Flemish school, ca. 1500.

Flemish school, ca. 1500.
"St. John the Baptist, Crowned Virgin and St. Roch".
Carved wood, polychrome and gilded.
The composition of the altarpiece is from the XIX-XX.
The central sculpture is an element of the same period but from a different hand than the whole.
It presents cracks and losses and faults in the pictorial layer.
Measurements: 83 x 32 x 21 cm (free-standing carving); 157 x 155 x 25 cm.

This Flemish altarpiece has two original sculptures (high reliefs) and a free-standing Virgin (in the central niche) of the same period but of different manufacture and origin. It is structured as a triptych of architectural type, whose forms denote a taste typical of the international gothic, it presents pointed and trilobed arches topped by elaborate tracery, while the figures are raised on plinths with ribs. The Virgin Mary carries in her left hand an open volume of the Gospels, symbol of wisdom and incarnation of the Word, while with her right hand she shows an open palm, a gesture of offering or blessing. Her mantle, carved with angular and deep folds (characteristic of Flemish sculpture of the end of the 15th century), descends in broken forms that confer verticality and solemnity to the whole. The face, with a clear forehead, languid gaze and delicately drawn lips, reflects a melancholic sweetness that refers to the ideal of spiritualized beauty of the modern devotio. To his left is Saint Roque, a young pilgrim who raises his tunic to show the plague sore on his thigh, accompanied by his faithful dog. The expression of his face, between resigned and contemplative, emphasizes his protective character against epidemics, so frequent in the late medieval cult. On the right, St. John the Baptist appears in his usual iconography, half-covered in his pellicle and accompanied by the Agnus Dei (the Lamb of God), to whom he points while holding a phylactelia with the inscription Ecce Agnus Dei. The dynamics of the gesture and the inclusion of the text turn the figure into a theological bridge between the Old and New Testaments, insisting on his role as a precursor of the Messiah. The saint's anatomy, meticulously worked, suggests a knowledge of the human body that begins to emerge in this late medieval period, although still contained by the stylization of international Gothic. The figures of St. Roch and St. John the Baptist dialogue with each other, harmonizing in their postures, in slight contrapposto, and in the gesture of pointing the finger at the respective creature that gives meaning to their iconography.