Virgin with Child

This Virgin and Child follows a design by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, one of the busiest men in the Antwerp art world of the 1530s. Coecke ran a large workshop, designed tapestries and stained glass, translated Italian architecture books into Dutch, and in time became court painter to the emperor Charles the Fifth. A tender half-length Madonna like this was exactly the kind of thing his shop turned out in numbers. Antwerp in these years worked almost like a factory for devotional pictures, repeating the same well-liked designs for buyers at home and for export abroad. Whoever painted this panel around 1535 was following a proven Coecke formula rather than inventing one, which is part of why it survived at all. It hangs today in Basel, worked in oil on a wooden panel a little over half a metre tall.