Follower of Rogier van der Weyden, Christ appearing to the Virgin

The resurrected Christ has appeared to the Virgin Mary in a room in a fifteenth-century Netherlandish house. The Virgin, sitting on a cushion by the window, holds a book with gilded edges and a green chemise binding – possibly a Bible, the two columns of text being standard for medieval Bibles. Beside her is a bench with a carved lion on its arm; behind her is a bed of unusual shape.

Christ raises his hands to display his wounds, caused by the nails driven through them at the Crucifixion. We can see more wounds in his feet and his side. His open sarcophagus can been seen through the doorway in the rear wall, an angel sitting on the lid and two soldiers sleeping beside it. Through the window on the right we can see three women walking along the road. These are the holy women who discovered Christ’s empty tomb the morning after the Resurrection (Mark 16: 1–5). The appearance of Christ to the Virgin is not mentioned in the Gospels, but it was widely believed that immediately after the Resurrection he revealed himself first to his mother.

In the nineteenth century this picture was hung with a Pentecost which was on panel and was the same size. It is almost certainly the painting now in the Heinz Kisters Collection at Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. In both pictures the figures are on approximately the same scale; the hands, feet and draperies are similar in style; the harsh light comes from the right; and the colour is much the same, though in this painting it is muted by damage. The two paintings appear to be from the same complex, perhaps a large polyptych of the Passion of Christ. They are about the same height as the painted wing panels of several carved altarpieces produced in Brussels in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Both could have had painted reverses and may well have come from the folding wings of a carved altarpiece.

The composition is based on the right panel of the Miraflores Altarpiece (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) by Rogier van der Weyden but the poor drawing and exaggerated gestures of both this and the Pentecost distance them from the artist. The lively attitudes and bright colours of the Pentecost are reminiscent of the Master of the View of St Gudula. The two pictures are from one of the Brussels workshops of the end of the fifteenth century, where collaboration was commonplace.

The painting is in very poor condition and was seriously damaged when, and possibly before, it was transferred from a panel to a canvas support at an unknown date. Both Christ and the Virgin’s heads are much repainted, Christ’s halo is not original and his mantle is almost entirely overpainted, and the whole picture is covered with a very yellow varnish.