La Presentazione di Gesù al Tempio

The painter has no name we can use. Art historians gathered a cluster of late-15th-century Catalan panels around a church in the village of Canapost and simply call whoever made them the Master from Canapost. This scene comes from Luke's gospel. Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem, where the old man Simeon, who had been promised he would not die before seeing the Messiah, takes the child into his arms. It was painted around 1495, in the years Ferdinand and Isabella ruled a newly united Spain and Columbus had just crossed the Atlantic. The gold ground behind the figures was tooled and burnished by hand, the old Gothic manner still in use here while Italian painters had already moved on to painted skies.