St. Luke Drawing the Virgin

By tradition the evangelist Luke, author of one of the four Gospels, was also the first to portray the Virgin from life, which made him the patron saint of painters. Here he kneels to draw the nursing Madonna in silverpoint - and since Rogier van der Weyden headed the Brussels painters' guild, the picture doubles as a tribute to his own craft. The columned loggia opening onto a luminous river landscape, with two tiny figures gazing out, openly echoes Jan van Eyck's Madonnas, the older master Rogier most admired. It became one of the most copied images in Northern art, a quiet manifesto for the dignity of the painter.