A Wall Painting from 1504, as indicated by the mixture of arabic and roman numerals around the name 'S. Wilhelmus', and formerly in the Church of St William in Strasbourg but now only known from this engraving dated 1667 which is now in the Cabinet des Estampes of the city of Strasbourg. The three saints are represented as stylites on top of pillars, St William in the middle, St Hilary on the left, and Bernard on the right, identified by their names above. Bernard is in tunic and scapular, originally probably white and black, carries a book in his left hand and a staff in his right, probably formerly a crozier. A small kneeling donor figure is on the left. This may be compared to the other triple saint painting of St Andrew flanked by Bernard and St Malachy from Ossek, also with a small kneeling donor figure (see PA93), or the later votive image of the Virgin, St Malachy and Bernard commissioned in 1534 for the nuns of Lichtenthal in which the three figures are also on columns, or the woodcut frontispiece to the Bernard Sermons edited by Jean Petit at Paris in 1508 in which the same figures are also on pillars and are accompanied by members of Bernard's family (see EN31), and, finally, also to the Le Cellier Retable which features the same figures but not on pillars (see PA87). It is possible that there may have been an earlier woodcut or painting or wall painting on which this wall painting as well as the other examples were modelled and which may have been from either Citeaux or Clairvaux.
|