St. John Miniature Altar

When this small altarpiece stands open, the Virgin sits enthroned in the centre with the Child on her lap, an angel beside her and a kneeling donor whose name the picture does not give. On the left wing stands John the Baptist, who announced Christ's coming, and on the right John the Evangelist, who wrote his gospel. The Kunsthistorisches Museum thinks the patron was probably Jan Crabbe, abbot of Ter Duinen, a rich Cistercian abbey on the Flemish coast, who had ordered an earlier altarpiece from Memling some years before.

Memling painted it in Bruges around 1485 to 1490, and the details show him looking south. Into the painted architecture around the throne he tucked two tiny scenes, the sacrifice of Isaac and the beheading of Saint Catherine, and he hung the arches with garlands of fruit held by small putti, a motif taken from the Italian Renaissance.

A Memling triptych that seems to be this one appears in 1516 in the inventory of Margaret of Austria, aunt of the future emperor Charles V and twice regent of the Netherlands. The outer faces of the wings carried Adam and Eve. By about 1650, in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, those two figures had been separated from the wings to hang as pictures of their own, and they still hang apart.