Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece, 'Saints Peter and Dorothy', probably 1505-10

Saint Peter and Saint Dorothy look at each other, the sweeping upward folds of their draperies creating a rhythm from the left to the right of the picture. They mirror each other in pose and gesture, and both appear ready to step off the ledge towards us, lending a sense of momentum to their figures.

Saint Peter clutches ​a Bible with a soft leather cover to his chest. In the same hand he holds two unwieldy keys – those to the kingdom of heaven, promised to him by Christ. In the spindly fingers of his left hand he gingerly clasps a pair of glasses to help him to read. The minute reflection of a latticed window pane is visible in the lenses. Dorothy holds only a tiny delicate flower to her breast, plucked presumably from the basket of blooms in her left hand. The flowers are a reference to a miracle told in her legend which describes how, at her martyrdom, Christ came to deliver a basket of flowers from heaven to an unbelieving onlooker.

The artist has taken great care to imitate a range of textures faithfully, giving the impression that the saints really are standing before us. The highly polished marble column behind contrasts with the texture of the decorative textile hanging, its gold thread catching the light in its folds. The plants in the foreground are painted in great detail, while the hills and trees in the background have a hazy quality that emphasises their distance.

The panel may have formed part of the left-hand shutter of an altarpiece. It is a pair to another panel now in the Mainz State Museum which shows Saints Andrew and Columba standing against an almost identical backdrop of a fabric hanging and marble column in front of a landscape. The Mainz panel would have been the right-hand shutter. The central panel has not yet been traced. Both shutter panels have been painted on the reverse with a scene of the Adoration of the Kings, added some time after the fronts were completed.