Auto-da-fé Presided over by Saint Dominic de Guzmán

The episode belongs to the 1210s, when Dominic de Guzman was sent to preach against the Albigensians in southern France. What Berruguete painted, somewhere between 1491 and 1499, is that old story staged with the machinery of his own Castile. The tribunal sits on a wooden scaffold under a yellow awning, officials ranked on the steps below the saint, guards and townspeople on the ground, and at the right two condemned men tied to stakes as the fire is lit. It is one of the earliest surviving pictures of an auto de fe. The panel came from the altarpiece of Saint Dominic in the monastery of Santo Tomas in Avila, which housed the Inquisition's tribunal in that city. Cut wood and iron tools lie scattered along the bottom edge, at the feet of the soldiers.