La Crucifixion avec la Vierge, saint Jean et un donateur

For generations this small panel in a provincial French museum carried the name of Martin Schongauer, the leading German engraver of the late 15th century. A reexamination that began in 2023 pointed elsewhere, to the young Albrecht Dürer, and in 2024 specialists at France's national institute for art history set his name to it. If they are right, it dates from about 1492, when Dürer was barely 21 and passing through Basel on the journeyman travels every craftsman made before setting up on his own. Look to the foot of the cross and you find the man who paid for the picture, the bishop Kaspar zu Rhein, kneeling and identified by his coat of arms. He is painted much smaller than Christ and the mourners beside him, the standard way of that age to set a living donor apart from the holy figures.