Saint Louis of Toulouse

The young man on the gold ground had every reason to wear a crown. Louis of Anjou stood in line for the throne of Naples, and he handed it to a younger brother to become a Franciscan friar, then bishop of Toulouse. He was dead by 23. Bartolomeo Vivarini painted him around 1465 and gave his rank away quietly. The fleurs-de-lis of the Anjou family are embroidered on the cope he wears over a plain grey friar's habit. This panel is a survivor. It was once a single figure in a tall, multi-part altarpiece, and the rest has been lost or scattered. Look at the mitre and the rings, worked with the hard, sculptural edge that painters near Padua were taking from Mantegna in those very years.