The Virgin and Child with St Anne, donors and Sts Francis and Lidwina

The Virgin and Child with St Anne, Donors, and Sts Francis and Lidwina by the Master of the St John's Altarpiece, painted around 1500 and now in the Rijksmuseum, presents a complex devotional composition that combines the Anna Selbdritt — the three-generation grouping of Anne, Mary, and Christ — with kneeling donor portraits and the flanking saints Francis and Lidwina. Lidwina of Schiedam was a Dutch mystic of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries who suffered extreme physical disabilities and had visions that were widely venerated in the Netherlands before her formal beatification. Her presence in this panel indicates a Dutch, and likely Schiedam-connected, patronage context. The Master of the St John's Altarpiece, named for a triptych in a related institutional context, was among the accomplished practitioners of the mature Flemish devotional tradition around 1500. The Rijksmuseum panel is among the most iconographically complex works by this anonymous hand.

The master manages the complex iconographic program — multiple sacred figures, donors, and flanking saints — within the devotional panel format with the compositional confidence characteristic of the mature Flemish tradition. Each figure is differentiated through individual feature modeling and attributed costumes, the whole organized within a coherent spatial and devotional logic.