.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The Master of the Mansi Magdalene, named by Friedländer after a painting formerly in the collection of the Marchese Giovannni Battista Mansi, and acquired by the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin in 1897, remains a somewhat mysterious figure working in Antwerp during the 1520s and 1530s. A follower of Quinten Massys, very little is known about his career, though he frequently employed engravings and prints by Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder as models for his works, a phenomena which had become increasingly wide spread during the early 16th century.
This panel shows the Magdalene, wearing a faintly exoticised red, fur-lined dress, standing in a rocky landscape, with a traveller on the road behind her. In her left hand she holds the lid of an elaborately worked gold pot (her usual attribute), the base of which rests on a ledge in the foreground. In her right, she rests a richly bound Book of Hours with an ornately gilded and tooled fore-edge, the open pages of which display the wide yellow borders embellished with large, naturalistic flowers invariably found in devotional texts illuminated in Bruges and Ghent during the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
We are grateful to Peter van den Brink for confirming the attribution after inspection of the original.
This panel shows the Magdalene, wearing a faintly exoticised red, fur-lined dress, standing in a rocky landscape, with a traveller on the road behind her. In her left hand she holds the lid of an elaborately worked gold pot (her usual attribute), the base of which rests on a ledge in the foreground. In her right, she rests a richly bound Book of Hours with an ornately gilded and tooled fore-edge, the open pages of which display the wide yellow borders embellished with large, naturalistic flowers invariably found in devotional texts illuminated in Bruges and Ghent during the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
We are grateful to Peter van den Brink for confirming the attribution after inspection of the original.