This triptych presents four scenes: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Adoration of the Angels and the Adoration of the Magi. Painted around 1445, it is considered the earliest surviving work by Dirk Bouts. Stylistically, it resembles his later paintings except for the canon of its figures, which are much shorter here than in posterior works. Besides the interest Bouts shows in landscape from the very beginning, what merit mention in the Museo del Prado’s work are the figures’ oval faces -the Virgin’s, for example- which exemplify the simplification of volumes practiced by painters in the northern Netherlands. Dirk Bouts received other influences when he settled in the southern Netherlands. He must already have been in Louvain between 1444 and 1448, and he died there in 1475. The present work reflects his peculiar manner of depicting the world around him. His inexpressive figures seem to be standing still in meditative silence, imbued with a sense of absorption far removed from the emotive strength of Van der Weyden or the monumentality of Jan van Eyck, although he was familiar with the work of both and drew on it in the development of his personal style. Despite the fact that this triptych is an early piece, Bouts borrows certain compositional schemes from Van der Weyden, including the painted architecture that simulates a doorway with a sculptured archivolt of the sort depicted a few years earlier by the latter in his Miraflores Triptych (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), or the composition of the Visitation derived from another Van der Weden at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig. In Bouts’s early years, Van Eyck was undoubtedly the basis for his pictorial language, although that influence was mitigated later in his career. In the Prado’s triptych, Bouts follows Eyck in differentiating materials such as hair and cloth -for example, in the Archangel Gabriel in The Annunciation. His use of light as a unifying factor is also drawn from Eyck, especially his manner of flooding the different scenes with a golden atmosphere, as is his vigorous modeling. Also worthy of mention is the attention he pays to the figures’ faces and hands, for example, in the first of the Magi who kneels before the Christ child in The Adoration. His face is filled with wrinkles and his hands have the same marked veins as Elizabeth’s in The Visitation. Despite the fact that this work by Bouts appears to be a polyptych with one panel for each of its four scenes, it actually has only three panels. The central one bears two scenes, each with the same dimensions as the lateral ones. These two central scenes, The Visitation and The Adoration of the Christ child by the Angels, are separated by a depiction of a pink marble column. Both these and the two on the lateral panels -The Annunciation on the left and The Adoration of the Magi on the right- have architectural frames that evoke the entrance to a portico. And, while the arches are semicircular, the porticoes are gothic, like the casings and other decorative elements from that style that allude to the new law that came into effect following the Archangel Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary. The archivolts bear depictions of passages from the Old and New Testaments -six in each scene- that reinforce that idea. Here, Bouts transforms the shallow porticoes used by Van der Weyden in his Miraflores Triptych into more developed ones. In the Prado’s work, the porticoes delimit the foreground in front of the protagonists, who are thus not framed by the architecture, but instead seen through it, as part of the space around it. This generates a sense of distance between the viewer and the painted figures (Text drawn from Silva, P.: 100 Obras Maestras de Museo del Prado, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, p. 20).