St Margaret (interior) and St Pantaleon (exterior)

The Belvedere gives this narrow wing to the circle of Friedrich Pacher, a painter from South Tyrol, and dates it to around 1490. On the inner face, Saint Margaret of Antioch stands crowned against a tooled gold ground, holding a tall cross with two crossbars. A red cord runs from her hand to a dragon at her feet, which bares its teeth but is plainly on a leash. The medieval Golden Legend says a dragon swallowed her in prison and split open when she made the sign of the cross, though its compiler admitted the swallowing was held to be apocryphal. Women in labour called on her all the same, since the legend has her praying for exactly them. The outer face shows Saint Pantaleon, a physician martyred at Nicomedia around 305, whom midwives also took as a patron.