Back to the List

'God's blessings on you!' - St Antony Gives Thanks for a Basket of Fruit

Zug, 1699
Attributed to Franz Josef Müller

Diameter 14 cm
Clear-glass round unipartite panel, with polychrome painting (blue enamel, red and black vitreous paint, yellow silver stain)

Dokumentation

This panel was a donation of the Friar Preacher Antonius Gebel, who according to the inscription was chaplain to the Royal Swiss Guard in France, and shows his patron saint, Anthony of Florence (1389–1459), on the bank of a body of water, with a city spread out behind, at the foot of hills with vineyards. St Anthony is in the process of paying a farmer, who has brought him a basket of fruit.

Legend has it that St Anthony thanked the farmer for the fruit with the words ‘deo gratias’ (‘thanks be to God’), much as the local expression ‘Vergelt’s Gott’ (‘God’s blessings on you!’). The farmer thought however that this was not sufficient payment. The saint then wrote the words on a piece of paper, which he placed in one of the two pans of a pair of scales, with the fruit in the other, and miraculously the pan with the leaf on which the saint had written was heavier. On the panel the saint appears to give in to the disappointment exhibited by the farmer kneeling at his feet, and completely empties his money pouch over him.

Anthony of Florence (Antonino Pierrozzi) was a member of the Dominican Order of Friars Preachers and Archbishop of Florence.

Read more

Print
Contact us
Biografie Franz-Josef Müller

Stained-glass roundel, Dominican Order