Legend of Saint Florian

Albrecht Altdorfer painted this cycle on the life of Saint Florian for the saint's own monastery near Linz, in Austria, beginning around 1510. Florian was a Roman officer drowned in the river Enns for refusing to give up his Christian faith, and the panels follow him from arrest to martyrdom. At some point the altarpiece was broken up and its panels sold off one by one, so today they are scattered, several in Nuremberg, one in Prague, others in Berlin. Two of them reached the Uffizi in 1914, bought to strengthen the gallery's thin holdings of German painting. Altdorfer set the whole story in the dense forests and sharp Alpine light of his own Danube country rather than in ancient Rome.