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One of the key monuments of late medieval painting in Westphalia, completed in 1400, the altarpiece probably made for the high altar of the former Kollegiatstift Sankt Maria und Sankt Georg, now the Neustädter Marienkirche in Bielefeld, was a triptych with folding wings about 6,56 maters wide when fully opened and about 2,18 meters high, including its lost frame. In the open state, it displayed a large central image of the Virgin and Child enthroned in the company of saints, flanked by thirty smaller scenes ranging from God Warns Adam about the Tree of Knowledge, through the life of the Virgin Mary and the Passion of Christ, to the Last Judgment, all on gold ground. The small scenes were arranged in three rows of ten, with the subjects progressing chronologically across each row, skipping over the Virgin and Child at centre, from the upper left to the lower right. The folding wings displayed nine scenes each, the rest of the small scenes belonged structurally to the central panel and were thus immobile. The lost exterior decoration of the wings was probably painted either with standing saints or nonfigural ornaments.
The central section remains in the Marienkirche in Bielefeld. The retable was dismantled in the course of church renovations in 1840-41 and the wings were cut and divided into the individual scenes now found at various collections (Staatliche Museen, Berlin; Oetker Collection, Bielefeld; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
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