The Martyrdom of Saint Florian

Around 1518 Albrecht Altdorfer, working in Regensburg on the Danube, painted a series of panels for the high altar of the monastery of Sankt Florian, near Linz in Austria, telling the story of the saint the place was named for. Florian had been a Roman officer in this region who admitted he was a Christian during the persecutions around the year 304, and was thrown from a bridge into the river Enns with a millstone tied to his neck. This panel shows that end. Altdorfer, one of the first painters to treat landscape almost as a subject in its own right, sets the cruelty among tall trees and Alpine light. The cycle was later broken up and scattered. This piece reached the Uffizi in Florence in 1914, from a collection in Siena.