Die Heilige Elisabeth von Portugal

Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, the thirteenth-century queen who became a Franciscan tertiary after her husband’s death, was an unusual subject in Netherlandish painting. Metsys’s 1524 depiction in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie may have been commissioned by a patron with particular devotion to this Iberian saint, perhaps connected to the extensive Portuguese merchant community in Antwerp that traded in spices and colonial goods. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The royal saint’s elaborate costume provides an opportunity for Metsys’s descriptive virtuosity, the crown, robes, and attributes rendered with painstaking attention to textile and metalwork surfaces.