A Proposed Reconstruction of an Altarpiece by Rogier Van der Weyden

* I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Maria Helena Maia e Melo Soares Costa, Curator of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Collection, for her assistance in providing me with new photographs and measurements required for the present reconstruction.

Abstract

It has long been suspected, despite overpainting which completely obscured its background, that the Magdalen Reading in the National Gallery, London (Fig. 1), generally attributed to Rogier Van der Weyden, was a fragment of a larger altarpiece;¹ however, until the investigations of Martin Davies, present director of the National Gallery, the nature of the original altarpiece remained conjectural. Davies's studies firmly tied the Magdalen fragment to several other works and demonstrated their basic relationship. Not all of his conclusions seem warranted, however, and no attempt has been made to reconstruct the original altarpiece since Davies's diagrammatic reconstruction of 1954,² discredited by his own subsequent discoveries.³ In view of the considerable information now known concerning the altarpiece, a new reconstruction has seemed to me well worth making.