Tríptico Bladelin

Around 1450 Pieter Bladelin was one of the richest officials in Europe, the treasurer who handled the money of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. With that fortune he did something unusual. He founded his own town in Flanders, called Middelburg, and built it up from nothing. This altarpiece went to its new church. In the central panel the Virgin kneels before the newborn Christ in a ruined stable, and kneeling with her, in the plain dark robes of a living man, is Bladelin himself, set at the same scale as the holy figures, present at the first Christmas. It is the only Nativity scene art historians confidently give to van der Weyden's own hand. The side wings carry the story outward, to kings and emperors who read the birth of Christ in a star.