Triptyque de la famille Sedano

Gerard David worked in Bruges in the 1490s, when the city was one of the great trading ports of northern Europe, full of foreign merchants who wanted their piety recorded. This folding altarpiece was ordered by one of them, a Castilian trader named Jean de Sedano, who kneels on one wing with his family while the Virgin and Child sit enthroned in a walled garden between two music-making angels. A patterned carpet from the eastern trade lies at Mary's feet, the kind of luxury a Bruges merchant would actually have owned. A single landscape of green fields and blue sea runs unbroken behind all three panels. Close the wings and the outside shows Adam and Eve, the fall set against the redemption within. The Louvre bought it in 1890.