Petrus Christus’s Frankfurt painting of the Madonna has a very special place in Netherlandish painting. For the first time, a Netherlandish painter succeeded in constructing his pictorial space not only according to what he saw but according to the rules of geometry, with perspectival
“correctness”. It was only just under thirty years since the universal scholar Leon Battista Alberti had laid the theoretical bases for the practise. In the tradition of Jan van Eyck, Petrus
Christus has proudly signed and dated his painting on the bottom step of the throne: “Petrus Christus me fecit 1457” (“Petrus Christus made me in 1457”).