Madonna with Female Saint by Adriaen Isenbrandt

Madonna with Female Saint (c. 1550) by Adriaen Isenbrandt looks like countless Flemish devotional paintings. That was the business model. Held at Munich's Alte Pinakothek, it comes from a Bruges workshop that specialized in religious commissions for private homes.

Look past the Madonna and Child. A woman in blue prays the rosary. A woman in red reads from a prayer book. These are saints, shown in the act of interceding for whoever paid for this painting. At their feet, a lamb, the ancient sign of Christ's sacrifice, anchors the composition.

Isenbrandt ran a large workshop in Bruges. By the mid-1500s, Bruges had lost its economic dominance to Antwerp, but its painters kept the older Netherlandish style alive, turning out devotional images in numbers for private patrons.

This was never meant for a church. It was someone's private prayer, paid for in oil and pigment. The person who commissioned it is long forgotten. The painted prayer outlasted them.