Stefano Tumidei, who was the first to publish the present panel, offers perhaps the clearest explanation of the presumed links between our artist and Melozzo during the 1480s, the least documented phase in Melozzo's career. The foreshortening of the saint, as well as his hair, echo Melozzo's work in Loreto and suggest that the Figdor Master may well have collaborated directly with Melozzo. The idea that it is a youthful work by Palmezzano is less convincing for Tumidei, however, for the panel shows few stylistic links to Palmezzano's altarpiece in Dozza, from 1492, and would anyway be too idiosyncratic a work for Palmezzano's more rigid style.2

The proposed dating to circa 1490 would make the painting an extremely early example of the successful use of distorted perspective, as Tumidei notes. The design revolves around counter-balances and internal rhythms, geometric shapes and more fluid lines. The archers in the foreground show a close understanding of the work of Andrea Mantegna, and in particular his treatment of the same subject from the 1480s, today in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.3 Behind them the saint is shown in an elegant pose leaning against classical columns which provide a vertical axis to the composition, while to his left the steep drop leads the eye to two rather fey figures who contrast admirably with their caricatured colleagues in the foreground. To their left another drop takes us to a group of soldiers beside the river. The bridge above them provides a neat horizontal line which cuts through the design, almost as a line of demarcation before the craggy hill-top town beyond. The same approach to landscape and the town are offered in the aforementioned Berlin Saint Eustace, with a very similar play of colour between the greys of the rocks and the red of the bricks.

1. See Berlin 1994, under Literature; R. Longhi, Ricerche sulla pittura veneta, 1946–69, reprinted Florence 1978, p. 81.

2. Tumidei 2005, pp. 186–89, cat. no. 6, reproduced.

3. R. Lightbown, Mantegna, Berkeley 1986, pp. 420–21, cat. no. 22, reproduced in colour plate XI.