Madonna and Child with Saints

Six women saints sit with the Virgin in a garden, and each can be named by what she holds. Cecilia plays a small organ, Agnes has her lamb, Lucy holds out a dish, and Margaret has a dragon poking its snout from beside her skirts. At the front, the Christ child reaches for the hand of Catherine in the gesture of her mystic marriage, and her wheel lies in the grass below. The panel is only about 25 centimetres tall. It was made in Bruges as the left half of a folding pair for the spice merchant Jean du Cellier. This half reached the Louvre on its own, in 1881, as a bequest from the Paris sculptor and collector Édouard Gatteaux.