«Un saint noble », Antoine ou Gilles? Additions à un cycle hagiographique peint à Bruxelles au début du XVIe siècle

The present article discusses a cycle of the life of Saint Gilles painted in Brussels in the first quarter of the 16th century. Components of this cycle were three fragmentary panels, today in Toledo (Hospital de San Juan Bautista) and in Lille (Palais des Beaux-Arts); a panel was sold in London in 1976; and another divided between the United States and the Netherlands (New Orleans Museum of Art and 's-Heerenberg, Stichting Huis Bergh). The reconstruction proposed, for the mostpart new, is based on physical, formal, stylistic and iconographie evidence. The ensemble was commissioned through the initiative of a Carmelite (from Brussels?) whose identity is unknown. He must have been the one who developed the iconographical program and composed one of the most complete cycles of Saint Gilles to have survived. He consulted, in particular, the life of the saint drawn up by the Normand cleric Guillaume de Berneville in the second half of the 12th century. The painter seems to have closely followed the instructions, which might have been especially detailed, of the well read "designer." There did exist, it is true, in Brussels, a strong tradition when it came to narrative painting, a tradition established in 1440 by Rogier van der Weyden, whose famous Tableaux de Justice painted for the town hall constituted, until their destruction in 1695, one of the most illustrious works of the ancient Netherlands.SCOPUS: re.j