Saint Anthony of Padua

The Maestro de los Luna was an anonymous painter associated with the powerful Luna family of Aragon, one of the most prestigious noble houses in the Crown of Aragon in the fifteenth century. Saint Anthony of Padua, dated 1501 and now in the Museo del Prado, depicts the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar who became the most popular miracle-working saint in Western Christendom, celebrated for his preaching, his patronage of lost things, and the miracle of the Christ Child appearing to him holding a book. Anthony was especially venerated in the Iberian Peninsula, where his cult was supported by the Franciscan Order's powerful network of convents and churches. The Maestro de los Luna's panel reflects the Aragonese Hispano-Flemish tradition in the precise rendering of Anthony's Franciscan habit and his identifying attributes of lily, book, and flame.

The Maestro de los Luna employs the Hispano-Flemish technique of precise oil painting in a format appropriate to a devotional saint's image — the figure placed in a clearly legible, frontal or three-quarter pose with his attributes carefully displayed. Anthony's brown Franciscan habit is rendered with the textile precision characteristic of the tradition, and the soft landscape or architectural background provides a devotionally neutral setting.