The Merchants’ Saint: Thomas Becket among the Merchants of Hamburg

Abstract

A remarkable painted altarpiece in the Hamburger Kunsthalle serves as a valuable visual source for the character of devotion to St Thomas Becket in a 15th-century Hanseatic city. Commissioned from the artist Meister Francke by a guild of merchants known as the Englandfahrer, the altarpiece includes four panels depicting a narrative of St Thomas, of which two survive and two are known from an 18th-century engraving. One scene, unique among images of Becket, has previously been identified as an image of Louis VII’s pilgrimage, but is here identified as a posthumous appearance by St Thomas in a shipping port. These four scenes should not be viewed as a neutral re-narration of the saint’s written vitae, but rather as a set of images that link the saint to the contemporary concerns of the guild of merchants who commissioned the altarpiece.