Great Altarpieces: Gothic and Renaissance is one of the latest additions to the new wave of scholarship on the altarpiece as a genre. The last two decades of the twentieth century were marked by an increasing pace of publications on altarpieces—which had not been studied as such since the late nineteenth century, when Jacob Burckhardt wrote an article called “Das Altarbild.” Recently a number of monographs on altarpieces of various regions have appeared, including: Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function; Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice; Judith Berg Sobré, Behind the Altar Table: The Development of the Painted Retable in Spain, 1350–1500; and Lynn F. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380–1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing. These have been joined by a volume of essays from a conference, The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, Italian Altarpieces 1250–1550, and even a republication of Burckhardt’s seminal article in the form of a book entitled The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy, edited and translated by Humfrey.¹

Compared to these other publications, Caterina Limentani Virdis and Mari Pietrogiovanna’s book has a wider scope. It covers the broadest geographical spread, including the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, with consideration of artists from localities not commonly considered in altarpiece studies, such as Lombardy, Sardinia, and Sicily. The volume also has the most splendid illustrations, with most of the book devoted to large-scale, color reproductions of the works (indeed all the reproductions in the book are in color, with magnificent photographs of the newly cleaned Garden of Earthly Delights). There are also numerous details, even eight gatefolds, that is, pages with flaps that allow the viewer to unfold the altarpieces. Such images provide a better sense of the interrelation of the parts of an altarpiece than can be afforded by the standard photographs of altarpiece interiors and exteriors on separate pages.

Unfortunately, however, the conception of this book suffers from a central problem. Though entitled Great Altarpieces, the book in fact treats only a subset of altarpiece types—specifically, polyptychs, that is, altarpieces with multiple panels. The authors provide conflicting definitions of the polyptych format: although they argue that movable and folding panels are fundamental to the polyptych, the book considers many polyptychs with fixed wings. Nowhere is any attention given to a central—and to me very intriguing—question about the motivations behind the choice of fixed or folding structures. I might add that the book’s subtitle, “Gothic and Renaissance,” is also misleading for a volume that considers only fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works.

The book begins with a fairly lengthy introductory essay that addresses a number of issues: the liturgical roles, terminology, genesis, patronage, structure, execution, technique, and iconography of altarpieces. While the topics are well chosen, the presentation is at times unclear, particularly for general audiences, while at the same time too sketchy to allow for many scholarly contributions. Moreover, a number of the claims made here seem unjustified. For example, the notion that the polyptych fills an aesthetic role for the upper classes and a devotional one for the lower classes is outdated and reflects a simplistic view of social history and the uses of art. I also see no basis for the authors’ claim that it was hard to find clients for altarpieces. Certainly in the Netherlands the demand was so strong that large-scale altarpieces could be produced on speculation and sold on open markets. And I was rather perplexed to see that the introduction included discussion of certain works, such as Dirk Bouts’s Justice panels, that were not altarpieces at all, but rather, in this case, served civic purposes in the Town Hall.

The bulk of the book is devoted to studies of thirty individual altarpieces. The authors do not explain the organization of this section, but for the most part the altarpieces are grouped by region, starting with the Netherlands, then France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Toward the end there is some alternation between Italian and Spanish works, which I found a bit confusing, but the internationalization of style for some of the artists (e.g., Colantonio, an artist working in Naples, was influenced both by Hispano-Flemish and Burgundian-Provençal styles) may account for the more fluid organization here. The authors also provide no explanation for the choice of altarpieces in this section, other than to note that some altarpieces are very famous, some little known. The inclusion of lesser-known works is quite welcome and refreshing, but one wonders why the book includes no Sienese works and so few Florentine works—why not Masaccio’s Pisa polyptych, for example? Also, why does the book examine sculpted (in addition to painted) altarpieces from Germany and Spain, but not from the Netherlands and Italy, even though these countries were major producers of sculpted retables? I was also surprised by some of the specific choices: Why study Bouts’s Last Judgment Altarpiece—which has lost its central panel and retains only its wings—rather than his Last Supper, which is fully intact and has an iconographic program centered on the theme of the Holy Sacrament, a topic of special interest for a book on altarpieces?

Each of the altarpieces studied in this section is illustrated lavishly with many details but is allocated only about three or four pages of text. Since the writing typically includes quite a bit of general information about the artist and his style, the specific altarpiece under consideration ends up being examined in a very cursory way, with brief summaries of scholarship to date and, as with the introduction, few original ideas. (The authors’ suggestion that the Isenheim Altarpiece might have been produced in two separate campaigns for different patrons forms one notable—if unconvincing—exception.) This format does not really permit an effective presentation of these altarpieces to either the general or scholarly reader. The general reader will be most affected by the brevity of the discussion covering the basic style and iconography of the individual works, whereas scholars are likely to be troubled by omissions of key research on some of the topics, such as the neglect of Felix Thürlemann’s work on the Mérode Triptych (which, by the way, may not have actually been an altarpiece), Paul Vandenbroeck’s on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (which also probably was not an altarpiece, though the authors quickly dismiss this possibility), and Pamela Sheingorn’s on Lucas Cranach’s Holy Kinship.

There are other significant omissions and errors. For example, the analysis of Bouts’s Last Judgment neglects to mention key sources in Rogier van der Weyden’s Beaune Altarpiece. The section on Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece refers to Petrus Christus as Rogier van der Weyden’s heir, a rather inaccurate description considering Christus’s close relation to Jan van Eyck.

It is particularly regrettable that this book, while treating altarpieces from a wide variety of regions, makes no attempt to draw connections or distinctions that could deepen our understanding of either the individual works or of altarpieces more generally. For example, the entries on Michael Pacher’s Altarpiece of the Church Fathers and Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece suggest in each case that the retable, when opened, was displayed with the wings placed at an angle, rather than in a fully opened position. By considering these two works totally independent from one another, the authors miss a chance to probe more fully the conditions of display and their effect upon altarpiece design. So, too, the authors never take a broader look into the use of grisaille on the exterior of altarpieces to examine how it is treated differently in the Netherlands and France, and how (and, perhaps even more importantly, why) grisaille appears less frequently on the exterior of German works, such as Stephan Lochner’s Adoration of the Magi Altarpiece, which portrays the Annunciation (so frequently seen in monochrome within Netherlandish retables) in an almost startling polychrome rendition. It is equally regrettable that the entries on individual altarpieces focus almost exclusively on stylistic and iconographic issues without giving any real consideration to function, a surprising lacuna for a book devoted to altarpieces, which are, of course, defined by functional type.

This is a book, then, that has no clear audience. Scholars will not find much to advance the study of altarpieces, while the general public will not find materials to aid in their appreciation of these works (and may be befuddled by features such as the inclusion of untranslated Latin passages and of some rather obscure works). Though it provides a few reference points for the study of altarpieces, the main contribution of Great Altarpieces is the quality and quantity of its illustrations. These reproductions no doubt will inspire further study into the altarpiece tradition that will address the many questions left unanswered by the text.