Saint Julian and the Redeemer

Andrea del Castagno painted this fresco around 1451 on a wall of the church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, then one of the city's busiest pilgrimage sites. He was among the sharpest of the early Renaissance painters, known for figures that look carved rather than drawn, with hard edges and real weight. The subject is Saint Julian the Hospitaller, a legendary knight who, tricked by the devil, killed his own parents and then spent the rest of his life doing penance by sheltering travelers. Above him Christ appears in blessing. Castagno gives Julian a grieving, downturned face rather than a saintly calm. Six years after finishing it the painter was dead, caught in one of the plague waves that kept sweeping through Florence in these decades.