Margaret of Austria in Worship of the Virgin

THE DECADES AROUND 1500 WITNESSED the intensified preoccupation of Netherlandish painters with the art of their great predecessors, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Robert Campin.See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 1:350–356; Larry Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys with Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1984), 70–86; and Hans J. van Miegroet, Gerard David (Antwerp, 1989), 95–141, for a discussion of the grounds for this phenomenon. Artists made astonishingly exact copies, integrated motifs from older images into new ensembles, and created new compositions in the spirit of the older...