Saint Anthony of Padua with the Infant Christ

This masterly depiction of Saint Anthony of Padua with the Infant Christ belongs to the small oeuvre of the anonymous Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy who, alongside Hans Memling and the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula, was one of the foremost painters working in Bruges in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Named by Max J. Friedländer after a series of panels, dated to 1480, depicting the life of the saint in the Sint-Jacobskerk in Bruges, the Master appears to have been highly popular in the city. His thriving workshop produced paintings for local patrons like Donaes de Moor, who held a number of important civic positions in Bruges and was pictured in the Master’s Pietà Triptych of circa 1475 (Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza), as well as for international export to Italy, Spain and the Hanseatic region.

The Portuguese Franciscan friar Saint Anthony of Padua was known for his fervent and eloquent preaching, having taught in several European universities, and for his devotion to the sick and the poor. Recognised by his Franciscan habit of the Observance, he is often pictured with one of his most unmistakable attributes, that of the Infant Christ, tenderly held in his arms or at times seated atop a book, the image of which was derived from one of his legendary visions. The half-length format of the saint was atypical in early Netherlandish art, yet common in Spanish retables of the late fifteenth century. As Ann Michelle Roberts has posited, the Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy may have travelled to Spain in 1491, where he executed large commissions, including Mary, Queen of Heaven (Washington, National Gallery of Art) and possibly the Altarpiece of the Altar of the Virgin Mary (Tallinn, Niguliste Museum; op. cit.). This sojourn could account for the format of the present picture, in which Saint Anthony and the Infant Christ are placed prominently in the picture plane, with the enframing brocade intended to perform the same visual function as that of tooled gold surfaces of Spanish predella panels. Anthony of Padua found greater popularity in Italy, Spain and Portugal than in the Low Countries, attesting to the possibility that this panel may indeed have been painted for an Iberian patron.

Nicole Veronee-Verhaegen first recognised in this work the hallmarks of the Master’s idiosyncratic style (op. cit.), which the artist drew from the study of predecessors like Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts and Hugo van der Goes. The physiognomic eccentricity of his willowy female figures is here reflected in the form of the Infant Christ, whose heavily-lidded eyes, small chin and delicate wisps of hair exemplify the most distinctive physical traits by which the artist is identified. Dr. Sacha Zdanov, to whom we are grateful, compares the characteristic face of Saint Anthony to the Master’s Saint Peter Martyr in the triptych in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the saints found in the Tallinn altarpiece (private communication, October 2023).

In the artist’s visual narrative, landscapes and figures were painted with equal significance. Beyond Saint Anthony’s looming cross, the artist painted a vista with a realistic yet imaginary fortified city, providing a glimpse of a heavenly garden outside of its walls embodying the paradise of the celestial realm. While fantastical here, many of the artist’s landscapes were dominated by detailed renderings of the towers and walls of the city of Bruges, particularly its tallest fifteenth-century structures: the tower of the Church of Notre Dame and that of the Belfry. Indeed, the artist so often rendered the Belfry that scholars attempted to create a chronology of his work from the alterations he made recording its architectural history, including the heightening of its tower in 1483 by the addition of a white stone octagon, which was crowned by a steeply pointed roof that burned down in 1493, only to be replaced in 1499 (see A.M. Roberts, ‘The City and the Convent: “The Virgin of the Rose Garden” by the Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy’, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, LXXII, no. 1⁄2, 1998, p. 57). It is for this reason, for example, that his Lamentation in the Minneapolis Institute of Art has been dated to after the Belfry’s crowning (fig. 1).

Set in contrast to the saint’s sombre habit, the lavish cloth of honour with a pomegranate brocade became a signature element that recurred time and again in his work. The artist employed the design in the cloths adorning Nicodemus and Saint Catherine in his Minneapolis Lamentation; in the cloth of honour in his Virgo inter Virgines at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; in the retable of Saint Nicholas in the Groeningemuseum, Bruges; in the triptych at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; in the vestments of Saint Donatian in the Pietà Triptych in Madrid; and in the brocade of the dress of Saint Ursula of his Virgin of the Rose Garden (Detroit Institute of Arts), to name a few. Indeed, the pomegranate motif was at the height of fashion in fifteenth-century velvet weaving, not in the least due to its multiple meanings. In a religious context it referenced the resurrection and Christ’s immortality, with the infant Christ often depicted presenting a pomegranate to his mother, while in the secular realm it connoted both fertility and majesty.