Master of the Legend of Saint Vitus

Saint Vitus, as the legend tells it, was the son of a pagan nobleman in Roman Sicily who refused to give up his Christian faith. An unnamed painter active around 1480 told his story on a series of panels, and art historians call him after them, the Master of the Legend of Saint Vitus.

In one panel, now in the Belvedere in Vienna, the young saint turns away from music-making girls sent to tempt him. Some of the boards were painted on both sides and later sawn apart, and this scene is the separated inner face of another panel. A Christ on the Mount of Olives in the same museum belongs to the group.

The Martyrdom of Saint Vitus shows his death in an oven, where the legend usually puts him in a cauldron of boiling oil. That panel, with Christ before Caiaphas on its back, belonged to the Viennese collector Friedrich Spiegler until the Gestapo seized it in 1938. It spent decades in Vienna's state museums, was recommended for return to his heirs in 2001, and left the Belvedere's inventory in 2013.