Circumcision of Christ

This panel shows an episode the church marked eight days after Christmas: the circumcision of Christ, when by Jewish law a boy was circumcised and formally given his name. For medieval and early modern painters it was the moment of Jesus's first shedding of blood, and it was read as an early sign of the Passion to come, which is why it was painted so often for altars and prayer books. The maker of this version is not known. It comes to the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest without a secure name attached, one of many devotional panels whose author has been lost while the subject stayed perfectly legible to anyone who saw it.