Memory, Making, and Duty in the Remaclus Retable of Stavelot

Abstract

A seventeenth-century drawing now preserved in the Archives de l’État, Liège, records what must have been a spectacular retable from the Benedictine abbey of Stavelot, Belgium, made under the abbot Wibald in the middle of the twelfth century. Containing a series of images from the life of the founder of the abbey, Remaclus, the retable also had two intriguing inscriptions wrapping around its edge. One named Abbot Wibald as patron and recounted the object’s cost; the other listed a series of properties held by the monastery. Though the drawing has long been treasured by art historians as witness to an early altarpiece, the way in which the retable presents its own making has not been analyzed. This essay examines the perimeter texts, two surviving medallions depicting the personifications of Fides and Operatio, and the themes of the narrative images to reconsider how the production of the retable was presented to, and remembered for, its public, a community of lay, aristocratic, and monastic viewers. The imagery and inscriptions of this altar, I suggest, reveal themes of obligation that extend beyond the abbot to the community at large, and cast the making of the object as the fulfillment of Christian duty.