Saint Giles and the Hind

Saint Giles and the Hind by the Master of Saint Giles, now in the National Gallery, London, depicts the legendary encounter that defines the iconography of this Provençal hermit saint: a hunter's arrow aimed at a hind that had taken refuge with the hermit Giles strikes the saint instead, wounding him rather than the animal. The Visigothic king who ordered the hunt, impressed by the miracle, becomes Giles's patron and founds a monastery for him. The subject allowed the Master to deploy his exceptional landscape and hunting-scene painting, and it is paired with The Mass of Saint Giles as part of the same altarpiece program. The National Gallery's two panels together are the masterpieces of this anonymous painter and among the finest surviving examples of Franco-Flemish painting of the period 1490–1510.

The Master employs his characteristic Flemish precision in the rendering of the forest setting — trees, foliage, and the hunting party are depicted with the same meticulous attention to physical reality that characterizes his Parisian interiors. The hind sheltering against the wounded saint creates a compositional and emotional center of great tenderness, rendered with the oil technique's capacity for fine textural differentiation.