St Ambrose (verso)

Saint Ambrose, fourth-century Bishop of Milan and one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church, appears on the verso of a Bowes Museum panel attributed to the Master of the View of Saint Gudula around 1467. Ambrose was celebrated for his fierce defense of Church independence against imperial power, his role in Augustine's conversion, and his theology of the Virgin. In devotional painting he typically appeared in bishop's vestments with a beehive — referencing legends about bees settling on the infant Ambrose's mouth, foretelling his eloquence. Paired with Gregory, Jerome, and Augustine across the altarpiece's exterior panels, Ambrose completed the authoritative quartet of Western Christianity's founding theologians.

Oil on panel in the static, hieratic format appropriate to an exterior altarpiece panel: the bishop in frontal or three-quarter view, cope and mitre rendered with material precision, crozier and beehive or book as identifying attributes, the whole composition designed to be legible when the altarpiece was closed.