The Iconography of St. James in the Indianapolis Museum's Fifteenth-Century Altarpiece

The Indianapolis Museum of Art houses a beautifully comprehensive, but not widely-known nor thoroughly-understood, example of late fifteenth-century pilgrimage art. ¹ The twelve-panel triptych is by an anonymous painter, presumably Flemish and of the school of Dirk Bouts, c. 1510 (Van Herwaarden 358–60). Janson and Frasier (np), who attribute it to The Master of the Legend of St. Ursula, active in Bruges toward the end of the fifteenth century, also perceive influences of Memlinc, David, and van der Weyden. ² A painting somewhat similar in subject and style, and almost certainly by the same painter, is found in the private Argüelles collection in Madrid (Lavalleye 2).