Wings of a polyptych with donors -Man with son and Saint, Woman with daughters and Saint (burned)

These wings of a polyptych with donor portraits — a man with his son and their patron saint on one wing, a woman with daughters and their patron saint on the other — have an unusually recorded fate: they were burned, most likely in the destruction of the Richard von Kaufmann collection in Berlin during the Second World War. Adriaen Isenbrandt painted them around 1530 for a family whose piety and social ambition found expression in commissioning a polyptych altarpiece with portraits. The donor portrait wings of Flemish altarpieces were among the most personal objects in Catholic devotional practice: they placed real people, in their actual dress and with their actual physiognomies, within the sacred company of the saints they venerated, creating a permanent intercessory bond across death. The loss of these panels is one of the countless casualties of the twentieth century's destruction of private European collections.

Donor portrait wings demanded from the painter dual competence: the ability to render an accurate and recognizable likeness of living individuals, and the ability to paint a convincing saint in the same pictorial space. Isenbrandt's portraits, drawing on the Bruges tradition of precise physiognomic rendering established by Memling, would have combined careful observation of the specific family members with idealized saint figures executed from stock models.