Accessing the Divine: Private Devotional Diptychs and Triptychs of Fifteenth-Century Flanders (thesis)

Abstract

Diptychs were not static portraits but rather functioning objects.' They demanded active viewer participation and contemplation. Yet, the diptych represents a very specific genre that developed because of the religious climate in the Low Countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When this climate changed by the middle of the sixteenth century, diptychs fell out of favor as the Reformation took hold.2 The images survived as artistic evidence of the precursors to the Protestant conception of individual piety. [From the Conclusion]