You may think the frame is an afterthought compared to the painting it contains—added by the purchaser to hold the art and attach it to the wall—but historically frames have been designed and made by notable architects, master sculptors, and artist-gilders, as well as artists themselves, and have enjoyed periods when they cost as much as, or more than, the paintings they contained. Today the history of frames is a respectable and growing area of research, and in recent years there have been several important frame exhibitions in various countries.
One, Exceptional Picture Frames, closed recently at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, but can still be seen on the museum’s website. It includes the illusionary stone and marble frames that Jan van Eyck painted into his famous Annunciation Diptych. At the Prado, also in Madrid, curators have created a “frame trail.” around the museum, with added frame-specific information on wall labels for select masterworks from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, as well as a new webpage dedicated to frames in the museum’s collection.
You can visit Framed! European Picture Frames from the Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through the spring. The curator Tara Contractor and frame conservators Chris Ferguson and Nicolette Absil have produced an imaginative and beautifully displayed introduction to the functions, styles, decoration, and symbolism of frames through thirteen examples from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth—French, Italian, Dutch, and British—some containing paintings and some empty. An arched tabernacle frame of about 1480, which would have held a painting of the Madonna and Child, is ornamented with gilt scrolls on either side carved with roses, a tribute of the Virgin. Next to it is what may be an original sixteenth-century Italian altarpiece frame (or is it a very good nineteenth-century imitation, made of antique wood?) carved with dolphins, which may stand for Christ, or perhaps indicate its Venetian origin.
The two small frames alongside (one from seventeenth-century Italy; the other from the Netherlands, 1500s) have been chosen to match the periods of their contents, but they are also extremely decorative in their own right, as well as functional, using polychromy and gilding to focus attention on the pictures, and as a foil to the painted colors. Panels of gold decoration set up invisible focal lines—diagonal and cruciform—which help to draw the eye to the center of each painting; red on the Italian frame contrasts with the green of the landscape it contains.
Frames may help to illuminate the history of the paintings they contain. The neoclassical frame for Two Dutch Vessels Close-Hauled in a Strong Breeze by Willem van de Velde the Younger “tells us about the painting’s time in France in the eighteenth century, likely in an aristocratic residence,” Contractor says. She points out the luxurious 1907 Gothic revival frame made for Saint Nicholas of Tolentino by Piermatteo Lauro de’Manfredi da Amelia (active 1467–1503), which, as something both fashionable and period-appropriate to the painting it contains, is “such a snapshot into the reception of early Renaissance art at the turn of the century, and the way that altarpiece fragments were being reframed to hang in Gilded Age mansions.” The twentieth-century frame has been inscribed (although with the wrong name!), just as the arched tabernacle frame has a dedication to the Virgin, and van Eyck’s frames are “carved” with the words of the Archangel Gabriel and Mary.
This brings us to a final exhibition, which opened in the fall in Berlin. Framing Emptiness runs until March in the gallery of Olaf Lemke, one of the world’s great collectors of and dealers in antique frames. He is curating it with his daughter, Tanja Lemke-Mahdavi, who has, as she says, “been engaged with inscribed Renaissance frames for years—first out of love for typography, later out of enthusiasm for the ‘stories’ that pictures, frames, and inscriptions tell.”
Together, father and daughter have assembled twenty-six examples of inscribed frames (Italian and Spanish) from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The frames are empty of paintings, but each contains a transcription in German of the words that decorate them. In the online version of the exhibition, you can read a literal transcription of the original Latin or Spanish, along with an English translation: quotations originating from the Bible, but now appearing like enigmatic fragments of poems. Abstract, poignant, and tantalizing, the frames are like vacant mansions, meticulously crafted and seeking the paintings they once explained, ornamented, and made whole.
– Lynn Roberts
LYNN ROBERTS is a picture frame historian, and the creator and editor of The Frame Blog theframeblog.com.
Exceptional Picture Frames • Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (online) • museothyssen.org Museo del Prado, Madrid • museodelprado.es
Framed! European Picture Frames from the Johnson Collection • Philadelphia Museum of Art • through spring 2025 • philamuseum.org
Framing Emptiness • Antike Rahmen, Berlin • to March 25 •antike- rahmen.de
