A historian has discovered a hidden second level of meaning in a two-part picture panel from the late Middle Ages. If one mentally folds Jean Fouquet’s “Diptych of Melun” together, the classic scene of a nursing Madonna with Jesus Child and two worshiping people becomes a lactatio – the allegorical representation of the Madonna as a nurturing mother also for the faithful.
The “Melun Diptych” by the French illuminator and panel painter Jean Fouquet is a well-known work from the late Middle Ages. The two panels were created around 1455 and originally hung in the crypt of the Notre-Dame collegiate church in Melun. There they were attached as a devotional image over the grave of the client Étienne Chevalier and his wife. Chevalier was the treasurer of the French kings Charles VII and Louis XI.
After the medieval diptych had hung in the collegiate church for centuries, it was sold by the church authorities in 1775, contrary to Chevalier’s will, in order to raise money for the church’s restoration. Both parts of the picture were separated and only reappeared after the French Revolution. The panel on the right ended up in the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp through resale, while the panel on the left now hangs in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.
Brainstorm when visiting the museum
This spatial separation of the two panels has so far made it difficult to evaluate and view their content in context. The panel on the left shows the commissioner of the diptych, Étienne Chevalier, kneeling next to his namesake, Saint Stephen. The right panel shows the Madonna breastfeeding the Infant Jesus, surrounded by several angels. But in addition to this superficial depiction, the historian Monja Schünemann from Chemnitz University of Technology has discovered another, previously overlooked meaning in the diptych.
The trigger was the consideration of how these two panels, originally connected by a hinge, would look together. “When I was thinking intensively about the composition of the picture for the entire diptych while looking at the panel on the left, a thought hit me like lightning,” Schünemann recalls. On the same day, she made a mirror-image sketch of the panel in Antwerp and placed it over the panel with Étienne Chevalier and his patron saint. “I sort of folded both panels together,” says the scientist.
Closing changes the message of the picture
This sketched “folding together” revealed something surprising: “I discovered a previously unnoticed game of hide-and-seek that is not revealed when looking at the opened double image,” reports Schünemann. “Only when you consider the folding effect of the panels, which are actually connected by a hinge, do completely new interpretations of what Jean Fouquet probably also wanted to express become possible.” In the resulting “sandwich picture”, the donor Étienne Chevalier kneels in the folds of the Mary’s cloak wide open and is mystically breastfed by her. “Closing the picture completely changed the meaning of the picture,” explains Schünemann. “The two wings of the diptych thus become a lactatio, which in the iconography denotes the miracle of nourishment from the breast of the Madonna.”
This hidden, deeper religious meaning could also explain why the painter subsequently corrected the heads of Étienne Chevalier and Saint Stephen on the left panel while painting. Fouquet wanted to ensure that when the diptych was folded up, certain pixels met exactly. “The directions in which the angels look on the right-hand panel now also have a previously unimagined meaning,” says Schünemann. She has her insights in one blog entry described in more detail and submitted a technical article for review.
Source: Chemnitz University of Technology