CEULEN, Peter Wolfgang van

This gilded copper bas-relief was commissioned from Peter Wolfgang van Ceulen, a Rhenish sculptor, in 1529 by Pedro da Salamanca, a Spanish merchant in Bruges, for his chapel in the Augustinian church in Bruges. Devoted, as was the chapel, to the Virgin of the Pietà, the relief shows the Virgin weeping over the dead Christ, accompanied by John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalen, another Mary, Joseph of Arimathea, and - in profile, kneeling in prayer - Salamanca himself, a clean-shaven, long-nosed gentleman with a full head of hair.