Saint Margaret and Saint Apollonia

Rogier van der Weyden painted Saints Margaret and Apollonia around 1450, during his mature period as official city painter of Brussels. Both saints were popular in Northern devotion—Margaret as patron of childbirth, Apollonia invoked against toothache. The panel is now in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, which holds a significant collection of Early Netherlandish paintings. Rogier van der Weyden, the most influential Flemish painter of the mid-fifteenth century, combined Jan van Eyck's technical achievements in oil painting with a new emotional intensity and compositional drama that his predecessor's work had not achieved. His altarpieces for the major churches and institutions of Brussels, Bruges, and their international clientele defined the vocabulary of Flemish devotional art for two generations. Painters from Germany, France, Spain, and Italy absorbed and adapted his compositional formulas and his approach to devotional emotion, making him the single most important transmitter of Flemish painting technique and aesthetic to the broader European tradition.

Van der Weyden's refined technique renders the saints' faces with porcelain-like smoothness and emotional subtlety, while the precisely painted attributes identify each figure with the clarity his workshop was renowned for.