St Thomas (interior) and St Sylvester (exterior)

A winged altar had two faces. On ordinary days its wings stayed shut and churchgoers saw the outer sides. On feast days they were opened, and the gold came out. This wing, from the Marian altar that Marx Reichlich's workshop painted around 1500 for St Peter's Abbey in Salzburg, still has both. The inner side, on a patterned gold ground, shows the apostle Thomas, barefoot, in a red cloak lined with green, holding a book and the lance with which, by tradition, he was killed in India. The outer side is plainer, a dark wall above a strip of floor. There stands Pope Sylvester in the three-tiered papal crown, with a papal cross in one hand and in the other a book on which a small dragon coils. A medieval legend tells how Sylvester subdued a dragon that was killing the people of Rome with its breath.