Triptych with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin

Dieric Bouts worked in Leuven in the middle of the 15th century, when Netherlandish painters were teaching all of Europe how to render a room, a window, a fall of light in oil. This triptych runs the early life of the Virgin across its three panels, the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Nativity, each set inside careful architecture that carries your eye deep into the distance. The two outer wings were hinged once, so the whole thing could be shut like a cupboard. By 1584 it hung at the Escorial, the vast palace-monastery Philip II built outside Madrid, which is how a Flemish altarpiece ended up in the Prado. Bouts kept his figures quiet and still, feeling their moment rather than acting it out.