Master of the Lille Adoration

[3] Most of the works the new master has now been "given" were previously attributed to Dirck Vellert, the leading Antwerp stained-glass maker of the day, on the assumption that he also painted.

[4] His notname comes from the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, "as the painting which perhaps best demonstrates his individual style".

[8] Differences between the master and Vellert include the paintings' "depiction of tensely gesturing hands, often with palms turned outward and the fingers splayed", as in the Lille and Rotterdam pictures, a "trademark".

[9] Other traits are a liking for a low viewpoint, small pieces of trompe-l'œil, and elements projecting over a ledge, such as the kneeling shepherd's foot at Lille.

[11] Max Jakob Friedländer in his Die Antwerpener Manieristen von 1520 (1915), which introduced the term "Antwerp Mannerists", and later work with Ludwig von Baldass, gave Vellert a coherent group of four paintings: The Lille Adoration (an Adoration of the Shepherds in the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille), the Rotterdam triptych (both illustrated here), a Holy Kinship in the Stiftsgalerie in Kremsmünster (a larger related version of the Rijksmuseum one shown here),[12] and an Ecce Homo triptych in Brussels.

[15] Konowicz compared these paintings to the stained glass and drawings for it by Vellert (who helpfully very often signed and dated his work) and concluded that they were not the same artist, therefore named the "new personality" the Master of the Lille Adoration.

The Amsterdam Holy Kinship is not mentioned by Konowicz, but is now attributed by the Rijksmuseum to the Master of the Lille Adoration, as a cut-down fragment with the central group from the painting in the Stiftsgalerie in Kremsmünster.