Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami

Images(2)

The Madonna and Child with a Member of the Hillensberger Family

Artist/Maker Adriaen Isenbrandt (Flanders, ca. 1500-before 1551)

Date1513

Mediumoil on wood

DimensionsSight: 12 1/4 x 8 1/4 in. (31.1 x 21 cm)
Framed: 26 1/2 x 19 x 3 in. (67.3 x 48.3 x 7.6 cm)

ClassificationsVisual Works

Credit LineGift of The Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Terms

Object number61.006.000

On View

On view

Collections

Art of Europe

DescriptionThe Madonna and Child with a Member of the Hillensberger Family is an extremely well preserved example of a small devotional altarpiece consisting of two panels hinged together. The identification of the donor as a member of the Hillensberger family of Hanover is established by the coat of arms appearing on the back of the right-hand wing, and on the signet ring worn by the young man on the index finger of his left hand. The inscription at the bottom of the frame records that the young man was thirty-two years old at the time the work was completed on 16 February 1513, but his precise identity has not been discovered. Like many other artists working in Bruges in the first half of the sixteenth century, Isenbrandt was a conservative painter who maintained fifteenth-century Northern Renaissance traditions of microscopic realism, disguised symbolism, and jewel-like color. For this painting he derived the composition and iconography of the Madonna and Child from Jan van Eyck’s Virgin of the Canon can der Paele of 1436.