TOGETHER AGAIN

FOR nearly 30 years, Medieval Art Expert James J. Rorimer has been intrigued by the strange similarity of two superb 15th-century tapestries. In both of them, the same principal characters were prominently featured. Their borders were identical in design, and each had been restored along one side. But the two sections did not fit together, and Rorimer began to suspect that there was a missing middle section. Last year he found just what he was looking for in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. Brought together, the three sections matched perfectly in design, color and thread count.

This week the reassembled tapestry went on view at the Metropolitan Museum's medieval showroom, The Cloisters, of which Rorimer is director. The tapestry, a sumptuous rectangle 30 ft. long by 11ft. high, has been named The Glorification of Charles VIII, King of France from 1483 to 1498. The detail reproduced on the opposite page, less than a third of the whole, shows the magnificence that the medieval artist, believed to have been Jan van Roome of Brussels, put into his work.

To please his royal patrons, who liked to identify themselves with famous forebears or Biblical characters, the artist worked out his scenes as a series of allegories. In the main scene, Charles is shown as a monarch of France, and the lady with crossed arms before him is his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, who ruled as regent from Louis XI's death in 1483 until Charles came of age. But the scene they are acting is thought to be a Biblical one: the meeting either of King Ahasuerus and Esther or of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Charles' illustrious forebear, the Emperor Charlemagne, is in the small panel at the upper right, labeled "Karlus." In the large lower right-hand panel, the artist has illustrated a popular medieval legend. He shows Emperor Octavian asking the Tiburtine sibyl whether any king as great as he would ever live; the sibyl replies by showing the Emperor a vision of the Christ Child.

Rorimer believes that the tapestry was probably commissioned by Charles VIII's father-in-law, the Emperor Maximilian of Austria, as a gift to the young King, who, at the age of 12, had married Maximilian's daughter, three-year-old Margaret. The tapestry was cut into three sections sometime before the middle of the 19th century, and the various parts found their separate ways to the U.S. The Metropolitan got the right section as a bequest in 1941; last year it traded the Walters Art Gallery another fine tapestry for the center section; the left part was bought from a Manhattan dealer with funds provided by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Carefully cleaned and put together again, the tapestry turned out to be one of the most beautiful works of its kind ever brought to the U.S.

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