Saint Agapitus of Praeneste in the Arena; (interior) The Beheading of Saint Agapitus of Praeneste

This work and another double-sided panel, Saint Remigius Replenishing the Barrel of Wine; (interior) Saint Remigius and the Burning Wheat (The Met, 71.33ab), must originally have formed the folding wings of an altarpiece.

The first side of the Agapitus panel shows the saint seated in a walled enclosure, surrounded by lions and bears. His persecutors observe from the balcony at the upper right. According to legend, Agapitus, a youth of fifteen, was martyred at Praeneste (modern-day Palestrina) under Emperor Aurelian (reigned 270–75). Thrown to lions as punishment for not renouncing his Christian faith, Agapitus was spared by the beasts. The scene on the Museum’s panel is augmented with bears not mentioned in the hagiography.

The saint’s beheading outside the walls of Praeneste appears on the other side of the panel. The executioner wears the tight, striped garb typical of contemporary depictions of this occupation. At the left, a crowned, bearded man, probably meant to be Aurelian, stands before his retinue, his tilted scepter signifying the order to kill.

The appearance together of Saint Agapitus and Saint Remigius allows a general determination of the location and patronage of the lost altarpiece to which these panels belonged. The relics of Remigius were conserved at the basilica of Saint-Remi in Rheims, and its abbey (defunct since the French Revolution) was a major Benedictine foundation. The main relics of Agapitus are held at the great Benedictine abbey of Kremsmünster, Austria, having been transferred there probably by the end of the ninth century, and Agapitus is that monastery’s patron saint. Given the association of both saints with important Benedictine houses, it is plausible that the former altarpiece was commissioned for a Benedictine monastery church.

That the Museum’s panels are gilded on both sides suggests that they were not the only set of wings on the former altarpiece. The aesthetic and liturgical inner hierarchy of winged retables required that they progress toward greater lavishness in the movement from exterior to interior. A display of gilding equally sumptuous in the fully closed and open states, as would be the case were the Museum’s panels the sole wings, would have been unusual. Thus the lost retable probably had yet another, outermost pair of folding wings without exterior gilding, which equipped the altarpiece for two openings. Fully closed, it might have displayed paintings of standing saints, as is common for exteriors. The first opening would have revealed four painted narrative scenes, all united by a shimmering gold sky: from left to right, an earlier scene from Agapitus’s martyrdom, the extant Agapitus in the Arena, the extant Remigius Replenishing the Barrel of Wine, and then a subsequent Remigius scene. In the altarpiece’s second opening, the Beheading of Agapitus and Remigius and the Burning Wheat would have flanked the lost center, which might have consisted of a sculptural shrine. This more elaborate configuration has the further advantage of filling in the somewhat abbreviated extant narrative program.

When The Met acquired the Agapitus and Remigius panels in 1871, they were attributed to Jacob Walen, a fictitious personality purported to have been the teacher of Michael Wolgemut. The Museum later considered the paintings Austrian, a designation accepted by Kuhn (1936). Based on the opinions of Fischer (1935), Ganz, and Benesch (unpublished opinions in departmental archives), Wehle and Salinger (1947) published the panels as late-fifteenth-century Swiss, relating them to works by Hans Fries, Hans Leu the Elder, and the Carnation Master (Nelkenmeister) group. Stange (1955) dated them instead to the early sixteenth century and assigned them to a group he assembled around what he called the Master of the Legend of the True Cross (Meister der Kreuzlegende), ostensibly active in Zürich. Konrad (1989) rightly recognized the pronounced stylistic heterogeneity of the True Cross group and dismantled it, connecting The Met's panels instead to works associated with Bern about 1500, namely, four small scenes from the lives of the emperors Trajan, Frederick II, and an unidentified emperor, and the wings of an All Souls Altarpiece of 1505 (all Kunstmuseum Bern). To this Bern group, Konrad later added panels from an altarpiece of Saint Fridolin of Säckingen (private collections), which display striking similarities to the paintings in New York.

Indeed, the Fridolin scenes, four in all, are so close to The Met’s that they are surely by the same workshop. Saint Fridolin and Urso Appearing in Court offers several points of correspondence: the comparable palette, the similar hand shapes, the frequently overlong arms, the tendency to extend the brow across the temple with a prominent shadow, and the drapery creases that branch off one another and terminate in gentle curves. The face of the figure at the far left of the Beheading of Saint Agapitus nearly matches that of the standing figure (Landolf) at the center of the court scene, except in reverse, as if the same workshop pattern had been used for both. Moreover, the brocade pattern of the gold background appears to correspond exactly. In the two scenes showing Fridolin in a landscape, the types of rock formations and fanlike depiction of leaves are the same as those found on the Museum’s panels. The Fridolin cycle’s likely date of 1503 (inscribed on the lectern in the court scene but hard to read) is good reason to date The Met’s pictures about 1500–1505.

The very subject matter of the Fridolin panels is evidence for the workshop’s location in northern Switzerland, since the saint is historically associated with the area. The same regional assignation is suggested by the general stylistic affinity with northern Swiss painting of the final decade of the fifteenth century in various centers, including works of the later Carnation Masters active in Bern, Zürich, and Baden. Further supporting the attribution is a probably somewhat earlier depiction of Saint Hubert and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (about 1490, private collection), putatively of northern Swiss origin, on which has been discovered the exact same brocade pattern in the gold background. That panel is by a distinctly different hand; thus possibly the master of The Met's panels was successor to the earlier painter’s workshop and inherited the pattern, or there was simply an exchange of patterns between associated workshops. The general resemblance of the Agapitus, Remigius, and Fridolin panels to the Bernese works cited by Konrad, and to other paintings associated with Bern, certainly raises the possibility of an origin in that city; however, in light of the still uneven state of knowledge about painting in northern Switzerland about 1500, the parallels for now seem too approximate to support such a precise localization.

[2014; adapted from Waterman in Ainsworth and Waterman 2013]

The support of this double-sided painting is composed of three boards with the grain oriented vertically. When viewed from the exterior side, it exhibits a slight compound convex lateral warp. The modern engaged frame prevented examination of the perimeter. An x-radiograph detail (see fig. 1 above) revealed fabric attached to one side of the panel below the ground preparation in the examined location.


On both sides of the panel, the sky is decorated with elaborately tooled and burnished water gilding applied over an orange bole. The pattern was scored into the ground preparation before the gilding was carried out. The gilding on the halos is damaged and restored. The sword blade in The Beheading of Saint Agapitus is gilded with a white metal leaf, the hilt with gold. The low-relief pattern on the robe of the emperor in the beheading scene scene is a gilded and glazed wax appliqué.


The scenes are skillfully painted in a graphic style with fluid brushstrokes. In portions of the clothing, directional brushwork reinforces volume and folds, while distinctive hooked "overdrawn" lines accent folds in the fabric. The saint’s face was painted in a manner different from that used to paint the faces of those witnessing his martyrdom. The latter are painted in an idiosyncratic fashion, wet on wet, using few brushstrokes to describe features. By juxtaposing brushstrokes of pale flesh color with ones that are opaque red, brown, and pale yellow, volume and shading were created; then the faces were finished with brown, black, and red contour lines. The saint’s face is painted in a more restrained manner, with softer blending and subtler brushwork.


In general the paintings are in good condition; most of the restoration is confined to discrete losses throughout and to abrasions in the gilding. The lower half of Saint Agapitus in the Arena is considerably restored. Much of the figure of the seated saint and many passages of the foreground, landscape, and animals are masked with broad restoration and toning.


When the surface was viewed with the stereomicroscope, a white ground preparation and a white priming were visible. Infrared photography (fig. 2) documented the presence of underdrawing in a liquid black material applied with a brush. The underdrawing in both paintings consists of basic linear compositions, with hook-ended contours for folds in the drapery and long hatch marks for shadows. The face on the decapitated head in The Beheading of Saint Agapitus was carefully drawn, with hatching for shadows, but in the other figures only cursory marks such as circles and short curves indicate the placement of facial features. Minor changes, primarily related to adjustments in perspective, were found between the underdrawing and the painting in both pictures.


[2013; adapted from German Paintings catalogue]

Inscription: Inscribed (reverse, bottom, in a later hand): 87

?by descent to Martin Comte Cornet de Ways Ruart, Brussels (until d. 1870); [Étienne Le Roy, Brussels, through Léon Gauchez, Paris, until 1870, as by Jacob Walen; sold to Blodgett]; William T. Blodgett, Paris and New York (1870–71; sold half share to Johnston); William T. Blodgett, New York, and John Taylor Johnston, New York (1871; sold to The Met)

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Temporary Exhibition," April 1906, no. 44 (with 71.33ab, as "Scenes from the Lives of Two Saints," Austrian School, 15th century).

Lexington, Va. Washington and Lee University. "The Metropolitan Museum of Art Loan Exhibit," October 30, 1950–January 15, 1951, no. 18 [this work remained on long-term loan to Washington and Lee University until February 14, 1952].

Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences. "The Artist Looks at Nature," November 30, 1952–January 13, 1953, no. 3 (as "Martyr Saint," Swiss, 15th century).

Etienne Le Roy and Léon Gauchez. Letter. 1870 [see Ref. Wehle and Salinger 1947], tentatively attribute this panel to Jakob Walen.

Catalogue of the Pictures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 681 Fifth Avenue, in the City of New York. [New York], 1872, p. 39, no. 87 or 88, with 71.33ab, as "Hagiological Subjects," by Jacob Walen; calls them the wings of an altarpiece.

Otto Fischer. Letter to Harry B. Wehle. August 10, 1935, calls them definitely Swiss and dates them about 1500; finds them closely related to the work of Hans Fries of Fribourg, suggesting that they may be "by a contemporary and perhaps somewhat older master who came under his influence, possibly also under that of the Zurich panel-master identified recently with Hans Leu the elder (about 1487–1507)".

Charles L. Kuhn. A Catalogue of German Paintings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in American Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1936, p. 74, no. 325, pl. LXIV (a), as "Scenes from the Legend of St. Thecla," Austrian School; dates it about 1510 and calls it the companion piece to 71.33ab.

Harry B. Wehle and Margaretta Salinger. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Early Flemish, Dutch and German Paintings. New York, 1947, pp. 171–73, ill. (a and b), reject the identification of the saint as Thecla, calling it certainly a man, and mentioning Saints Eleutherius, Agapetus, and Tropez as possible subjects; relate the panels to two wings of an altarpiece at Heiligenkreuz, near Vienna, depicting the Agony in the Garden and Saint Christopher (ill. in Österreichische Kunsttopographie 19 [1926], figs. 163–64); mention a work in the Provincial Museum, Hannover (no. 190), that is so similar to "The Beheading of a Martyr Saint" that one must be based on the other.

Julius S. Held. "Book Reviews: Harry B. Wehle and Margaretta M. Salinger . . ., 1947." Art Bulletin 31 (June 1949), p. 140, suggests Saint Pantaleon as the subject.

Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 93.

Alfred Stange. Deutsche Malerei der Gotik. Vol. 7, Oberrhein, Bodensee, Schweiz und Mittelrhein in der Zeit von 1450 bis 1500. Munich, 1955, p. 79, identifies the saint depicted in these two scenes as Vitus; erroneously calls these scenes the reverses of 71.33ab, which he mistakenly refers to as two separate panels; attributes the Remigius scenes to the "Meister der Kreuzlegende" and these two scenes to a younger assistant.

Alfred Stange. Kritisches Verzeichnis der deutschen Tafelbilder vor Dürer. Ed. Norbert Lieb. Vol. 2, Oberrhein, Bodensee, Schweiz, Mittelrhein, Ulm, Augsburg, Allgäu, Nördlingen, von der Donau zum Neckar. Munich, 1970, p. 83, no. 355 (with 71.33ab).

Denys Sutton, ed. Letters of Roger Fry. New York, 1972, vol. 1, p. 255 n. 1 to letter no. 177 (March 2, 1906), lists it among works included in the 1906 exhibition.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 216, ill. (obverse and reverse).

Katharine Baetjer. "Buying Pictures for New York: The Founding Purchase of 1871." Metropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004), pp. 172, 197, 205, 245, appendix 1A no. 88, ill. (a and b).

Joshua P. Waterman in Maryan W. Ainsworth and Joshua P. Waterman. German Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350–1600. New Haven, 2013, pp. 257–63, 322, no. 60A, ill. (color).