Virgin and Child with Saints

Sometime late in the 15th century an anonymous draughtsman sat down with pen and ink and copied, whole, an altarpiece that no longer survives. The original was a Virgin and Child among saints by Rogier van der Weyden, the leading painter of the Low Countries in the middle of that century, and it was taken apart and lost long ago. What remains of the painting itself is only three cut fragments, scattered far apart: the panel known as the Magdalen Reading, now in the National Gallery in London, and two fragments trimmed down to the heads of saints, in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. This Stockholm sheet is the one thing that records the entire composition, and in 1971 a scholar used it to fit the surviving fragments back into their original arrangement. Its maker is known only as the Master of the Drapery Studies, a name given to a group of related drawings by an unidentified hand. Copying an admired design like this was ordinary workshop practice, the way a composition travelled from town to town in the years before printed images made that easy.