Saint Dominic and the Albigensians

This Prado panel depicts the legendary confrontation between Saint Dominic and the Cathar heretics of Languedoc, in which Dominic challenged them to submit their books to fire, with the Catholic texts miraculously emerging unscathed. The Albigensian crusade against Cathar heresy had been the most violent religious purge of thirteenth-century Europe, and Berruguete's commission to depict this scene came from Torquemada's Inquisition, which drew ideological legitimacy from that earlier campaign against doctrinal dissent. The subject thus served pointed contemporary institutional purposes.

The miracle of the unburned books is organized around the central fire, whose dramatic light falls differentially across the groupings of Dominic's supporters and the confounded heretics. Berruguete uses this artificial light source as a compositional device to unify a complex multi-figure scene—an unusually sophisticated treatment for Spanish altarpiece painting of this period.