The wings of an altarpiece: Saint Catherine of Alexandria; and Saint Barbara

These two panels likely formed the wings of a triptych, the central panel of which is lost, and represent two of the Capital Virgins, Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Barbara. The two saints were frequently depicted together in Netherlandish art, particularly during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, where to the erudite viewer they would have been understood to represent the two ideal modes of Christian living: the vita contemplativa (Saint Catherine) and the vita activa (Saint Barbara). The Master of Frankfurt painted these saints on numerous occasions, including the celebrated Virgin and Child with Saint Anne altarpiece now in the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig. As in the Leipzig panel, here Saint Catherine appears as a beautiful young woman with long golden tresses, sumptuously attired in a white fur-lined, red silk gown with gold brocade embellishments. She holds her traditional attribute of the sword of her execution in one hand and an open book in her other, reflecting her role as the patron saint of scholars and students. Barbara holds in her right hand her attribute of a tower while presenting a white, jeweled ostrich feather in her left, following a tradition which held that she received such a feather as a gift from the Christ Child in a vision. She wears an equally luxurious gold-brocaded black gown with a red cloak. According to legend, Barbara was the beautiful daughter of a pagan nobleman named Dioscurus. To protect her from her numerous suitors, Dioscurus constructed a great tower with only two windows and locked her inside it. Separated from society, the young woman converted to Christianity and was able to receive the rite of baptism by a priest who entered the tower disguised as a doctor. One day, while her father was away, Barbara convinced workmen to add a third window to the tower. Upon Dioscurus’s return, she explained to him that the three apertures represented the Holy Trinity. Enraged by his daughter’s conversion, he had her tortured and eventually executed her by decapitation with his own sword.

The Master of Frankfurt was one of the foremost artists working in Antwerp in the early sixteenth century. Tentatively identified as the painter Hendrik van Wueluwe, who was active in Antwerp from 1483 until 1533, the Master of Frankfurt is named after two large paintings commissioned by patrons originating in Frankfurt: the circa 1503-06 Altarpiece of the Holy Kinship made for the city’s Dominican church (Historisches Museum, Frankfurt; inv. no. 261) and the Crucifixion Triptych (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt; inv. no. 715) painted for the patrician Humbracht family, some members of which were residing in Antwerp by 1503. Though a suggestion has been made that the Master visited Frankfurt himself, the use of Baltic oak panels precludes his practicing there and indicates that the Frankfurt altarpieces were commissioned and produced in Antwerp, the economic and cultural center of the Netherlands during the early sixteenth century. The Master was an important proponent of the so-called ‘Antwerp Mannerist’ movement and ran a large, successful workshop. Indeed, his putative identification as de Wueluwe accords with the Master’s prominence in the city, since de Wueluwe served as Dean of the Guild of Saint Luke six times between 1495 and 1523, and is documented as having at least seven apprentices.

The early provenance of the present panels is frequently conflated with that of two similar, but later panels of the same subject, which at one point were joined as a single panel and later were sold at Sotheby's, Amsterdam, 10 May 2011, lot 10 (see Literature).

We are grateful to Peter van den Brink for endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs (private communication, 30 March 2024).