Saint Ambrose

Down in one corner Stom set a small whip, and it carries the point of the whole picture. Ambrose was bishop of Milan in the late 300s, remembered by the church as the man who drove out the Arians, the party that denied Christ was fully divine, and the scourge stands for that fight. He is one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church, the early theologians Rome treated as the foundations of its teaching. Stom painted the set in Italy in the 1630s, when Rome was holding these four up as the pillars of Catholic doctrine against the Protestant challenge from the north. Ambrose himself was bold enough to bar an emperor from his cathedral until the man did public penance for a massacre. Behind the chair, a cross and a bishop's mitre mark the office he held.