A Woman Holding a Lily-of-the-Valley and a Pansy

Marx Reichlich painted this Woman Holding a Lily-of-the-Valley and a Pansy around 1505, a female figure whose combination of attributes—flowers associated with purity, memory, and devotion—suggests this is either a devotional image of the Virgin or a portrait of a donor in semi-allegorical guise. Reichlich was trained under Michael Pacher in Salzburg and worked primarily in Tyrol and Bavaria, his style combining the precise spatial construction of Pacher's workshop with softer, more lyrical treatment of figures and landscape. The flowers' symbolism—lily-of-the-valley as humility and the return of happiness, pansy (from French pensée, thought) as remembrance—gives the image a devotional or memorial dimension that would have been immediately legible to Renaissance viewers.

The panel shows Reichlich's characteristic Tyrolean technique with careful botanical rendering of the symbolic flowers and the precise modeling reflecting his training in the Pacher workshop tradition.