Provenance

Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands

died 1530

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A woman wearing a long, royal-blue dress is surrounded by nine winged angels as she floats on a thin, bright white, downward-pointing crescent moon above a deep landscape with a town tucked into rolling hills in this vertical painting. The woman, Mary, and all the angels have pale, peachy skin and long, brown hair. Mary and the angels float against a pale yellow and pale peach field of light enclosed within a mass of steel-gray clouds. She presses her fingertips together in front of her chest and gazes down and to our right, her dark eyes almost closed. She has a delicate, straight nose, and her small mouth is closed. Her brown hair parts in the middle and flows down over her shoulders. The angels wear flowing gowns in sky or topaz blue, olive green, tangerine orange, white, or light pink, each with matching wings. Three angels place a gold crown on Mary's head. Four others hold up the edges of a silvery white cape, which is fastened across her shoulders with brooches of white pearls surrounding ruby-red stones. The final two angels hold up the downward-facing points of the crescent moon beneath her. In the landscape below, groupings of trees are dotted among the rolling hills, with a village in the distance to our left. The blue, hazy horizon comes about a sixth of the way up the composition. A brown boulder sits in the bottom left corner, closer to us. The paint is visibly cracked throughout.
Michel Sittow, The Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1500, oil on panel, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1965.1.1

The Assumption of the Virgin

Michel Sittow · c. 1500 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1965.1.1

To our right, a man with a long, pointed beard, wearing a fawn-brown, hooded robe, walks toward a second bearded man, to our left, wearing a cobalt-blue robe and sitting on a stone slab in front of a deep landscape, in this vertical painting. Both men have pale skin and brown hair. The man to our right faces our left in profile, and has two sharp, bone-white horns curving back from the top of his head and a claw-like, webbed foot protruding from under the hem of his monk’s robe. He has a prominent, hooked nose, sunken eyes, and he seems to look ahead, into the distance. He clutches a strand of large beads hanging from his waist with his right hand, farther from us, and holds a round, loaf-sized stone in his other hand. The body of the seated man, to our left, faces us but he turns to look off to our right with dark eyes. His left hand, to our right, rests in his lap and his other hand is raised, palm facing the walking man. Rocks and boulders lie on the ground between and around the men. Behind them, a grassy meadow dotted with tiny white flowers slopes down to a line of trees with olive-green leaves, tucked beyond the hill. One tall, spindly tree grows behind the horned man and a bird perches, wings spread, on the top. A steep, rocky cliff rises behind the seated man, to our left. Two strokes of light blue and pale beige suggest two people standing atop the cliff. Beyond, a city with tan-colored stone buildings and blue mountains are hazy in the distance. Atop a tower in the city, the pair of men appear again, with the man in brown gesturing down and the man in blue looking on. Three more birds fly across the sky, which deepens from a misty white near the mountaintops in the background to azure blue along the top edge of the panel. The surface of the painting has visible long, mostly vertical cracks throughout.
Juan de Flandes, The Temptation of Christ, c. 1500/1504, oil on panel, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1967.7.1

The Temptation of Christ

Juan de Flandes · c. 1500/1504 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1967.7.1

Bibliography

1839

  • le Glay, Andre Joseph Ghislain. Correspondence de Maximilien Ier et de Marguerite d'Autriche..., 2 vols. (Paris, 1839) 2: 481-482.