With Koen Fillet and Sven Van Dorst, head of restoration at The Phoebus Foundation studio.

The Madonna and Child belongs to the established repertoire of European art. Precisely for that reason, Pieter Claeissens II’s Virgin and Child with Crown Imperial and Llama calls for closer attention. Behind the familiar scene lie unexpected accents: exotic flowers and, almost unnoticed, a llama in the landscape. In this episode of Phoebus Focus, we follow the trail of these curious details. Although Claeissens never travelled far, fauna and flora from South America and Asia nonetheless found their way into his work, through an exceptional natural history manuscript and the international networks of his time. What appears to be a traditional devotional image thus opens onto a window on an early modern world in motion.