When a painter died or left town, the church or the prince who had paid for the work still wanted it delivered. So someone else picked up the brush, sometimes the next month, sometimes decades later.
Eleven of the twelve works below were finished by a second hand. On some of these walls and panels, it is still hard to tell where the first hand stopped and the next one began.
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How These Were Chosen
In the workshops of medieval and Renaissance Europe, a painting finished by someone else was nothing unusual. Altarpieces, chapels and prayer books were paid for by a church, a religious brotherhood or a prince, and what they paid for was a finished work, not a particular hand.
Even in his lifetime, a master rarely worked alone, and assistants painted parts of his pictures. When he died or left, a brother, a colleague or a pupil took over the commission, often working from his drawings.
Eleven of these works were begun by one artist and carried on by another. The twelfth, at number 7, is the exception: there a second painter started over on a new panel. The list counts down from number 12, the work begun earliest, up to the most recent. Where scholars disagree about who painted what, the entry says so.
12. The Limbourg Brothers, Barthélemy d'Eyck and Jean Colombe, Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (about 1411 to about 1485)
The oldest story on the list starts in a book. On the February page of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, peasants warm themselves by a fire while snow covers the farm outside. The page is part of the calendar of the book, twelve painted pages that follow the months of the year.
The book is a prayer book of 206 parchment leaves, kept today in a museum at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. Its calendar was not painted by a single generation of artists, and the story of how the book was completed fills most of the fifteenth century.
Books like this one were made for the very rich, and their pictures, called miniatures, were the work of specialists. Around 1411, Jean I, Duke of Berry, an uncle of the king of France, gave the commission to three brothers, Paul, Johan and Herman Limbourg.
The brothers had not finished when, in 1416, the duke died, and all three of them died the same year, probably of plague. The half-painted book then passed from owner to owner, with its empty pages waiting.
In the 1440s, the painter Barthélemy d'Eyck took it up again, and the September page, with its grape harvest, is his work. Around 1485, Jean Colombe, the third painter to work on the calendar, added the November page and completed the book for Charles I, Duke of Savoy, who had inherited it.
So the twelve months now show three hands side by side: the Limbourgs' pages, d'Eyck's September and Colombe's November, the last of them painted some seventy years after the brothers began.
At a Glance
Artist: Paul, Johan and Herman Limbourg, then Barthélemy d'Eyck and Jean Colombe
Made: Commissioned about 1411, completed about 1485
Medium: Illuminated manuscript on parchment
Size: 29 × 21 cm (11.4 × 8.3 in), 206 leaves
Where to see it: Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, France
11. Hubert and Jan van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (1432)
In Flanders, a few years later, two brothers shared a single altarpiece. On the frame of the Ghent Altarpiece, four lines of painted Latin verse name them and rank them. Yet the order the verse gives them is not the one the paint tells.