Altarpiece of Saints Thomas and Matthias

Bernard van Orley's Altarpiece of Saints Thomas and Matthias at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, painted around 1515, depicts the two apostles selected by lot and divine will to replace Judas among the Twelve — Thomas the doubter who became a witness of the Resurrection, and Matthias chosen in the period between the Ascension and Pentecost. As Brussels' leading painter and court artist to Margaret of Austria, Van Orley received the most important ecclesiastical commissions in the Habsburg Netherlands, and this altarpiece represents the formal ambition of his religious work. The paired apostle altarpiece combined devotional function — venerating the titular saints — with Van Orley's demonstration of his fully developed mature style, in which Italian Renaissance elements of monumentality and balanced composition were fully integrated with the Flemish precision of surface detail. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds the imperial Habsburg collection, one of the world's great art assemblages, and Van Orley's altarpiece is among its significant examples of early sixteenth-century Flemish painting at the court level.

The altarpiece demonstrates van Orley's synthesis of detailed Netherlandish technique with Italian Renaissance compositional principles, presenting the saints with both surface refinement and spatial grandeur.