Early Flemish Portraits 1425-1525: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...

sanctum. Moreover, while the room of the
Annunciation and the workshop of Saint
Joseph in the right wing are, judging by the
views from their windows, clearly above
street level, the donor is at ground level.
Nonetheless, he appears, in his devotion, to be
allowed a view of the holy event through the
open door, the casement of which is visible
along the left edge of the central panel.
There may be even more subtle distinctions
between temporal and sacred realms. The donor
seems to occupy his space more convincingly
than do the figures of the Annunciation,
which are abstracted-one might say spiritualized-in
a flattened pattern, and the folds
of his garment hang more naturally. Such stylistic
dissimilarities have led some scholars to
believe that the donors' panel is by a second
artist, but these dissimilarities may merely reflect
varying approaches to the different kinds
of subjects.
Although fifteenth-century Flemish artists
may have considered portrait painting an activity
significantly different from painting religious
subjects, it could be argued that they
regarded some half-length depictions of the
Virgin and Child as belonging to a portrait
tradition. Painters' guilds throughout Europe
operated under the protection of Saint Luke,
who was believed to have been a portraitist.
The legend, of Greek origin and known in
western Europe since at least the tenth cen-
tury, holds that Luke made one or more portraits
of the Virgin. Representations of Saint
Luke as an artist, such as that by Rogier van
der Weyden (fig. 2), became popular in Flanders
during the period considered here.
In 1440 Fursy du Bruille, a canon at Cambrai,
brought from Rome a picture of the
Virgin and Child believed to have been
painted by Saint Luke (fig. 3). He bequeathed
it to Cambrai Cathedral in 1450, and in the
following year the picture was installed in the
chapel of the Trinity, where it became widely
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