Master of the Virgo inter Virgines

We do not know his name. Art historians call him the Master of the Virgo inter Virgines, after a single altarpiece, the Virgin and Child seated among four holy women, that once hung in a convent near Delft and now belongs to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. From the style of that one panel, first singled out in 1903, scholars have gathered a whole body of religious pictures around this anonymous hand.

He worked in and around Delft in the last two decades of the 15th century, and he also designed woodcuts for the early printers of the northern Netherlands. Some researchers tie him to a Delft painter recorded in the town archives as Dirck Jansz, though the match is not certain.

What sets his work apart from the polished elegance around him is its blunt feeling. His figures are gaunt, awkward and openly grieving, and in his scenes of the dead Christ mourned by his family the emotion is pushed right to the front with no softening. That plain, almost harsh honesty is why some call him an early ancestor of the later Dutch school.