Saint John of Capistrano

In July 1456 an Ottoman army besieging Belgrade fell back, and much of Christian Europe gave the credit to two men, the Hungarian commander John Hunyadi and an elderly Franciscan preacher, John of Capistrano, whose sermons had raised a crusading army. Within months both were dead. Bartolomeo Vivarini signed this panel only three years later, in 1459. Capistrano holds a crusader's banner, a red cross on white, which also carries a small figure of his own teacher, the preacher Bernardino of Siena. The scroll above his head adapts a line of Saint Paul, thanks be to God, who gives us the victory, and the inscription on the ledge calls him blessed and records his death in 1456. The Church did not declare him a saint until 1690, so the gold rays around his head ran well ahead of Rome. Italian sources record the panel as made for Gagliano Aterno, a village in the Abruzzo, the mountain region where Capistrano was born.