A Trapped Body or a Living Stone? The Case of Grisaille and Demi-grisaille Paintings by Hans Memling

The en grisaille convention appeared in painting at the beginning of the fourteenth century in Italy, although it was already known in Antiquity – for instance, it is mentioned by Pliny the Elder, who calls it “monochromata.” It was quickly adopted by the French painters, especially illuminators. In the early fifteenth century, Dutch artists began to use it as well to decorate the closed wings of altarpieces with images imitating stone carvings. Monochrome was also used by Hans Memling, who introduced several innovations to this technique. There are several variants of monochrome in his works; though it should also be noted that he did not always use it. In almost all of his works, Memling gave the figures painted en grisaille an ambiguous character. They combine in varying proportions the qualities of living, corporeal beings and at the same time the qualities of a stone sculpture. They are also materially different from the accompanying lay persons and various accessories painted in multicolour. The reverses are fundamentally different from the open versions of the retables, where the scale and intensity of colour is incomparably richer; moreover, they are shallower in space and more modestly arranged. One of the most salient features of retables with movable wings is the transformation that takes place in the process of opening them. In Memling’s work, it has several stages: it begins with the closed wings, where, by means of illusion, the stone is transformed into a figure and the sculpture into a painting; it is then followed by a further, more radical stage after the opening of the wings: sacred reality appears in its full material and colour dimension, close to, but not identical to, the empirical world. The transformations of form, colour, and conventions that occur in Memling’s retables cannot be explained by purely liturgical considerations; such may have come into play in the large retables from Gdańsk and Lübeck intended to furnish chapels, while the small triptychs served private devotions and very possibly functioned in secular spaces. What is certain is that Memling’s monochrome images have an indeterminate status both in terms of their materiality – they are neither stone nor living being – and in terms of their genre – they are neither an imitation of a sculpture nor a painting, or in other words: they are at once stone and living beings, imitation sculpture and direct painting. This precarious state of the permanent intermingling of matter and means of expression made it all the more inviting to open the wings in order to find there – in the open retable – the solution to the riddle posed by the images outside.