Miraflores Altarpiece

In 1445 the king of Castile, John II, handed this triptych to a charterhouse of silent Carthusian monks he was building near Burgos, the Miraflores. The deed recording the gift praises the panels as the work of the great and famous Fleming, Rogel, which is how a Spanish court wrote down the name of Rogier van der Weyden, then the leading painter in Brussels. Read the three panels left to right and they run like a life. The birth, in the family scene where Mary wears pure white. Her son's death, where she cradles his body in red. And his return, in blue. Each colour is a virtue the period assigned to her, purity, then compassion, then perseverance. It has been in Berlin since 1850. A second, very close version exists, but tree-ring dating of its oak put it after 1492, and van der Weyden was already dead by 1464.