Vienna Diptych

Hugo van der Goes's Vienna Diptych, painted around 1470 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, shows the Fall of Man on one panel and a Lamentation on the other, creating a typological connection between Original Sin and Christ's redemptive sacrifice. Hugo was the most psychologically intense of the Netherlandish painters, and his work foreshadowed the emotional expressionism that would emerge in Northern art. He suffered a mental breakdown in 1482 and died the following year.

Hugo renders both panels with his characteristic sharp, anxious intensity, using angular figure poses and vivid, sometimes discordant color to create emotional tension between the two scenes of sin and redemption.