The present paper deals again with the topic of the origins of altarpiece, which the bulk of specialists have almost exclusively confined in the field of pictorial production. But by considering certain enamelled gold or silver realizations from IXth to XIIIth centuy, it appears that they display achievements as well foreboding the central and late Middle Ages apparatus ; this, as to the transition from the altarfront to the piece set on the top of the table itself, as to its various modes of articulation and, equally, as to its iconographical content. However, it is not intended here to reject the sources traditionally alleged for the genesis and first development of painted altarpiece in Gothic Italy ; but in other spheres of the Western world, the items here taken in account had a very decisive part in emergence, even prior enough, of solutions of the same order.
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