In 1403, Conrad von Soest painted an altarpiece for the city church in the town of Niederwildungen (Fig. 1.1). The work remains in that same church (now the Evangelische Stadtkirche of the renamed town of Bad Wildungen). The interior of Conrad's Niederwildungen Altarpiece follows a format that was extremely common within Westphalian triptychs of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In order to incorporate more narrative events, each of the three panels of the triptych is subdivided into separate cells, four equal-sized ones on each wing and five in the centre, with two vertically stacked cells at each side of a much larger central Crucifixion scene. Virtually the same structure is found in two Westphalian works produced in the second half of the fourteenth century—probably in the same workshop2—the Osnabrück Altarpiece (Fig. 1.2) and the Netze Altarpiece (Fig. 1.3). This format is not limited to the Westphalian region: the Lower Saxon, early fifteenth-century Göttinger Barfüßeraltar has a very similar structure, though it has three registers as opposed to the two registers of the Niederwildungen Altarpiece—as does the Cologne Kirchsahr Altarpiece of 1401–1425 (Fig. 3.2). Indeed, the tendency to subdivide the interior into multiple narrative fields, rather than showing one scene in each panel, is one of the key features that distinguished painted triptychs from Germanic regions from their Netherlandish counterparts, especially in the earlier part of the fifteenth century.