| One of the large number of small rectangular donor panels from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the cloister at Wettingen. They were introduced after the cloister was rebuilt following the fire of 1507, the first, of which this is one, during the abbacies of Johannes Mueller (1486-1521) and Andreas Wengi (1521-8). This, one of five from before 1530 (see GL81-3 and GL85), was given by Abbot Jodokus Necker from the Cistercian abbey of Salem, the tiny kneeling figure in the bottom right corner with his coat of arms. The central figures of the crowned Virgin with Child in a blue dress and Bernard in a brownish grey cowl and carrying a crozier with sudarium in his right hand and a book in his left are standing on grass against a red damask drape. They are flanked by two columns, at the base of the left one of which is the date '1521', surmounted by an Annunciation scene with a kneeling Mary on the left and Gabriel on the right with the inscription: 'AVE GRATIA PLENA.D(OMI)N(U)S TECU(M)'. Unusually for the period, although Mary is here depicted with Bernard it is not a Lactation scene.
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