Annunciation 1452 Wood, 85,5 x 54,8 cm Groeninge Museum, Bruges Petrus Christus belonged to the same generation as Van der Weyden, but was perhaps a little younger. He came to Bruges from North Brabant, possibly after completing his initial training in Haarlem. His style is strongly modelled on that of Van Eyck and so there is good reason for suspecting he was Jan's apprentice, even though he did not purchase free citizenship of Bruges until three years after his putative master's death. The two panels by Christus, the Annunciation and the Nativity were quite badly worn, but painstakingly restored. Both of them are signed and dated (1452) and were probably painted as part of a triptych or polyptych. They reveal Christus as a precise designer of space and moulder of volumes. The figures in the Annunciation resemble statues arranged in a geometrically constructed show-case. It is the first painting in the Netherlands with a correct central perspective. , Artist: CHRISTUS, Petrus , Annunciation , 1451-1500 , Flemish , painting , religious
Nativity 1452 Wood, 85,5 x 54,8 cm Groeninge Museum, Bruges The two panels by Christus, the Annunciation and the Nativity were quite badly worn, but painstakingly restored. Both of them are signed and dated (1452) and were probably painted as part of a triptych or polyptych. They reveal Christus as a precise designer of space and moulder of volumes. The figures in the Annunciation resemble statues arranged in a geometrically constructed show-case. It is the first painting in the Netherlands with a correct central perspective. , Artist: CHRISTUS, Petrus , Nativity , 1451-1500 , Flemish , painting , religious
Potrait of a Carthusian 1446 Oil on wood, 29,2 x 21,6 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York In 1444, three years after the death of Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus left his homeland in the northern Netherlands to settle in Bruges. This portrait, one of Christus's earliest signed and dated works, shows van Eyck's influence in the technical virtuosity of the trompe-l'oeil fly and the carved inscription. The sitter, once transformed into a saint by the addition of a halo, is an unknown lay brother of the Carthusian order. The fly is a symbol of decay, a reminder of man's mortality, but it also greatly enhances the fiction of a real person gazing at us from behind a stone ledge in which Christus's signature appears as an incised inscription. , Artist: CHRISTUS, Petrus , Potrait of a Carthusian , 1451-1500 , Flemish , painting , portrait