The Presentation of Christ

The relationship between the temple and the surrounding space is unusual. (The same is true of the pavilion in The Annunciation.) The Holy Family, Saint Simeon and a servant girl, who carries a candle in her right hand and a basket with two doves in her left, all gather round the Christ Child. Again, the building in which they stand is open onto the world outside, as if the painter were trying to show us both interior and exterior simultaneously. This apparent contradiction is a convention which Broederlam has borrowed from the paintings of the Italian Trecento.

Broederlam's Presentation of Christ is the only known imitation outside Tuscany of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's influential work in the Uffizi, Florence.