Madonna and Child with a Dominican Offering His Heart

In 1515 Joachim Patinir joined the painters' guild in Antwerp. He was the man who turned landscape into a speciality, with wide blue panoramas of crags and rivers, and this small panel, painted in the same city between 1515 and 1518, borrows his manner openly. The Louvre says so plainly. Look past the figures to the rock with its castle, the town on the river and the harvesters in the fields.

In front, a Dominican friar kneels and holds out something small and red. It is his heart, offered to the Christ Child, who reaches towards it from his mother's lap. Behind the friar stand the instruments of the Passion, the column and the cross, so the gift is set against the suffering it will cost. Who the friar is remains open. One scholar proposed Henry Suso, a 14th-century German Dominican mystic who, by his own account, cut the name of Jesus into the skin over his heart. Others see Saint Dominic himself.

Under the Child's rock a small spring rises and runs off as a stream, which the museum reads as the source of life offered for the salvation of the world. The collector Jules Maciet gave the panel to the Louvre in 1893.