ABSTRACT
The recently restored fourteenth-century triptych from Polesden Lacey is an impressive and unusual object (Fig. 15.1).1 Even if its shape and wooden frame clearly indicate that it was intended for use in a Latin devotional context, as a votive offering or visual counterpart to an individual’s practice of prayer, viewers can clearly see that the painting displays a rather shattering mixture of Gothic Italianate and Byzantine forms. This is revealed by its vivid chromatic scale, the selection of both Eastern and Western saints, and the use of such stylistic features as the Palaiologan way of modelling faces combined with the introduction of formulae (especially in the rendering of folds) borrowed from the Giottoesque repertory. Previously considered to be the product of such a border area as the Dalmatian coast, it was then seen to be a work made either in Venice or Constantinople by a Byzantine painter working for a Latin patron in the first half of the fourteenth century; more recently, Rebecca Corrie has assumed that it was painted for the royal court of Naples by a Greek itinerant artist working in either Rome, Siena, or Naples itself in the second quarter of the century.2 On the whole, the triptych’s historiographical vicissitudes reveal scholarly embarrassment with an artwork whose stylistic features and historical determination prove elusive.
