A Choir of Angels: From Left Hand Shutter

These musical angels were originally at the top of the left shutter of the St Bertin altarpiece, an elaborate altarpiece that sat on the high altar of the Abbey of St Bertin in Saint-Omer, northern France. Beneath these angels, Guillaume Fillastre, abbot of St Bertin, once knelt at prayer inside a Gothic building – you can see its top at the bottom of this panel. The top of the right shutter is The Soul of Saint Bertin carried up to God; the main parts of the shutters are now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, and show scenes from the life of Saint Bertin.On the back of this panel is the top part of a Gothic stone canopy painted in grisaille, identical to that on the other wing. The designs for both were transferred onto the panel by pouncing from the same pricked cartoon. When the wings were closed, the stone canopies on the backs of the two panels covered the top part of the central Crucifixion and appeared to project above the niche enclosing the grisaille Annunciation.Three angels play instruments that look like shawms, a Renaissance forerunner of the oboe, made of brass – or possibly even gold – rather than wood. The symbols on the scroll held by the two lower angels are not real musical notation and were never readable. Technical analysis show that the artist was working out the design, or at least adapting it, as he went: the angels‘ instruments, heads, wings and draperies were all changed between the underdrawing stage and the final painted version.The unpainted edges at the tops and sides are original but at the lower edges the paint and ground has been scraped away. This took place in 1822/3 when our fragments were cut off their panels by a French dealer who thought their unusual shape would have been ’disagreeable' in a picture gallery.