Rencontre de saint Érasme et de saint Maurice

Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg was one of the great relic-collectors of his age, and the huge sums he raised selling indulgences to fund that piety were exactly what had pushed Martin Luther to nail up his protests only a few years before Grünewald began this panel, around 1520. It shows two saints meeting: Maurice, an early Christian officer from Egypt, painted here as a Black African in gleaming silver armour, and Erasmus, whose face is a straight portrait of Albrecht himself. The cardinal had just moved Maurice's relics to his church in Halle and wanted himself pictured greeting his patron saint, the two of them caught mid-conversation as if debating doctrine. Grünewald leaned toward the Protestant cause in the upheaval that followed, and by the time he died a few years later he had left almost no signed work, which is why even his real name is still argued over.