The Holy Trinity with the Saints Roch, Florian, Sebastian, and John of Nepomuk

Anyone in Vienna around 1755 would have known this arrangement from the street. After the plague of 1679 the city raised a column on the Graben dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and plague saints were often set beneath the Trinity on such monuments. Mildorfer brings that pattern indoors, for the altar of a castle chapel. Christ sits on a cloud with the cross behind him, held up by a small angel, and God the Father holds a sceptre, with the dove between them. Among the saints below, John of Nepomuk was still a recent one, canonised in 1729, a Prague cleric whose cult the Habsburgs promoted across their lands. Mildorfer signed the canvas at the lower left and put his initials, I.M., on the small tub of water that belongs to Saint Florian, carried here by a cherub.