The head of a queen or queen saint

Southern Netherlandish painters and glaziers made such an intense and far-reaching contribution to the field of medieval stained glass that they fundamentally reshaped the medium's evolution, but recurring bouts of iconoclasm (the Beeldenstorm as it is known in the Low Countries), the secularization of the late eighteenth century, neglect and desuetude, and finally two world wars have all conspired to reduce the region’s rich corpus of this delicate medium to only a handful of surviving schemes and a small peppering of now dislocated and dismembered fragments. This beautiful crowned female head is one such survival - a tantalising shard from what must have been a fabulous late fifteenth-century glazing scheme. It offers close technical and stylistic parallels to a window of the Virgin and Child in the church of Saint Guidon at Anderlecht (a small centre nestled among Brussels' south-western suburbs), which was painted in 1482, and it may very well have been executed in the same artistic milieu.