St Odilia

The two eyes resting on the book tell you who this is. Odilia, an Alsatian abbess who lived around 700, was born blind according to her legend, and her father, a duke, rejected her. She gained her sight at her baptism, and the same father later founded a convent for her on the Hohenburg, the mountain in Alsace now called Mont Sainte-Odile. People with eye complaints prayed to her, and painters gave her the eyes to hold. Here she wears a white veil, a black mantle over a white habit, and a pink robe gathered in front of her. She stood on the gilded inner side of a wing from the Marian altar that Marx Reichlich's workshop painted around 1500 for St Peter's Abbey in Salzburg. At some point the wing was sawn apart, and its outer side, a St Roch, is now a separate panel in the Belvedere.