ABSTRACT
This chapter and the next investigate two instances in which Burgundian women fissured the masculine prerogative for devotional portrait diptychs in response to gender stereotypes and patriarchal controls. The painting treated here, by Jean Bellegambe, at first seems to fall easily into the standard pattern for the diptych type since the interior panels depict the customary male devotee, in this case a Cistercian cleric accompanied by the Order’s most acclaimed representative, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in prayer before the Virgin and Child (Color Plate VI and Figure 45). The reverse of the portrait panel, however, reveals an extraordinarily innovative feature for this location in such paintings: a portrait (Color Plate VII and Figure 46). This is only one of two known devotional portrait diptychs in which a portrait appears on an exterior wing; in the other, the Diptych of Chrétien de Hondt by the Master of 1499, the figure is Robert de Clercq, Chrétien de Hondt’s successor as abbot of Les Dunes. (Figures 47 and 48). What is even more striking is that in the Flines diptych, the portrait does not represent a man but rather a woman.
