The Death of the Virgin

Carel van Mander, writing his lives of the Netherlandish painters in 1604, noted that this altarpiece had been sold very dear to Spain. It had been made for the collegiate church of Saint Gudule in Brussels, and Philip II sent it to El Escorial in 1586, the year after his army took Brussels back in the war with the rebel provinces.

What you are looking at is the middle of a triptych. The Virgin is dying, the apostles around her bed, in a church interior painted with the kind of hard, exact detail Netherlandish painters had been managing since van Eyck. The two wings, with the Birth of the Virgin and her Presentation, are still in the Prado under their own catalogue numbers.

The museum will not date it more closely than before 1550. The figure 1598 painted in orange at the lower left is an old collection mark, not a year of work.