The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Mountain Landscape

By the 1530s, when this small panel was painted, a new kind of picture had taken hold in Antwerp. The sacred story shrank to a few figures while the world around them opened into blue distances and jagged peaks. Herri met de Bles was among the painters who made that world-landscape their specialty. Here the Holy Family rests with the infant John the Baptist among mountains, and the figures are given more room than usual. That prominence is part of why the panel has long divided scholars. The landscape is credited to Bles, while the figures were assigned early on to a different hand. For a painter who signed almost nothing, the work carries one unusually firm anchor. It appears in the 1587 inventory of the Basel collector Basilius Amerbach, whose cabinet the city bought in 1661 and made the founding core of this museum. The panel has stayed in Basel ever since.