Pietà with Saint John the Evangelist, the Virgin and Two Angels

In 1404 Jean de Berry, uncle of the French king and a lavish patron of artists, inherited the county of Auvergne on the death of his father-in-law. The Louvre thinks this Pietà may have been painted soon after for the chapel of his palace at Vic-le-Comte, near Clermont-Ferrand. Saint John holds up the dead Christ, with the Virgin beside them and two angels below, all on a gold ground, on a panel of walnut.

The panel's later life was humbler. It is first recorded in 1952 in the presbytery at Vic-le-Comte, and in 1985 the parish sold it to a secondhand dealer, heavily overpainted. Once cleaned, it looked so close to the Louvre's great round Pietà that it was given to the same painter, Jean Malouel, court painter to the dukes of Burgundy, and the state bought it under his name in 2012. Today the Louvre lists it under the French school and puts forward, with a question mark, Malouel's nephews, the Limbourg brothers.