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3 unusual facts about Jan Mostaert


Jan Mostaert

In 1500 Mostaert was commissioned to paint the shutters for a receptacle housing the relics of Saint Bavo in the Groote Kerk, Haarlem.

Mostaert's "Portrait of a Courtier", a painting that until 2005 had been in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts since 1949, was found to have been confiscated by Nazi forces in 1941 from its rightful owners in Poland.

Although the narrative in the painting was thought to depict a number of different events, including Columbus on the island of Guanaja, Hernán Cortés in Mexico, and the Portuguese invasion of Brazil, it is actually the story of Coronado's search for the seven cities of gold in the Zuni village of Cibola in New Mexico and Arizona in 1540-42.


Adriaen Isenbrandt

In his critical exhibition catalogue of Early Flemish Masters in Bruges in 1902, the Ghent great connoisseur of early Flemish Art and art historian Georges Hulin de Loo, came to the conclusion that Isenbrandt was actually the anonymous Master of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin and the author of a large body of paintings previously attributed to Gerard David and Jan Mostaert by the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen.


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