Marienaltar (Annunciation-Triptychon)

This was painted around 1434, in the Netherlandish towns where a young generation had just watched Jan van Eyck work out how to make oil paint hold light. You can feel that lesson here. The angel arrives not in some gilded heaven but in an ordinary Flemish room, with a brass basin, a bench, a bed with red hangings, all of it rendered with the patient exactness that made this the great age of northern painting. Van der Weyden borrows the crowded, precise interior from his older contemporaries and lets the sacred moment happen among the household objects. The triptych was later broken up. The central Annunciation stayed in Paris while the two side wings, the Visitation and a kneeling donor, went to Turin.