Jabach Altar: Saints Simeon and Lazarus

Plague ran through Saxony in 1503, and the altarpiece these two saints come from is usually connected with its end. Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, is thought to have commissioned it. Dürer painted it somewhere between 1503 and 1505, and it carries the name of the Jabach family of Cologne, who owned it long afterwards. Simeon, the old man who took the infant Christ in his arms in the Temple, stands beside Lazarus on a gold ground, on what was the inner face of one wing. The centre of the altar is lost, and scholars do not agree whether it held paintings or carved figures. The outer face survives in two pieces in two cities: Job sitting on his dungheap, in Frankfurt, and the two musicians playing to him, in Cologne. Those were once a single picture, and the dress of Job's wife still runs off the edge of the Frankfurt panel and continues on the Cologne one.