The Evangelists Matthew and Luke

In 1917, with the war still going on, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna bought this narrow panel, barely 13 centimetres wide, from the Viennese dealers Gilhofer and Ranschburg. Two evangelists stand close on a gold ground and read from one open book, a curly-haired young man in red and a grey-bearded elder in a cloak lined with white fur. Their symbols are labelled. An angel overhead holds a scroll reading Matheus, and a brown ox at their feet lies beside a scroll marked lucas. The pairing goes back to Saint Jerome, who gave Matthew the human figure because his gospel opens with the ancestry of Christ, and Luke the ox, the animal of sacrifice, because his begins with a priest serving in the Temple. The Belvedere calls the painter Netherlandish, with a question mark, and dates the panel to around 1430.