Recently identified as the Master of the Hohenlandenberg Altarpiece, a triptych held at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, and commissioned in 1496 by the bishop of Constance, Hugo von Hohenlandenberg, Michel Haider was active in Constance from around 1479 to 1517. He is a representative of the Swabian and Upper Rhine school of painting, which is little represented in French collections. Where his early works still used the typically medieval gold ground, this is one of the first to use a purely imaginary landscape, albeit one drawing on the urban architecture of the day. Separated from the city behind her by a river, Mary is sitting in a garden surrounded by ramparts, holding the Christ Child, while an angel—usually the archangel Gabriel come to announce her coming maternity—kneels to her right. Seen in a walled garden, the hortus conclusus celebrated by the Songs of Songs, she is not the mother of Christ fated to suffer, but the promise of paradise.