Attributed to Jean Malouel

The Louvre shows a round panel, 65 centimetres across, in which God the Father holds the body of the dead Christ while the Virgin, Saint John and several angels press close around them. Its label reads attributed to Jean Malouel, and this name exists in the catalogue to carry exactly that caution.

The evidence is strong but indirect. The coat of arms of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, is painted on the back, so the panel was made before his death in 1404, and Malouel had been his court painter in Dijon since 1397. The subject joins the Trinity to the mourning over Christ, which suits the duke's Carthusian monastery at Champmol, dedicated to the Trinity. No payment record or contract names the painter, though, and the French art historian Albert Châtelet refused to accept it as Malouel's work.

Nothing is known of the panel's history until the Louvre bought it at auction in 1864. In 2017 it left Paris for the first time in 55 years, lent to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for an exhibition that presented the painter under his Dutch name, Johan Maelwael of Nijmegen.