Philip the Fair as a child

The Master of the Legend of the Magdalene, an anonymous painter identified by a group of stylistically related works, created this piece around 1483, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This work exemplifies the Early Renaissance artistic production of the period, when numerous skilled painters whose names have been lost worked alongside better-documented masters. This work belongs to the Early Renaissance, the transformative period in European art when painters first applied mathematical perspective, naturalistic figure modeling, and archaeological interest in antiquity to the inherited traditions of medieval devotional painting.

Accomplished tempera technique is evident in the smooth modeling of forms and the controlled color harmonies, with the composition following the spatial principles developed by fifteenth-century Italian workshops.