Death of the Virgin (c. 1400): Art, History and Details

Death of the Virgin (c. 1400) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of Heiligenkreuz (Austrian).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Christ’s apostles visit the Virgin upon her deathbed. Saint Peter, wearing white robes and the papal tiara, performs funerary rites, reciting prayers and sprinkling holy water on the Virgin’s body. Above, angels engraved upon the golden background celebrate the assumption of the Virgin heavenward. Once joined to another panel titled The Death of Saint Clare (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), this double representation of saintly deaths may have been used in funerary services in the convent of Clarissan nuns for which it was made.

Object facts

• Title: Death of the Virgin
• Date: c. 1400
• Creator attribution: Master of Heiligenkreuz (Austrian)
• Culture: Austria, possibly Bohemia, early 15th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: tempera and oil with gold on panel
• Dimensions: Image: 66 x 53.3 cm (26 x 21 in.); Framed: 74 x 61.5 x 4.5 cm (29 1/8 x 24 3/16 x 1 3/4 in.); Unframed: 71 x 54 cm (27 15/16 x 21 1/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Medieval Art
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1936.496

A detail from the museum

The artist was named for a painting that was once in the Cistercian monastery of Heiligenkreuz in Austria.

Collection credit

Gift of the Friends of The Cleveland Museum of Art in memory of John Long Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Buchner, Ernst. "Eine Gruppe deutscher Tafelbilder vom Anfang des 15. Jahrhunderts," Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Kunst I (1924).
• Suida, William. Osterreichische Malerei in der Zeit Erzherzogs Ernst des Eisernen und Konig Albrechts II (Vienna, 1926).
• Baldass, Ludwig. "Review of Beitrage zur Gschichte der druschen Kunst, Belvedere, X (1926).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.