Triptych with Birth, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ

An extremely fine painted altarpiece, part of the museum’s small but nonetheless important collection of medieval paintings. The side panels depict Christ’s nativity (left) and his resurrection from the grave (right). In the centre is his crucifixion on Golgotha, the ‘place of the skull’ just outside Jerusalem. The city painted in the background springs from the artist’s imagination. Christ is already dead: to make sure of his death ‘one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side; and forthwith came there out blood and water’ (John 19:34). Christ’s mother mourns at the lower left; at the lower right soldiers throw dice for Christ’s garments. The triptych is regarded as the work of a follower of the Southern Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. It may be a copy of a lost work by Memling.