The Holy Family

Low in the picture, at the foot of the book stand, a small slip of paper looks as if it has been left hanging over the edge. On it the painter put his name, the Latin word faciebat, meaning he was making it, and the year 1522. Italian painters had been signing their work on illusionistic scraps like this for decades. The art historian Charles Cuttler identified this one as the earliest in Netherlandish painting.

Everything around that slip of paper is ordinary Brussels devotion. The Christ Child stands on a thick carpet, playing with his mother. One angel sets a crown on her head as Queen of Heaven, another brings her a basket of flowers, the same kind that lie on the table, and those flowers point ahead to the Passion. Joseph holds an apple, the fruit of Eden, since Mary was understood as the second Eve.

Behind them a window opens onto a stretch of coast. The panel reached the Prado in 1916, left to the museum by the collector Pablo Bosch.