SIR, I was gratified to read the highly favourable review by Carl Brandon Strehlke (January 2010, pp.41–42) of the Meadows Museum’s publication Fernando Gallego and his Workshop: the Altarpiece from Ciudad Rodrigo, Paintings from the Collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, London 2008. I did want to correct, however, one common misconception expressed by Mr Strehlke, namely that in this period it would have been difficult to change the components of an altarpiece once assembled and installed in a church. In fact, there are numerous fifteenth-­century altarpieces in Central Spain, including the main 

altarpiece in the old Cathedral of Salamanca, which Fernando Gallego probably saw daily, and that by Fernando Gallego and his workshop for Santa María la Mayor in Trujillo, in which original panels have been replaced. In Santa Maria, which dates from the 1480s and 1490s, a Crucifixion was removed to make way for a tabernacle in 1545, and an original Flagellation was replaced by a sixteenth-century Descent from the cross.

It would have been a simple matter to accomplish the changes. Claire Barry, Amanda Dotseth and I visited Santa Maria la Mayor accompanied by our colleagues Araceli Gabaldón, Tomás Antelo and Carmen Vega from the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España in Madrid. Our Spanish colleagues provided access to the back of the altarpiece through a door from its front leading to a small chamber where a staircase leads to the top, and each panel’s attachment to the frame can be seen. Their marvellous work, with instructive reproductions of the backs of the panels, was published as ‘Fernando Gallego en Trujillo: estudios físicos’, Bienes Culturales: Revista del Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España 8 (2008), pp.61–74. 

Of course, this does not mean that the altarpiece from Ciudad Rodrigo was necessarily altered after its initial completion. But if the inscription dating its completion in 1488 was correct, that is what would have happened. If incorrect, the entire altarpiece would have been completed a decade or so later, during a per­iod of serious turmoil that would surely have prompted the inclusion of the unusual eschatological subjects in the iconographic programme combined with the more common New Testament episodes.