Hiding in plain sight
Look carefully at Renaissance paintings and you will see all sorts of fascinating cultural details, from the most obvious – the clothing that was fashionable at the time the painting was made, the jewellery, the hairstyles, and the headgear – to less obvious props, such as Chinese and Japanese imported porcelain, Iznik ware from Turkey, ancient Islamic lustreware, or handmade rugs from central Asia that are often portrayed in Flemish art as table coverings or in Venetian paintings as a backcloth to pictures of the Virgin, Child, and Saints. What nobody had spotted until now, though, was the prehistoric handaxe that appears in the Melun Diptych, a painting of c.1455 by the French artist Jean (or Jehan) Fouquet (c.1420-1481).
The right-hand panel of this diptych (now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp) is relatively well known because it is thought to depict Agnès Sorel (1422-1450), the famous mistress of Charles VII, known as the Dame de Beauté (‘Lady of Beauty’), in the guise of the Virgin. Surrounded by red angels that appear to be made of wax, the Madonna has one breast fully exposed and a complexion that can only be described as resembling glazed white porcelain.
The portrait captures your attention because of its sheer oddity. Perhaps that is why the left-hand panel has escaped close scrutiny. The two panels were separated in 1773, and the left-hand one is now displayed in the Gemäldegalerie of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany, but they are usually shown together in catalogues and art-history books.
A not-so-dense idea