Christ Taking Leave of his Mother

The farewell between Jesus and his mother before his last journey to Jerusalem was told in the Meditations on the Life of Christ, a devotional book of the late Middle Ages long credited to the Franciscan saint Bonaventure, and painters took the scene from there. Cornelis Engebrechtsz painted it in Leiden around 1515 to 1520. Mary, her two sisters and Mary Magdalene stay behind by the gate of Bethany, their grief in their hands and faces, while four apostles are already walking down the hill toward the city in the distance. The panel belonged to a series on the life of the Virgin, and a second scene from it is also in the Rijksmuseum.

At some point someone painted Albrecht Dürer's monogram on it, with the date 1505, and in 1877 it was sold in Cologne as a work by the famous German. Restorers removed the false monogram and date in 1950.