Saint Louis of Toulouse

The young man in bishop's robes here had a crown within reach and turned it down. Louis of Toulouse was a grandson of kings and son of the King of Naples, with a claim on that throne. As a boy he spent years as a hostage in Aragon, and when he came home he handed his place in the succession to a younger brother, took the plain habit of a Franciscan friar, and accepted the bishopric of Toulouse only under pressure from the pope. He died at 23. Sebastiano placed him, around 1509, in a niche closed by a gold mosaic half-dome, holding a bishop's crozier above the knotted cord of a friar. This was one of the inner faces of the San Bartolomeo organ shutters, hidden until the doors swung open, and it hung on the instrument until the 18th century, when it was framed on its own.