Following the monumental mural art of Romanesque style, the glass painting of Early Gothic cathedrals and miniature painting so warmly favored by courtly culture, medieval panel painting, an interesting and attractive field in the history of German art, aspired to the proud rank of leadership. Born on small-size diptychs and portable altars, it became the progenitor of the vast realm of easel pictures with an extensive province of themes, the forerunner of the portrait, the still-life, of genre-painting, in general of all the motives that were to appear again and again in frescoes of loftily solemn tone without having a proper place of their own. The aristocratic art of miniature painting was inaccessible to the wider public, leaving its demand for the spectacular unsatisfied. While gazing at major altarpieces, at the triptychs gleaming with gold and colors in the dim glimmer inside Gothic churches, people found ample opportunities for enjoying new representations of century-old sacred themes painted in a life-like manner after the intense, veritably naturalist conception of the Late Middle Ages, virtually dividing the picture into series of scenes fully comprehensible to the spectator. This demand was manifest in occasional details of the genre-scene type to be discovered in a fair number of pictures, the arrangement of minor utensils to form a complete still-life, the portrait-like verisimilitude of some figures; these were to become the preshaped elements of artistic forms destined to emerge later and to acquire independence. - p. 5.