Saint Christopher

The giant wading through the water is Saint Christopher, carrying a child who grows heavier with every step. In the old legend that child is Christ, bearing the weight of the whole world, and the ferryman only grasps this once he reaches the far bank, where a hermit waits by a small chapel. This panel was painted around 1562, somewhere along the Upper Rhine, and no one is sure by whose hand. For years it was tied to the workshop of the Master of Messkirch, a painter we know only through his surviving pictures. Other scholars pull it out of that circle and give it to a separate unnamed artist they simply call the Master of the Basel Christopher, after this very work. So the painting has done something odd. It handed its maker a name while the man himself stayed lost. The staff in Christopher's hand and the little chapel on the opposite shore are the parts the legend always asked a painter to show.