St Sebastian Altarpiece, Right Wing: St Elizabeth

Elizabeth was a real woman, and when Holbein painted her she had been dead for almost 300 years. She was a daughter of the king of Hungary, married at 14 to the ruler of Thuringia in central Germany, and widowed at 20 when her husband died on his way to a crusade. She then turned her back on court life, founded a hospital at Marburg in 1228 and nursed the sick there with her own hands. She died in 1231, only 24 years old, and the pope declared her a saint four years later. By the 16th century she was the standard picture of charity toward the poor and the sick across the German lands. That is the work Holbein shows her doing on this right-hand wing, painted in Augsburg in 1516, where she bends to tend the sick.