The Preaching of Saint Paul at Ephesus

Every year on the first of May, from 1630 until 1707, the goldsmiths of Paris presented Notre-Dame with a large new painting, and these gifts were simply called the Mays. The May of 1649 was this canvas, nearly four metres tall, by Eustache Le Sueur. It illustrates a passage from the Acts of the Apostles. At Ephesus, after Saint Paul's preaching, people who had practised magic brought their books together and burned them. Paul raises his hand in a gesture Le Sueur took from Plato in Raphael's School of Athens. The painter signed and dated the picture on a stone at the lower right, and on a step appear the letters PR and GC, the initials of the two goldsmiths who paid for it, Philippe Renault and Gilles Crevon. Seized from the cathedral in 1793, it went to the Louvre, and from 1949 to 1983 it hung in Notre-Dame again on loan.