What Is That Strip of Tiny Paintings Along the Bottom? The Part Nobody Looks At

A large altarpiece consists of one or more main panels showing holy figures, standing or enthroned and largely motionless, mounted above a horizontal strip divided into several small compartments. That strip is the base, physically supporting the structure and visually terminating it, and each compartment holds a separate small scene. Because the altarpiece sits on an altar table, the strip lands roughly at the eye level of anybody standing in front of it, while the main panels rise well above, which reverses the usual relationship between size and visibility.

The subjects follow a consistent logic across the tradition:

• •Narrative scenes from the life of the saint shown above
• •Episodes from the life of Christ, particularly the passion
• •Miracles attributed to the figure being honoured
• •The donor and their family, occasionally at one end
• •Small scenes explaining why this saint mattered here
• •Never a static devotional image, which belonged above

The division of labour in a workshop pushed quality downwards in an unexpected direction. The large figures above were governed by convention and by the patron's contract, which specified poses, gold and expensive pigments, leaving little room for invention. The small scenes below were narrative, so the painter had to invent settings, arrange crowds, handle architecture and perspective and tell a story in a small space, and being less conspicuous they attracted less interference. Many of the most inventive passages in fourteenth and fifteenth century Italian painting are therefore found in these strips, and art historians study them closely for exactly that reason.

The strip is one component of a structure whose parts all have names, and knowing them makes a museum label readable. The main field holds the principal figures, divided into compartments by columns or left as one space. Above it a row of smaller panels or pinnacles may rise, frequently with half-length figures. Slender columns separate the compartments and carry an entablature. The whole sits in a carved and gilded frame that was usually made first, by a different craftsman, with the panels painted to fit it. Contracts survive specifying the frame in more detail than the pictures.

Very few survive attached to the structure they belonged to, and the reason is commercial. From the eighteenth century onwards dealers found that a large gilded altarpiece was hard to sell and that individual small panels were easy, so structures were dismantled and the compartments sold separately. A single original work may now have its main panel in one country and its small scenes scattered across four or five museums, sometimes unrecognised as belonging together. Reconstructing these assemblies from dimensions, wood grain, saw marks and the direction of the light in each scene is a recognised speciality, and matches are still being made.

The narrow strip at the base of an altarpiece carried small narrative scenes at the eye level of anybody standing before it, while the large static figures rose out of comfortable view above. Being less conspicuous and requiring invented settings and storytelling, those scenes frequently contain a painter's best work. Dealers dismantled most of them, so the parts are now scattered across museums.