Scenes from the Life of Christ

In 1831 an inventory of the Munsterkerk in Roermond noted a Gothic altarpiece behind the high altar and guessed that it went back to the first foundation of the church. That was this painting, made around 1435 in the Meuse region, perhaps in Roermond itself. It holds 18 scenes in three rows of six, and the Rijksmuseum compares them to a comic strip, starting top left with the Annunciation and ending bottom right with Pentecost, with the Passion filling the middle row. The museum thinks it was probably commissioned by Bela van Mirlaer van Millendonck for the Cistercian nuns of the abbey there. In the Lamentation a small kneeling figure appears beside a coat of arms. In 1889 the parish sold the painting to the museum for 800 guilders, and in 2019 a reproduction was unveiled in the Munsterkerk.