Sibbecai and Benaiah

These two warriors are the companion piece to the scene of David and the well. They are the other soldiers from the same story, shown carrying the water they have just drawn back through the Philistine lines. The striking thing is how Witz dressed them. These are Old Testament heroes from ancient Jerusalem, and he put them in the up-to-date plate armor of his own day, the gear a Basel soldier or a knight at a mid-15th-century tournament would actually have worn. Painters often collapsed the biblical past into the present like this, but few made the metal so convincing. Witz rendered the hard, reflective surfaces and their cast shadows with a precision that was new in northern painting. The men stand with a heavy, sculptural solidity, planted on the ground rather than posed.