Michel Sittow, 'The Ascension', 1500-2

Christ’s followers and apostles gather on a hilltop to watch his last moment on earth. The panel captures the drama of the Ascension, when Christ rose into heaven 40 days after his Resurrection (Acts 1: 1–9). Expanding on the description in the Christian Bible, on the left-hand side of the panel Michel Sittow has included Saint John the Evangelist, in a red robe, and the Virgin Mary wearing her customary white headdress and deep blue mantle. Behind them are Saint Mary Magdalene, with long, loose hair and a golden dress, and the Three Maries. On the right-hand side, Saint Peter, in white with a bald head and greying beard, and a dark-haired Saint Paul kneel to watch. Jesus’s legs and bare feet are visible as he disappears into the clouds. He is flanked by angels holding a scroll with the remains of an inscription.

This small painting is about the size of a postcard. It is possibly one of a series of scenes of the life of Christ and the Virgin. The Queen of Spain, Isabella of Castile, may have commissioned the works at the end of the fifteenth century. Juan de Flandes’s Christ appearing to the Virgin in the National Gallery comes from the same series. Around 27 panels from this series survive in museums and private collections worldwide. Only two, The Ascension and The Assumption of the Virgin (The National Gallery of Art, Washington), can be linked to Sittow.

The panels might have originally formed a retablo. This was a type of polyptych popular in late-fifteenth-century Castile with a large number of narrative scenes in the main body of the altarpiece. It would have been much smaller than the examples still surviving in Castilian churches. It may be incomplete, as some of the most important episodes of Christ’s life are missing.

Alternatively, their small scale may suggest these images were meant to be handled singly and used as an aid for private prayer and worship at home. They first appear in an inventory of Isabella’s goods, made after her death in November 1504. Items from her collection were sold to pay her debts. Chests and crates filled with her personal possessions were sent to Toro, Castille. They were then inventoried and offered for sale. The inventory of February 1505 describes 47 paintings ‘all the same size’, kept in a closet or cupboard.

The panels were split up at this point and sold to different buyers. Thirty-two went into the collection of the Regent of the Netherlands and Isabella’s daughter-in-law, Margaret of Austria. A 1516 inventory of her palace at Mechelen describes The Ascension and The Assumption together in a leather-covered frame, perhaps a diptych, and as from the hand of ‘Michiel’. It is not clear why these two were separated from the rest. Perhaps Margaret valued them particularly as being by Sittow. He had been her court painter since 1514. They are also linked by subject matter: both show supernatural events, the bodily transition of the two most holy figures in Christianity from earth to heaven.