(Oudewater 1450/60–1523 Bruges)
Virgin and Child with Angels,
oil on panel, 59 x 38.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
collection Martin Aufhäuser (1875-1944), Munich/Los Angeles;
confiscation of his collection by the Gestapo 18 November 1938;
confiscation of his whole property 15 April 1940;
transfer to Central Collecting Point Munich (MüNo. 36293) 23 July 1946;
transfer to Central Collecting Point Wiesbaden 25 May 1949;
restitution to the heirs of Martin Aufhäuser, 2 December 1949;
thence by descent;
sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 29 January 2016, lot 603;
where acquired by the present owner

The present panel depicting The Virgin and Child with Angels was likely executed in the first quarter of the sixteenth century by a master who most likely first trained in the Bruges workshop of Gerard David, before developing a style closer to the nascent ‘Antwerp Mannerist’ school - coined by M. J. Friedländer in his work Die Antwerpener Manieristen von 1520. The velvet canopy being turned back from the Virgin to the left and the round arched window opening onto a detailed townscape beyond find their echo in the rear side panel’s David’s Jan des Trompes Triptych conserved in the Groeningen Museum, Bruges. However, the figure of the Angel, its head twisted back and his gaze looking out of the picture plain, and the dynamic drapery over its raised arm, shows an awareness of artistic currents South of the Alps, such as the Angels raising and turning the canopy away in Piero della Francesca’s earlier work Madonna del Parto in Monterchi. Indeed, the marrying of the very Flemish gabled houses and the naturalistic illumination of their interior windows in the right background, coupled with an apparent knowledge of the concepts of Leon Battista Alberti, who in his De pictura famously recommended that a picture be as an open window through which the subject, sacred or profane, the historia, can be seen, is typical of the Antwerp coupling of both Northern and Italianate influences.