COLOGNE PAINTERS
The “Master of the Death of Mary,” to whose school belongs the Descent from the Cross, with a predella representing The Last Supper, and a lunette with St. Francis receiving the Stigmata (No. 2738), has been identified by Wauters and Aldenhoven with the early-sixteenth-century Flemish painter Joos van Cleef the Elder, and belongs to the Antwerp rather than the Cologne school. The “Master of St. Severin,” to whom the official Catalogue ascribes the two Scenes from the Life of St. Ursula (Nos. 2738c and 2738d), was probably a Flemish painter who worked at Cologne at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But the two panels at the Louvre, which were formerly at the Cluny Museum, are not from his brush. They are the work of his pupil, the “Master of the Ursula Legend,” and belong to a series of which other panels can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at Cologne.
The first definite name in the annals of the Cologne school is that of Bartolomäus Bruyn (c. 1493–1555), who was a follower of Joos van Cleef but subsequently became completely imbued with the Italian spirit. His portraits, in which he remained more faithful to the tradition of his country, are of greater significance than his religious compositions, and closely resemble those by Joos van Cleef; but the Portrait of a Man with a White Cross on his Breast (No. 2702) is only a school picture of indifferent quality.