“BAFFLING”; “You wouldn’t make a film of it”; “What is happening?”

In the flurry of comments at the opening party of the Sainsbury Wing, reopened at the National Gallery as the culminating celebration of 200 years, there was no mistaking confusion, perplexity, and downright astonishment at the most recently acquired work, now on display in Room 53 and hanging alongside Gossaert’s Adoration of the Magi (NG 2780) (News, 9 May).

Jean Gossaert (c.1478-1532) came from Maubeuge, but the whereabouts of the Gossaert work before 1600, when it was reportedly in a Benedictine abbey south of Ghent at Grammont, is unknown. The National Gallery acquired it in 1911 from the estate of the 9th Earl of Carlisle.

Now the National Gallery has acquired another Burgundian altarpiece from a British private collection, paying £16.24 million in a deal brokered by Sotheby’s. As with the Gossaert, it is not known where the work was commissioned; it was first documented in 1602, in a Premonstratensian Priory in Ghent. Gossaert signed his work twice, on the collar of the black king’s attendant and on that king’s hat. The new work is neither signed nor dated.

In 2014, Lorne Campbell published his comprehensive 856-page two-volume catalogue that grouped the 16th-century Netherlandish paintings in the National Gallery with French paintings before 1600, offering comprehensive coverage of Burgundian works. Although many of the paintings that Campbell considered are rarely on display, reference to the catalogue does not fully explain the present composition’s awkward angularity or its purpose.

The altarpiece is painted on Baltic oak; French artists of the period apparently preferred using locally sourced wood, which suggests that this is a Netherlandish piece.

Examination of the wooden panel shows that it is from a tree felled around 1483. The chivalric chain of the Order of St Michael with which St Louis is vested predates 1516, when King Francis I altered the decoration.

The Virgin and Child are seated enthroned under a richly embroidered testa with a cloth of state worked in bright green and gold with the double-headed eagle of the Empire. To one side, St Margaret of Antioch kneels, half emerging from the back of the defeated dragon that is by no means overthrown. Indeed, the dragon’s snarling maw, with six sharp incisors, and rolling eyes are at the very centre of the composition, terrifying us as we pass by.

On the opposite side of the composition stands an elderly figure, vested in a robe of deep blue, richly worked with fleur-de-lis and with an ermine collar, and wearing an open crown above his ermine-trimmed cap. This is St Louis (1214-70) of France. Although it is clearly a portrait, it bears no relationship to images that we have of the Capetian king.

None of the figures, nor of the two angels that stand either side of the throne behind the saints, is in any sense conventional. I can think of no other altarpiece in which the Christ-child holds a chaffinch upside down as he prepares to rip off one of its wings. His face, which looks as if he has Bell’s palsy, turns towards St Louis, who wisely ignores him.

Once we come closer, we see that he stands one step below St Margaret on the opposite side of the picture. Usually, attendant saints would be painted in parallel, but here there is a clear disparity, almost as if the figure of St Louis were that of a donor.

The Virgin’s throne is raised on what would appear to be a temporary scaffold. Maybe, as the gallery’s own notice suggests, this is intended to prefigure death, as if Christ were seated above the wood of the cross. The rough planks are in stark contrast to the delicately carved capitals of the eight columns, depicting variously Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, and other Old Testament scenes.

More troubling perhaps is the sheer indifference on the face of St Margaret. Almost as if she were exhausted by posing for the artist, her face is drained of any emotion, even though she has just triumphed over the devilish dragon. On her left shoulder perches an angry-looking bird of prey, with a sharp yellow beak, scarcely the dove reported in The Golden Legend of 1298.

By the side of the throne stand two youthful angels, one playing a jaw harp, the other holds up an open songbook, with the Marian anthem Ave Regina Caelorum, Mater regis angelorum, at an angle that no one in the composition can read.

The Virgin, in a red robe, delicately holds a carnation in her left hand. She looks down demurely as if unaware of the hostile, silent world around her.

It will no doubt prompt and encourage many interpretations now that it is in public view. The director of the National Gallery told me that he had had it already suggested to him that it might be related to a panel in the Ringling Art Museum, in Florida. No doubt, other more likely compositions will come to mind. But who would have commissioned such an irreverent, and almost unacceptable, item for personal devotion?
 

The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret is in Room 53 of the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2. Phone 020 7747 2885. www.nationalgallery.org.uk