A Contest between the Shepherds Alcesto and Acaten

The Master of 1416's A Contest between the Shepherds Alcesto and Acaten, dated around 1410 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a rare secular subject in early fifteenth-century panel painting, depicting a pastoral poetry competition drawn from classical pastoral tradition. The work belongs to a group of International Gothic panels associated with this anonymous northern Italian or Venetian master, notable for their unusual interest in landscape and classical literary subjects. Pastoral competitions — shepherds debating poetry and love in the tradition of Virgil's Eclogues — were fashionable in humanist circles, and the painting's existence demonstrates how literary taste was filtering into visual art at the highest social levels at a very early date.

The panel shows figures in a landscape with considerable attention to spatial recession, unusual for the period. The master employs a soft, luminous palette with the delicate color transitions characteristic of north Italian International Gothic. Figures are graceful and expressive within the decorative constraints of the style.