The Circumcision of Christ

The Circumcision was kept on the 1st of January, the eighth day after Christmas as Luke's Gospel counts it, and it was the day the Child was given the name Jesus. The painter set the rite inside a tall Gothic church. A bearded priest in a jewelled headdress, a large stone set in the plate on his chest, bends over the Child with a small knife, while two kneeling figures hold him up on a white cloth and a brass basin waits on the chequered floor. This was one of the large main panels of the Mondsee high altar. In 1828 Prince Johann I of Liechtenstein bought it from a Viennese dealer, and it hung in his family's gallery in Vienna until 1881, when it was sent to Paris and auctioned the following year. The Kunsthistorisches Museum acquired it on the Paris art market in 1929.