Madonna Standing

This small panel was long counted among Rogier van der Weyden's earliest works and dated around 1430, but the Kunsthistorisches Museum now places the diptych around 1451, when he was a long-established master in Brussels. The Virgin stands nursing the Child in a shallow stone niche, and if you look at the carved arch around them it is crowded with tiny figures painted to imitate grey stone: God the Father above, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and Adam and Eve at the sides, the whole story of salvation packed into a doorway. Scholars who favoured the early date saw the weight and dense detail of Jan van Eyck's great Ghent Altarpiece pressing on this small panel. It is the left half of a diptych. The right wing, showing Saint Catherine, has always been thought weaker and is usually given to his workshop.