Abraham before Melchizedek

Melchizedek was a king and priest of Salem who, in the Book of Genesis, came out to meet Abraham after a battle and brought him bread and wine. That small gesture is why he stands here, on a Christian altar painted around 1435. The book behind this whole altarpiece, the medieval Mirror of Salvation, read the offering of bread and wine as an early echo of the Mass, so an Old Testament king could serve as a forerunner of Christian ritual. Witz sets the meeting in a cramped, low room against a gold ground, the two men wrapped in heavy brocade trimmed with fur. He was less interested in the landscape of the story than in the solidity of cloth and body, the fall of a sleeve, the weight of a crown. The bread and wine, the reason the scene was chosen at all, sit plainly between the two of them.