Virgin and Child in an Apse

The Virgin and Child appear in a chapel, flanked by music-making angels. Based on a lost original by Campin of about 1420, this painting is among the earliest and finest of over sixty variants. Campin’s enormously popular devotional prototype derives from thirteenth-century Byzantine icons, specifically of the nursing virgin (the galactrophousa or Virgo lactans), which were imported to the Burgundian Netherlands in the fifteenth century. Campin’s tender, naturalistic translation of the icon tradition—including the intimate connection between mother and child created by the Virgin’s downcast gaze and the Christ Child reaching upwards—inspired subsequent Netherlandish artists.