"Max J. Friedländer separated a group of pictures from the mass of works of the so-called ""Antwerp Mannerists"" in 1915 for the first time. After a triptych with the Adoration of the Magi, which was then in the possession of the barons of Groote in Kitzburg, he named it the ""Master of Groote Adoration"". Friedländer himself emphasised the difficulties of even attempting to differentiate this master from his Antwerp contemporaries, especially from the ""Master of Antwerp Adoration"", named after another king adoration in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In order to avoid this problem, he suspected a close workshop collaboration between these two ""mannerists"". The activity of the ""Master of the Groote Adoration"" can be dated to the first quarter of the 16th century; the place of his activity was presumably Antwerp. None of the pictures that have been style-critically attributed to him is dated, only a copy after one of his Adoration of the Magi, now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, bears the date 1519.
Among the ""Antwerp Mannerists"", the ""Master of Groote Adoration"" is one of the less artistically inspired painters, even though his technique is impeccable. His wooden, clumsily formed figures are doll-like and inanimate; without a clear deep spatial development they appear before fantastic architectural and landscape formations. Like his artist colleagues, the ""Master of Groote Adoration"" also combines traditional, domestic pictorial inventions with Italian Renaissance elements, especially for decorative accessories. The concentration on marketable themes − such as the Adoration of the Magi − as well as the simplified composition with stencils used as set pieces reflect the changed artistic situation in Antwerp at the beginning of the 16th century."
