4. Early Netherlandish painting (15-16th c.)

The picture, awaiting restoration, is an interesting example of Netherlandish Renaissance painting. Two donors, a bourgeois couple, kneel in the foreground and hold a rosary. It is not known which of the three represented male saints may be the man’s patron saint. In an unusual way, all the three saints are shown in the context of their legends: Saint Roch with the angel curing his wound and the dog bringing him food, Saint Anthony with the Devil Queen tempting him, and Saint Christopher crossing the river with the Child weighing heavy on his shoulders. In the background, several episodes of their legends appear; in this respect, the work is a late example of the so-called simultaneous representations. The artistic importance of the work is revealed in the novel way of representing landscape: we can note in it early occurrences of panorama-landscape and of the so-called world landscape (Weltlandschaft). These types of landscapes are characterized by a bird’s eye view, a high horizon line, and a layered landscape structure. In this work, archaic buildings appear in the new landscape formula. Jacob Cornelisz., an exponent of late Gothic Mannerism, was a well-to-do painter and printmaker in Amsterdam.