Exeter Madonna or Virgin and Child with Saint Barbara and Jan Vos are names given to a small oil-on-wood panel painting completed 1450 by the Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus. It shows Saint Barbara presenting a Carthusian monk identified as Jan Vos, to the Virgin Mary who holds the Christ Child in her arms. Its diminutive size suggests it was meant as a personal devotional piece. The painting is set in a loggia reminiscent of the interior of Madonna of Chancellor Rolin by Jan van Eyck – complete with a row of floor tiles separating the earthly from the heavenly realms. The panel may have been a companion piece to van Eyck's late work Madonna of Jan Vos (c. 1441). The attribution to Christus is today undisputed, but art historians are unsure regarding the date and circumstances of the commission. In the 17th century it was thought to be by van Eyck and sold as such by the Marquis of Exeter. It was acquired by the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in 1888 and is now in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie. Background The Carthusian monk in the painting was identified as Jan Vos in 1938 by the art historian H. J. J. Scholtens. Vos became prior of the Charterhouse of Val-de-Grace in 1441, around when he probably commissioned Jan van Eyck's Madonna of Jan Vos . Van Eyck died in 1441 and various theories have been put forth in regards to Petrus Christus's hand in that painting. The art historian Erwin Panofsky speculated that Christus finished the van Eyck. Based on Christus's purchase of citizenship on July 6, 1444 and ostensible arrival in Bruges at that time and Vos's movements (he was absent from Bruges for a number of years), a more probable scenario is that the Exeter Madonna was commissioned as a portable devotional piece for Vos during his travels, or on his return to Bruges in the 1450s. It is possible that Vos gave van Eyck's Madonna of Jan Vos to Christus work from. Christus seems also to have used the now lost Madonna of Nicolas van Maelbeke as a source. Christus's rendition is a reinterpretion, rather than a direct copy of van Eyck's painting. Although Saint Barbara and Vos are in the same position in both paintings, the most obvious difference is the exclusion of Saint Elizabeth. Description Saint Barbara presents Jan Vos to the Virgin Mary, who holds the Christ Child in