Workshop of the Master of the Female Half-Lengths, Saint Christopher carrying the Infant Christ

According to legend, Saint Christopher was a giant, twelve feet tall. He was called Christophoros, Greek for ‘the bearer of Christ’. When he converted to Christianity he was assigned the Christian service of helping travellers across a river. One day a child asked to be carried across but Saint Christopher found him so heavy that he was bowed down with the weight. The child revealed that he was Christ and that Christopher was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Here, Christ has a faint halo of yellow light.

It’s clearly a blustery day: the mantles of both figures are blowing in the wind. Behind them, the river broadens into an estuary where seagoing ships are sailing. In the ship on the left, two sailors are furling the top sail on the foremast; on the right is a rowing boat. In the foreground, the man on the right with a staff and long grey beard must be the hermit who instructed Saint Christopher in the Christian faith. There are shells on the beach at his feet and the building with a bell on its roof behind him, might be his hermitage. On the other bank two men walk along a path through trees towards a seaside village. Above the village is a very large castle, behind which is a walled town with a large steepled church and various other buildings. On the back of the panel is a partly coloured underdrawing of a landscape.

The figures of the saint and the hermit resemble those in a woodcut of about 1501 by Albrecht Dürer, which they may be related to either directly or indirectly. The style and technique of this painting are close enough to that of Saint John on Patmos to justify an attribution to the same workshop, although not to the same artist.