The Exhumation of Saint Hubert

Saint Hubert, bishop of Liège, died in 727, and 98 years later his tomb was opened so his body could be carried to a new abbey in the Ardennes forest. Here it is lifted out whole and uncorrupted, the proof of sainthood the crowd has come to see. Behind the bishop with the censer stands Louis the Pious, the Frankish emperor of the day, his robe patterned with the lilies of France and the imperial eagle.

Most of the onlookers wear the clothes of Brussels in the 1430s. The panel was made for the chapel of Saint Hubert in the church of Saint Gudula, founded by Jan Vrientschap, a wealthy property owner, and his brother-in-law Jan Coels, a money-changer, and some faces in the crowd may be theirs and their families'. The decision to add them seems to have come late, and it forced a large rearrangement of the picture.

The two boys at the left are almost certainly by Rogier himself, painted directly over the red robe of the emperor's attendant. The companion panel, The Dream of Pope Sergius, is in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and in the 1620s a French traveller still saw the pair in the chapel.