Mary with the Child

Around the arch of Mary's stone niche runs a line of gold Latin letters. It cites the third chapter of Genesis, the moment after the Fall when God curses the serpent and promises enmity between it and the woman, and between their offspring. The inscription goes further than the Bible verse and names that offspring outright. It reads, in short, that the seed of the woman, Jesus, crushed the serpent's head.

Gossaert, painting around 1525, adds a second and more learned layer for a humanist viewer. The Kunsthistorisches Museum reads the strong, lively child in Mary's hands as the young Hercules, who in the Greek myth strangled two snakes sent to kill him in his cradle. Renaissance scholars liked to treat Hercules as a pagan forerunner of Christ, and the snake links the two stories neatly. The panel is only about 30 centimetres high, with a rounded top, and it is recorded in the imperial collection in Vienna as early as 1619.