Saints Achatius, Christopher and Leonard

In 1508 Albrecht Dürer painted the martyrdom of 10,000 Christian soldiers for Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony, who collected their relics. The picture is now in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. Legend names their commander as Achatius, torn with thorns and crucified with his men on Mount Ararat. Around 1520 this painter gave him a thorny branch and dressed him as a well-off man of his own day, in a pleated tunic and a beret heaped with white plumes. Christopher wades through shallow water beside him, leaning on a tree trunk, and the Christ Child on his shoulders holds on by a tuft of his hair. Leonard, in a dark monk's habit, carries a chain. The panel was once the outer face of an altar wing, and the shoemakers' workshop on its inner side has since been sawn away.