Four Saints (from left St. Peter, St. Martha, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Leonard)

Four saints, four different kinds of sign

This is the rare title that does the identifying itself, naming each figure in order. Read as a set, the four show how varied the attribute system is. Peter has keys — an emblem of office. Mary Magdalene has a jar of ointment — an object from a specific scene. Leonard is given fetters or chains, because the tradition made him the patron of prisoners, so his sign describes the people he helps rather than anything he held. Martha is given a dragon and a vessel of holy water, from the legend of the beast she is said to have subdued. Emblem, prop, clientele, monster: four systems, one panel. This is the only title in the collection that names Martha or Leonard.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1517 and gives the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as its location. The dimensions are 172 x 126 cm. It is filed under group portraiture, Religion and religious cultural heritage, with High Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

Why a title carries the labels

A title that lists figures from left to right is a cataloguer's sentence, not a painter's. It is written by someone who has already read the attributes and is passing on the result, which is what a record does at its best: it converts a picture into a line of text that can be searched. The signs in the picture and the words in the field are doing the same job in two media.