Saints Ambrose, Cecilia and Augustine

Saints Ambrose, Cecilia and Augustine, at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, depicts three of the most important saints of the Western church—an African church father, a Roman martyr, and a bishop of Milan. Painted around 1447 for a Cologne church, this panel by Stefan Lochner belongs to the tradition of multi-saint devotional panels produced throughout the fifteenth century to satisfy the demand for hierarchically ordered sacred imagery. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum holds the most comprehensive collection of Cologne painting and is the natural home for Lochner's surviving works.

The three saints stand in a compact lateral arrangement, each holding their identifying attributes: Ambrose with his beehive, Cecilia with her organ, Augustine with his book and bishop's vestments. Lochner unifies them beneath a gold ground with a tooled pattern, differentiating their costumes through color contrast while maintaining the visual harmony expected in multi-figure devotional panels.