Visitation of Mary

Mary has travelled to see her older relative Elizabeth, both of them expecting a child, and the two women meet on the steps of a Gothic porch and clasp hands. Elizabeth wears the white veil of a married woman, and Mary, in a deep blue cloak, has her fair hair loose. Behind them the painter built a real interior, with rib vaults and tall traceried windows, and set two small stone figures on red columns, one of them unrolling a scroll. On the right a little landscape begins, a rock with a single tree, and above it the painter laid gold leaf where the sky would be. The panel was the inner face of an altar wing, seen on feast days when the altarpiece stood open. Until 1927 it belonged to the Neukloster, an abbey in Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna.