ドゥランの聖母

Van der Weyden painted this small devotional Virgin around 1435, early in his career as the leading painter of Brussels, and you can feel him measuring himself against Jan van Eyck. He sets Mary in a shallow Gothic niche and pushes her forward onto a projecting stone ledge, so she reads almost like a carved statue given colour and breath. She wears a deep red robe lined with gold thread that spills down over the plinth. On her lap the Christ child leans back and turns the pages of a small book, and both of them look down at it, a quiet human moment inside the sacred one. The name is simply the last owner's: Pedro Fernández-Durán, who acquired it in 1899 and left it to the Prado in 1930. Painters copied this composition for decades afterward.