Fall 2009 » Arts & Letters » Opening Doors

Opening Doors

March, 2009
Forget park-sized art installations and cartoon cells - in the 15th and 16th century, triptychs were all the rage, according to art professor Lynn Jacobs. The best artists painted them, religious orders used them in churches, and business people bought them for the home. Often, religious triptychs were commissioned as memorials to be placed at the gravesites of donors wanting to transcend from the secular to the sacred realm.

Jacobs is writing a book about these "paintings with doors," as they were referred to in the Netherlands and elsewhere at that time. In the 15th and 16th centuries, artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch and Robert Campin created triptychs, many of which remain well known today, like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. And even as they went out of fashion, Peter Paul Rubens created the Antwerp triptychs of the early 17th century.

Often but not exclusively religious in nature, these paintings consisted of three painted wooden panels with hinges that allowed them to be opened and closed. Triptychs often sported paintings that gave the illusion of sculpture on the exterior of the panels.

Jacobs became interested in the intersection between format and meaning while writing her first book: "Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing," published by Cambridge University Press. As she pursued her current research into triptychs, she discovered that the artists used this format to create symbolic doors - boundaries between different levels of reality, different times and spaces, different levels of status and different worlds.

"In some triptychs, there seems to be a deliberate ambiguity," she said. These triptychs seem to depict "a space that is connected and disconnected at the same time."

For instance, in "The Annunciation" triptych by Robert Campin, shown above, Jacobs points to the painting of a door, which on the left side panel reveals the donor and his wife and on the middle panel depicts Mary and an angel. Once when Jacobs was at the Cloisters in New York, she stood in front of the painting, contemplating the door. Is it a opening or a barrier? Can the monk see what is happening in the middle panel? As she gazed and wondered aloud, a crowd began to gather with her, surrounding the painting.

"Everyone had a different opinion," she said. "It made it clear that these paintings can be really hard to interpret."