The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist and a donatrix

We are grateful to Ludwig Meyer for suggesting the attribution to an artist influenced by Konrad Witz (c 1400/10-1445/6), working c. 1460-70. Considered one of the great innovators in northern European painting (author of one of the first night scenes in northern painting, and, in The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Geneva, Musée d'art et d'histoire, of a virtuoso depiction of light reflected by water), Witz was a painter working along the Upper Rhine, uniting Swiss, German and Burgundian influences. The author of the present picture was one of his successors in the region, as is evidenced by the use of a softwood support. Almost all wood used in the Upper Rhine is of softwood species such as spruce and fir, while oak is almost exclusively preferred in the Lower Rhine.

The figures of Christ and of the Vigin are based on those of Christ and Saint Mary Magdalen in Rogier van der Weyden's (c. 1399-1464) triptych of The Crucifixion (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 901), while that of Saint John the Evangelist may be drawn from a German source. The habit of the donatrix is that of the Convent of Saint Odile, on Mont Saint-Odile (called the Holy Mountain of Alsace), near Strasbourg. The Convent could trace its origins to the seventh century, when the first community was founded by Saint Odilia; closed after a fire in 1546, since 1853, it has increasingly been a place of pilgrimage.