[1] It is an unusual survivor of the Beeldenstorm that has never left Gouda, and has been well documented as a city highlight over the centuries, because it shows the freer Venetian style of Italian painting rather than the mannerism more common among Barendsz' contemporaries.

[3] By that time in 1604 the "trubbel" of the Reformation had passed and this triptych was once again on view, but no longer in the Sint Janskerk for which it had been commissioned, as that church became Protestant after 1566.

[2] Whoever commissioned it, they must have been a promoter of literacy (though Barendsz was known as an erudite letter writer and musician himself) as it features not one, but two women reading: Unlike other cities in the Netherlands, the religious works considered too Catholic during the iconoclasm had been kept back by the city of Gouda and not sold off, and thus this one could be saved as part of Gouda's cultural heritage.

In his work on the Schilderboeck, the art historian Hessel Miedema noticed that some cities seemed to fare better than others, and remarked that perhaps less was destroyed than had been sold.

The Sint Janskerk had had an extra and somewhat dubious advantage in that the great church had been closed for renovations during the 1550s and 1560s due to a disastrous fire that occurred on January 12, 1552.