The Honesty of Saint Eligius

The Florentine goldsmiths had their own confraternity, and their patron was Saint Eligius, a 7th-century goldsmith who worked at the Frankish court before becoming a bishop. For their altar they asked Jacopo da Empoli to paint the tale that made his reputation as an honest craftsman.

The Frankish king Clotaire had given Eligius gold to make a single throne set with gems, and Eligius made two from it, using every scrap, without the tricks goldsmiths were suspected of, no metal quietly lost to the file or the furnace. Empoli shows the reckoning at court, the finished work presented and the surplus gold accounted for, a scene a room of goldsmiths would have read as their own trade at its most honest. He painted it in 1614 as a tall altarpiece, now in the Uffizi.