinnacles. Bellegambe’s fictive edifice is an ideal structure - like gold work, too delicate to withstand the stresses of earthly existence.

The picture shows the central panel of the triptych depicting the Virgin with the Child.