The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Unknown (English or French) · egg tempera with gold leaf on two small hinged oak panels · inside, at the left, Richard II kneeling, presented by Saint John the Baptist, Saint Edward the Confessor and Saint Edmund; at the right, the Virgin and Child among eleven angels in blue who wear the king’s badge of the white hart · outside, a white hart lying, crowned and chained, and a coat of arms · about 1395 to 1399, the date disputed · maker unknown, English or French, the attribution never settled · National Gallery, London, since 1929 · scored as the diptych as one object, both interiors and both exteriors
Mode
A portable devotional diptych made for one viewer: a donor presentation in which the donor is a reigning king and heaven wears his badge
Mythos
The king presented by intercessors before the court of heaven; the earthly and the heavenly court set face to face, the one an image of the other; the realm offered to heaven
Phase
One moment of approach and answer: the petition from the left wing, the blessing from the right, the banner about to pass or passing across the hinge
Presentation
Egg tempera with gold leaf and much ultramarine on two hinged oak panels; four figures on the left wing, thirteen on the right; a hart and a coat of arms on the exteriors
Register
One register, a jewelled and rapt stillness, rising across the blue and gold of the right wing and at the gesture across the hinge; no terror and no grandeur of scale
Scale
Small enough to be held near the face; one king, three saints, the Virgin, the Child and eleven angels; two courts, one livery
Governing Proposition
Two small oak panels are hinged together. On the left a young king kneels with open hands, presented by three saints against a ground of tooled gold; on the right the Virgin holds out the Child among eleven angels in blue, and every angel wears the king’s own badge, the white hart, and his collar of broom pods. Closed, the panels show only the hart and a coat of arms. The wager of the object is that a king’s claim to rule by heaven’s acknowledgement can be made as a private devotion: two courts set face to face across a hinge, heaven made of the most precious matter the painter had, and the whole of it dressed in one man’s colours.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The object is two small panels of oak, hinged so that they open like a book and close upon each other. They are painted in egg tempera, with gold leaf over tooled and punched grounds and a great deal of ultramarine. On the inside of the left panel a young king kneels in profile, his hands open: Richard II, in a robe of brocade, wearing the badge of the white hart and a collar of broom pods. Behind him stand three saints, each with his emblem: John the Baptist with the lamb, Edward the Confessor with the ring, and Edmund, king and martyr, with the arrow. They stand before a gold ground patterned by tooling, over a strip of rocky ground with trees.
On the inside of the right panel the Virgin stands in a meadow of flowers with the Child in her arms, among eleven angels in blue with their wings raised. The angels wear the king’s badge of the white hart and his collars of broom pods, as the king does. One of them holds a banner with a red cross on white. On the outside of the left panel a white hart lies on a bed of plants, crowned and chained at the neck; on the outside of the right panel is a coat of arms, the arms attributed to Edward the Confessor impaled with the royal arms of England and France. Four figures on the left wing, thirteen on the right; one animal and one shield outside.
What is scored is the diptych as one object: both panels, both interiors and both exteriors. The interiors carry the argument, but the object was made to be closed as well as opened, and the hart and the arms are part of it. The date is usually given as about 1395 to 1399, and it is disputed, the arguments running from the early 1390s to a making after 1400, when the king was dead. The maker is unknown. English or French, the attribution has never been settled, and Bohemian and Italian elements in the painting have also been argued. The work hangs in the National Gallery in London, which bought it in 1929.
Movement II
Everything in the diptych was inherited. The donor portrait, a kneeling patron presented by standing saints, was ordinary in the Italian, French and Bohemian painting of the fourteenth century. The portable devotional diptych, small enough to carry and to close, was ordinary at the French court. The heraldic badge was ordinary in livery, worn by a lord’s retainers as a sign of whose they were. The style is the court style of the decade, the International Gothic, with its slender figures, its gold and its shallow space.
The departure is in the fusion. The donor is not a merchant or a bishop but a reigning king, painted as a recognisable young man, and the saints who present him are kings or the forerunner of a king. Each is a title to rule: Edmund the martyred king of the East Angles, Edward the royal saint of Westminster and Richard’s chosen patron, John the Baptist who points to the Lamb. Then the host of heaven is put into the patron’s livery, a step that devotional painting rarely took so wholly: the angels round the Virgin wear the white hart. And the exchange is carried across the hinge, so that the gap between the two panels becomes part of the subject.
The stake was real and private. The diptych was made for one man’s use, not for a church or a public, and it risked no reception. It sharpens the court style toward personal myth more than it turns painting. Its force within the style is high, as high as any panel painting of its decade north of the Alps, and it is the strongest evidence of what the English court could commission. But it stayed in private hands for over five centuries and redirected no painters. English panel painting after it did not continue in its line, and the court style it may represent is otherwise almost wholly lost. Its reach since 1929 is that of an emblem: the image by which medieval English painting and Richard’s kingship are now known.
Movement III
The heaven of the right wing is made of its materials. Ultramarine is laid in quantity over the angels’ robes and the Virgin’s mantle, a blue the more intense for its expense, and the angels crowd round her with their wings raised, so that at a distance blue and gold read as one radiance. The gold is tooled and punched in patterns that change as the light moves, and the gold ground of the left wing is worked with a pattern of its own. The material is the meaning: heaven is made of the most precious matter the painter had.
The drawing is fine and individual at small scale: the king’s profile, the grave heads of the saints, the angels’ faces tilted and attentive, several of them turned toward the king. The minute work is load-bearing, not ornament. The hart badges on the breasts of the angels, the broom pods of their collars and the king’s, the brocade of his robe, are what carry the argument that heaven has taken his livery, and few painters of the decade matched that command. The costs are those of the court manner. The figures are slender and boneless, the space is shallow, the ground a strip, and the angels repeat one type.
One law ranks the whole. Take the two farthest elements, the dark rocky ground and trees behind the king and the flowered meadow of paradise, and both are placed by their nearness to heaven, earth at the left and paradise at the right. The king’s hart and broom pods are worn by the angels; the saints carry their emblems as the angels carry the banner; the gold of the ground and the gold of the haloes are one material; and the exterior gives outside the emblem the angels wear within. Nothing in the object stands outside its argument. The range is bounded, one court and its double, and the height is of one key throughout, a jewelled and rapt stillness without terror or grandeur.
Movement IV
The Child leans out of his mother’s arms toward the kneeling king, and the king’s hands are open, not joined, as if to give or to receive. Between them is the gap where the two panels meet. On a single panel this would be a scene; on two it is an approach, a petition from the left and an answer from the right across a divide, and the hinge is the threshold between earth and heaven. The banner with its red cross is what passes, or is about to pass, across it. Whether the king is receiving it or giving it, and whether the realm is being offered to the Virgin as a dowry, are still argued.
The form carries the rest. Closed, the diptych shows the white hart lying crowned and chained, and the arms of the Confessor joined to the arms of England and France: the king’s public face. Opened, it shows his private claim. Its size makes it an object held near the face by one viewer at prayer, and its meaning is that intimacy, a king alone with heaven. The archetype is the oldest of royal religion, the king presented by intercessors before the court of heaven, the earthly court and the heavenly court face to face, the one an image of the other; the livery makes it particular, for the angels are Richard’s retainers. The pattern was made often in its period, and this is its finest instance more than its invention.
What it discloses is kingship as this court imagined it: a man made king by heaven’s acknowledgement, not by his barons, presented by saints who were kings, received by a queen of heaven whose household wears his colours. The ideology is held completely and without irony, and it holds beyond its decade as a statement of how power dreams of itself. A later viewer sees in it what it did not intend, the vanity inside the devotion, and much of that is lent by knowledge of Richard’s fall. The orders it holds are the sacred, the state, dynasty, the person and the natural world of flowers, trees and hart; labour, the family beyond dynasty, the common life of the realm and any mind beyond devotion are absent.
Movement V
After about six and a quarter centuries the form is whole. Both panels survive, interiors and exteriors, with the composition entire, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Tempera and gold have held well for their age. The losses that can be named are in the colour, a darkening of some of the blues and a tarnishing of silver leaf, with the ordinary history of cleaning and conservation. The charge is presence: for most of its life the diptych was hidden in private collections and seen by few, until its exhibition and purchase in the early twentieth century. Since 1929 it has been on view in the National Gallery.
About a century of close study has not closed its questions. Who made it, an English painter, a French one, or one trained elsewhere at the English court. When, in Richard’s lifetime or as a memorial after his deposition and death. Whether it bears on a crusade, on his marriage to Isabella of France, on his coronation as a boy. Why eleven angels, and why the king is young. The questions are real, and largely iconographic and historical; formally the work is lucid and does not keep opening.
Among its neighbours it stands a tenth below The Tale of Genji Scrolls at 8.4, another court art of precious materials at small scale, though it beats them on The Inevitable, The Sublime, The Living Form, The Imperishable and The Inner Law and levels with them on The Archetypal Deep and The Made; the scrolls take The Unconcealment, The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition, the axes of consequence, and by most on the last. It stands a tenth above The Parliament of Fowls at 8.2, a court poem of the same decade and court, and three tenths below Westminster Abbey at 8.6, Richard’s chosen church and the shrine of the Confessor who presents him. The Arnolfini Portrait at 8.9, a generation later in the same northern world, and Rublev’s Trinity at 8.9 each changed their tradition, and the diptych did not; it stands five tenths above The Swing at 7.8, another perfectly made private picture of narrow reach, which it beats on every axis but The Made, where they are level. What holds it from the summit is swerve, reach and the breadth of what it discloses. What it has is heaven dressed in one man’s colours.
Act III · The Twelve
Taken element by element, the object resists subtraction to an unusual degree for its size. The king cannot go: the work exists for his kneeling. Each saint is a title to rule: Edmund, the martyred king of the East Angles; Edward, the royal saint of Westminster and the king’s chosen patron; John, who points to the Lamb. Remove one and a claim goes. The Child cannot go, since the whole exchange is his blessing; the banner cannot go, since it is what passes across the hinge. The angels in the king’s livery are the boldest element and the argument requires them. What yields is their number, whether eleven for a reason or a crowd to fill a field, and the flowers and trees are permitted ornament.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What can be stated is kingship as this court imagined it: a man made king by heaven’s acknowledgement and not by his barons, presented by saints who were kings and received by a queen of heaven whose household has taken his livery. The disclosure is of an ideology, held completely and without irony: sacral monarchy at its most private, the king alone at prayer and the whole of heaven in his colours. It holds outside the 1390s as a statement of how power dreams of itself, and a later viewer can see the vanity inside the devotion, which the picture did not intend. It stands below the upper band because it discloses one man’s claim more than a condition it can make general, and much of its force is lent by what is known of Richard’s fall.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation is real and of one register, a jewelled and rapt stillness. It rises across the right wing as a whole: eleven angels in a blue the more intense for its expense, crowding round the Virgin with wings raised, so that blue and gold read at a distance as a single radiance. It rises in the angels’ faces, tilted and attentive, several turned toward the king; in the gesture across the hinge, the Child leaning from his mother’s arms toward the kneeling man and the king’s open hands answering him across the gap; and in the gold ground of the left wing, tooled to catch light as the viewer moves. It never changes key. There is no terror and no grandeur of scale: beauty and transport at the scale of the hand.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is built, and it is in the structure. The diptych enacts the oldest pattern of royal religion: the king presented by intercessors before the throne of heaven, the earthly court and the heavenly court set face to face, the one an image of the other. The form carries the pattern: two courts on two panels, joined by a hinge and a gaze. The livery makes the archetype particular, for these angels are not generic hosts but Richard’s retainers. The banner carries a second pattern, the realm offered to heaven and given back. The three saints are the line of holy kingship made visible: martyr, confessor, forerunner. It is held below the gate because the type was made often in its period, and the work is its finest instance more than its maker.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is ordinary for the fourteenth century: the donor portrait, a kneeling patron presented by saints, common in Italian, French and Bohemian painting; the portable devotional diptych, common at the French court; the heraldic badge, common in livery. The departure is in their fusion. The donor is a reigning king, painted as a recognisable young man. The heavenly host is put into the patron’s livery, a step devotional painting rarely took so wholly. And the exchange is carried across the hinge, so that the gap between the panels is part of the subject. The stake was real but private: the object was made for one man’s use, not for a church or a public, and it risked no reception. It sharpens the court style toward personal myth more than it turns painting.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Substitute another form and much of what the work knows goes. The two panels are earth and heaven, and the hinge between them is the threshold the Child’s gesture and the king’s gaze cross: on a single panel the meeting would be a scene; on two it is an approach, a petition and an answer across a divide. The form is portable and closable. Shut, it shows the king’s emblem and his arms, his public face; opened, it shows his private claim. Its small size makes it an object held near the face by one viewer at prayer, and its meaning is that intimacy. The gold and blue are the substance of a heaven made of precious matter. It stands below the top because a single panel or an altarpiece wing carried the presentation of a patron almost as well.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: about a century of close study since 1929, and the questions have not closed. Who made it, an English painter, a French one, or one trained elsewhere and working at the English court. When, whether in Richard’s lifetime or as a memorial after his deposition and death. Whether the king is receiving the banner or giving it, and whether the realm is offered to the Virgin as a dowry. Whether it bears on a crusade, on his marriage to Isabella of France, on his coronation as a boy. Why eleven angels; why the king is young. The questions are real, but they are largely iconographic and historical. Formally the work is lucid and does not keep opening, and the axis stands below the upper eights for that.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is court painting in England and northern Europe in the 1390s, the International Gothic. The intrinsic force is high within the style: it is one of the finest panel paintings of its decade north of the Alps, and it shows that the court style could carry a personal political myth in devotional form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: small and late. It was a private object, in private hands for over five centuries, and it redirected no painters; English panel painting after it did not continue in its line, and the English court style it may represent is otherwise almost wholly lost. Since 1929 its reach is that of an emblem, the image by which medieval English painting and Richard’s kingship are known. That is presence, not redirection, and it lifts the axis only a little.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about six and a quarter centuries. Form: whole. Both panels survive, interiors and exteriors, with the composition entire; nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: hidden for most of its life in private collections and seen by few until its exhibition and purchase in the early twentieth century; since 1929 on view in the National Gallery and central to the image of its period. Fabric: tempera and gold have held well for their age; the losses that can be named are in the colour, a darkening of some of the blues and a tarnishing of silver leaf, with the ordinary history of cleaning and conservation. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, held in the middle of that row for the long concealment and the altered colour.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Command of egg tempera and gold on small panels, judged against the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The heaven of the right wing is made of its materials: ultramarine laid in quantity over the angels’ robes and the Virgin’s mantle, gold tooled and punched in patterns that change with the light, and the gold ground of the left wing worked with a pattern of its own. The drawing of the faces is fine and individual: the king’s profile, the saints’ grave heads, the angels’ tilted attention. The detail at minute scale, the hart badges, the broom pods, the brocade of the king’s robe, shows a command few painters of the decade matched. The costs: figures slender and boneless in the court manner, a shallow space on a strip of ground, and angels of one repeated type.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dark rocky ground and trees behind the king on the left, and the flowered meadow of paradise on the right. One law holds them. Everything in the diptych is ranked by its nearness to heaven, and heaven and earth are bound by one livery. The king’s hart and broom pods are worn by the angels; the saints carry their emblems as the angels carry the banner; the gold of earth’s ground and the gold of the haloes are one material; and the exteriors close the law, giving outside the emblem the angels wear within. Nothing in the object contradicts its argument or stands outside it. The range is real but bounded, earth and heaven, king and saints, one court and its double, and the figure stands below the top for the range.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held are several, and they are integrated, not listed. The sacred is there in the Virgin, the Child, the angels and the saints; the state and kingship in a reigning king and his badge; history and dynasty in Edmund and Edward, the realm’s royal saints; the person in a young man kneeling with open hands; the natural order in the meadow’s flowers, the trees and the hart. The livery binds the sacred to the state, and the saints bind history to the person. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family except as dynasty, the common life of the realm, and any consciousness beyond the posture of devotion. It holds more than a cabinet intrigue and less than a court. It clears its floor of 6.0 by a point and three tenths.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3 and The Made at 8.9, with The Inner Law at 8.7 and The Living Form at 8.6. A form whole after about six and a quarter centuries, both panels, inside and out; a heaven made of ultramarine and tooled gold, with minute work, badges, broom pods and brocade, that carries the argument; one law ranking everything by its nearness to heaven and binding earth to heaven in one livery; and a form, two panels and a hinge, open and closed, that makes the meeting an approach across a divide.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the sacred, the state, dynasty, the person and the natural world are integrated, and labour, the family beyond dynasty, the common life of the realm and any consciousness beyond devotion are absent. Above it, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: a fusion of inherited types made for one man’s private use, which risked no reception, redirected no painters and left no line, its reach since 1929 that of an emblem. Then The Unconcealment at 7.9: an ideology disclosed completely, but one man’s claim more than a general condition, and its force partly lent by knowledge of the king’s fall. They are one fact: a private object of the highest finish, made for one man’s eyes, whose argument is his own.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.3 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls short by two tenths, The Unconcealment at 7.9 by six tenths, and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 by nine tenths each. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which is exempted from the minimum, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. The twelve sum to 99.2, an average of 8.27 that displays 8.3, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, seven tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object as it now hangs in the National Gallery, London, and of its composition, its iconography and the main lines of the scholarly argument about it. No image or written source was consulted, and the surface at close range, its punch patterns, the state of its blues and its exact condition, was weighed with less confidence than the composition. The work scored is the diptych as one object: two hinged oak panels in egg tempera with gold leaf, both interiors and both exteriors, about 1395 to 1399, the date disputed, by a maker who is unknown, English or French, the attribution never settled. Bought by the National Gallery in 1929. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the donor portraits, devotional diptychs and court painting of the period, which are the inheritance, and the later image of Richard and of medieval English painting, which is reach. Cleaning, conservation and the changes in the colour are weighed only as facts of survival and are not charged to the painter. No words are quoted: the panels carry none that are given here. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the gallery’s inventory number, the exact dimensions of the panels and whether the frames are original, the plants on which the hart lies, the pattern of the gold ground of the left wing, the detail reported in the orb of the banner’s staff and the cleaning that revealed it, the dowry of the Virgin as a phrase tied to the panel, the saints’ days and feasts tied to the king, whether he is painted younger than he was, what the number of the angels was meant to count, and the course of the object’s ownership before its purchase and the house from which it takes its name.