Madonna and Child in a Window

This panel is one of only seven paintings by Martin Schongauer known to survive, part of a group of four devotional images, or Andachtsbilder, made near the end of his life. The Virgin sits in a window niche with the lively Christ Child, reading the book that symbolises her role as her son’s tutor while an angel above holds the crown and sceptre. Schongauer, whose art stood in the wake of Rogier van der Weyden’s, was credited from the 1500s with bringing the advances of Netherlandish Renaissance painting to Germany, and he became the main inspiration for the next generation of German artists, above all Albrecht Dürer. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.