ゲッセマネの祈りと寄進者オルレアン公ルイ1世

The kneeling donor in the corner is Louis of Orleans, brother of the French king Charles VI, whose recurring bouts of madness had left Louis effectively running the kingdom. He commissioned this small devotional panel around 1405. Two years later he was ambushed and hacked to death in a Paris street on the orders of his own cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, a killing that pushed France into decades of civil war. For centuries the picture drifted through collections as an anonymous work. Only when it surfaced on the Madrid market in 2011 and was cleaned did the figure of Louis re-emerge from beneath later overpaint, identified by the nettle leaves stitched along his sleeve. It is the only known panel painting to show him.