Episodes from the Life of a Bishop Saint

Master of Saint Giles and Assistant

National Gallery of Art

A bearded man kneels before a bishop in front of a crowd gathered outside a church in this vertical painting. The people all have pale skin. The bishop is to our left, though he stands angled to our right on the church steps. His face is lined and his eyebrows furrowed as he looks into the distance to our right. He holds up one hand with the thumb and first two fingers extended. His tall, pointed white mitre hat is widely edged with gold and jewels. A saucer-sized gold medallion fastens the two sides of his long, gold brocade robe. Under that, he wears a brick-red garment over a white shirt visible at his neck and wrists. Four clean-shaven clergymen stand behind him. The one closest to us wears white and his blond hair is cut into a ring around his head. He holds a hooked staff, a crozier, and his body blocks the others. The kneeling man, to our right, presses his hands together in prayer as he looks up at the bishop. The kneeling man wears an off-white cloth tied around his head and plum-purple, gold, and pine-green robes. A black, oval object, perhaps a cap, lies on the church step next to his knee. About fifteen men, women, and children line up beyond the kneeling man, forming a loose backward C-curve through the center of the scene. They are dressed in rose-pink, lemon or mustard-yellow, avocado-green, blue, or orange garments. At the back of the queue and seen in the near distance between the kneeling man and bishop, two men reach out to support a third man lying on the ground. The prone man looks with wild eyes and a gaping mouth at a green demon hovering overhead. The group occupies a plaza flanked by the beige stone church on the left and a large tan building with arched windows on the right. Statues and carvings fill the arched portals of the church beyond the bishop. The space is enclosed with more buildings set farther back from the two closer structures. A few wispy clouds float against the azure-blue sky overhead.