Polyptych

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Polyptych

A polyptych (from the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
polu- "many" + ptyche "fold") generally refers to a painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting....
(usually panel painting

Panel painting

A panel painting is a painting on a panel made of wood, either a single piece, or a number of pieces joined together. Until canvas became the more popular support medium in the 16th century, it was the normal form of support for a painting not on a wall or on vellum, which was used for miniature in illuminated manuscripts and also for pa...
) which is divided into four or more sections, or panels. (The term diptych

Diptych

A diptych is any object with two flat plates attached at a hinge. Devices of this form were quite popular in the ancient world, types existing for recording notes and for measuring time and direction....
is used to describe a two-part painting and the term triptych

Triptych

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A polyptych (from the Greek

Greek language

Painting

Panel painting

Diptych

Triptych

A triptych is a work of art which is divided into three sections, or three Wood carving panels which are hinged together and folded. It is therefore a type of polyptych, the term for all multi-panel works; the diptych has two panels....
describes a three-part painting. The terms tetraptych (4 parts), pentaptych (5), hexaptych (6), heptaptych (7), and octaptych (8) are also sometimes used.)

Polyptych may also be used to refer collectively to all multi-panel paintings. In most works there is a larger central panel called the "main panel", and the other panels are called "side-panels", and also "wings". Sometimes, as at Ghent or Isenheim, the hinged panels can be arranged in different ways to show different "views" or "openings."

Polyptychs were most common with early Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
painters, and the majority of polyptychs were designed to be altarpiece

Altarpiece

An altarpiece is a picture or relief representing a religious subject and suspended in a frame behind the altar of a church. The altarpiece is often made up of two or more separate panels created using a technique known as panel painting....
s in churches and cathedral

Cathedral

A cathedral is a Christian church that contains the seat of a bishop. It is a Religion building for worship, specifically of a denomination with an episcopal hierarchy, such as the Roman Catholic Church, Anglicanism, Orthodox Christian and some Lutheranism churches, which serves as a bishop's seat, and thus as the central church of a dioc...
s. The form was also quite popular among ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e

, "pictures of the floating world", is a genre of Japanese woodblock printing and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre and pleasure quarters....
printmakers of Edo period

Edo period

The , or , is a division of History of Japan running from 1603 to 1868. The period marks the governance of the Edo or Tokugawa shogunate, which was officially established in 1603 by the first Edo shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu....
Japan.

Examples of polyptychs include:

The Ghent Altarpiece
Ghent Altarpiece

The Ghent Altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is a very large and complex Early Netherlandish painting polyptych panel painting which was once in the Joost Vijdt chapel at Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium, but was later moved for security reasons to the chapel of the cathedral....
, completed 1432 by Hubert van Eyck
Hubert van Eyck

Hubert van Eyck was a Flemings Painting and older brother of Jan van Eyck.The date of his birth and the records of his progress are lost amidst the ruins of the earlier civilization of the valley of the Meuse River....
and Jan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck

Jan van Eyck or Johannes de Eyck was an Early Netherlandish painting active in Bruges and considered one of the best Northern European painters of the 15th century....
- probably the most famous polyptych
The Isenheim Altarpiece
Isenheim Altarpiece

The Isenheim Altarpiece is an altarpiece painted by the German artist Matthias Gr?newald between 1512 and 1516. It is on display at the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar, Alsace, now in France....
by Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald

Matthias Gr?newald or "Mathis" , "Gothart" or "Neithardt" , , was an important German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century....
The Saint Vincent Panels
Saint Vincent Panels

The Saint Vincent Panels, or The 'Adoration of Saint Vincent' panels, are a polyptych consisting of six panels that were painted in the 1460s. They are attributed to the Portuguese people Painting Nuno Gon?alves who was active from 1450 to 1471....
(1470-1480) by Nuno Gonçalves
Nuno Gonçalves

Nuno Gon?alves was a 15th century Portugal artist credited for the painting of the paineis de S?o Vicente de Fora . The panels depict the main elements of Portuguese society in the 15th century: clergy, nobility and common person....
Polyptych of the Misericordia (1445–1462) by Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca was an Italian artist of the Italian Renaissance. To contemporaries, he was known as a mathematician and geometer as well as an artist, though now he is chiefly appreciated for his art....
The Last Judgment Polyptych (1450) by Rogier van der Weyden
Saint Augustine Polyptych (1470) by Perugino
The Demidoff Altarpiece (1476), by Carlo Crivelli
Carlo Crivelli

Carlo Crivelli was an Italy Renaissance painter of conservative Late Gothic decorative sensibility, who spent his career mostly in the Marche, where he absorbed early influences from the Vivarini, Francesco Squarcione and Mantegna into a distinctive personal style that makes a contrast to his Venetian contemporary Giovanni Bellini....
St. Dominic Polyptych (1506–08) by Lorenzo Lotto
Lorenzo Lotto

Lorenzo Lotto was a Northern Italy Painting draughtsman and illustrator, traditionally placed in the Venetian school. He painted mainly altarpieces, religious subjects and portraits....

In comic books and comic strips a polyptych is a strip, or even an entire comic page, in which the background forms a continuous image even though it may be divided into separate panels; a good example is The Perishers

The Perishers

The Perishers was a United Kingdom comic strip about a group of urban children and a dog. It began in the Daily Mirror in 1958 and was written for most of its life by Maurice Dodd ....
, which often uses polyptychs divided into three panels.

Polyptych

Reconstruction of Bosch polyptch