Death of the Virgin (van der Goes)

The scene is borrowed from Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century "Legenda aurea"[1] which relates how the apostles were brought, at Mary's request, on clouds by angels to a house near Mount Zion to be with her in her final three days.

According to art historian Till-Holger Borchert, the panel "belongs to the most impressive and artistically mature achievements of Early Netherlandish painting".

Peter is dressed in the white robes of a priest and holds a candle which in the then contemporary ritual will be handed to the dying woman.

[4] The Death marks a break in van der Goes's style; line has become more important, setting is eliminated and the image lacks depth and is tightly contracted with only the bed, door and the body of the Virgin giving spatial indicators.

[7] It is renowned for not showing the apostles either in the traditional idealised manner nor as conventional figure types, but instead representing each as a unique individual, displaying their grief through a range of expressions and gestures, from sorrow and despair, to empathy and compassion.

They are usually thought to be later versions of a pen on paper drawing in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, probably a copy of an original preparatory sketch by van der Goes.

The artist's late life—he died in either 1482 or 1483—susceptibility to depression and insanity was discovered in 1863 in a chronicle by his contemporary Gaspar Ofhuys, who recorded a night in 1480 when van der Goes began to excitedly talk about how he was a doomed, lost soul and attempted to commit suicide and had to be forcibly held down.

[10] Other art historians, including Dirk de Vos and Susan Koslow, reject this thesis and argue that a wholly individualised conception of the scene would not have been acceptable to the painting's commissioners.

In their view the pared down and contracted manner of the work is due to a desire to "stress the solemnity of the event and its miraculous nature, van der Goes may have decided that material richness would be distracting and indecorous.