St. Luke Drawing the Virgin

As the patron saint of painters, Luke is usually shown in his atelier sketching the Virgin and Child sitting before him. Here, however, the saint kneels at a prie-dieu in a Renaissance hall with a tempietto adorned by a statue of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. The Virgin and Child appear as a vision, supported by putti that prepare to crown the Virgin as Queen of Heaven. The early 1520s was a time of growing religious tension, when the Protestant theologian Martin Luther preached against religious imagery. Gossaert's pictorial strategy offered an argument against iconoclasm. St. Luke, the... Mehr ...