Virgin and Child with Angels

Bernard van Orley was the leading painter of Brussels in the generation after Bosch, court painter to Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, and the designer of some of the most splendid tapestries of the age; his art is the clearest Netherlandish answer to the Italian manner that reached the north in these years. In this devotional panel the Virgin sits with the Christ Child in a walled garden — the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs — while angels, a fountain and a peacock carry the old symbols of her purity and of the resurrection. Painted about 1518, at the height of his powers, the panel came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the bequest of Benjamin Altman in 1913.