The Flight into Egypt

This panel was never meant to be seen on its own. It is one wing of a folding altarpiece painted in Antwerp in 1519, and it was built to move. On ordinary days the shutters stayed shut, and what a worshipper faced was the back of this very board, painted to imitate a slab of veined marble. Only on feast days did the altar open to reveal the Holy Family on the road, Joseph leading the donkey while Mary carries the child away from Herod's soldiers. The centre of that opened altarpiece, an Adoration of the Magi, hangs today in Karlsruhe, so the scene this wing once framed now sits a border away. When the Kunstmuseum recently turned the panel around, it was the marbling on the back that people had come to see.