Presentation of Jesus at the Temple (Master from Canapost)

The Master from Canapost's Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, painted around 1495 and now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, depicts the episode from Luke 2 in which Mary and Joseph present the infant Jesus at the Jerusalem Temple forty days after his birth for the purification rite, where the elderly Simeon takes the child in his arms and utters the famous Nunc Dimittis prayer. This anonymous Catalan master, named after the village of Canapost in the Baix Empordà region of Catalonia, worked in the late fifteenth century in a tradition that was beginning to absorb Renaissance influences from Italy while remaining rooted in the Gothic conventions of Catalan panel painting.

Tempera and oil on panel. The Temple interior provides an architectural setting rendered with some spatial ambition, the Gothic-to-transitional architecture reflecting the period's stylistic uncertainty.