Diptych of Jean Carondelet

Start with the frames. Around the portrait on the left runs a line in French. It calls the picture the representation of Messire Jehan Carondelet, high dean of Besançon, at the age of 48, and underneath it says made in the year 1517. Around the Virgin and Child on the right the words switch to Latin and turn into a prayer. Our mediatrix, after God our only hope, present me to your Son. The same word does the work twice. The portrait is his representation, and he asks Mary to represent him in turn.

Carondelet, a Burgundian lawyer and churchman, sat on the privy council of the Habsburg Netherlands and was close to the young Charles, who had just inherited the crowns of Spain and would later be emperor. When the little diptych was folded shut, its backs showed his coat of arms with his motto, Matura, and a skull with its jaw fallen loose.

The panels turned up in Valenciennes, where the Carondelet family had owned a house since the late 15th century, and the Louvre bought them in 1847.