Saint Catherine and Saint Barbara with Donors

Master of Frankfurt 1460 - ca. 1533

Summary

These paintings are the left and right panels of a triptych— a devotional picture in three parts, consisting of a central panel with wings on either side that could be closed over it in order to protect it or to limit its use to occasions of special religious significance. On the left, St Catherine, crowned and holding a sword, wearing a gown with a design of pomegranates, presents a female donor in a black habit edged with fur, before a landscape with buildings on a rocky crag. The donor's arms, held by a young black boy, are in a tree above. On the right, St Barbara, wearing a martyr's crown and holding a peacock's feather, presents another female donor, a young woman in a red gown, with two small girls behind her. They are in front of a castle or walled town, whose nearest tower appears to be in a state of neglect, with grasses growing between the mortar. The donor's arms are carried by an angel above. The Master of Frankfurt was a Flemish artist working in Antwerp, whose present pseudonym derives from the altarpiece of the Holy Kindred that he painted for the Dominican Church in Frankfurt.

Display Label

St Catharine and St Barbara with Donors around 1490 - 1515 The Master of Frankfurt around 1460 - 1515 Oil on panel These are two wings of an altarpiece. but the central panel has been lost. It depicted Christ carrying the cross: at the end of the cross can be seen at the bottom of the right hand panel. The kneeling figures are the donors who paid for the altarpiece to be painted. They would have chosen the particular scene to remind them that Christ suffered and died for the remission of their sins. The feint outline of a skeleton and an inscription on the outside of one wing amplifies this meaning: ‘I ask you who survive us to remember that what we are now, that you will be, and that we once were what you are now… think of death’. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund 1957.510