Retable de la Vierge

Around 1420 the painter finished this altarpiece for the Marienkirche in Dortmund, a busy Hanseatic trading town in Westphalia far from any royal court. Yet the style is the courtly International Gothic then fashionable across Europe, with slender figures, deep blues and lavish gold, the manners of a princely chapel brought to a merchant town's parish church. Three centuries later, in 1720, the triptych was cut down and forced into a new Baroque frame, and large parts of the original panels were lost. For a long time no one was sure who had painted it. Then in 1950 a museum director in Dortmund found the answer hidden in the central scene of the Virgin's death: on the little book by her bed, a few reversed letters spell out Conrad.