St. Lawrence

This is an early image, painted by or before 1421, of Saint Lawrence, a deacon of the church in early Christian Rome. He was among its treasurers, and the tradition holds that when ordered to surrender the church's riches he presented the poor and the sick instead, and was put to death on an iron grill for it. That gridiron became his emblem, and medieval painters rarely showed him without it. Very little is known about the painter, Antonio de Carro, whose name survives on only a few works from the early 1400s. The panel belongs to the group of early Italian pictures gathered for Romania's royal collection, prized in the 19th century for their gold grounds and their devotional stillness.