The Adoration of the Tomb of Saint Peter Martyr

This Prado panel from the Santo Tomás altarpiece depicts Peter Martyr's tomb becoming a site of veneration, with devotees prostrating themselves before the reliquary chest and miraculous healings occurring around it. Berruguete was required to arrange a crowd of pilgrims and the miraculously healed in coherent spatial depth—a challenge that taxed even experienced Italian painters of this period. Promoting Peter Martyr's cult was central to Dominican institutional prestige and provided indirect legitimization of the Inquisitorial authority exercised by Torquemada, the altarpiece's demanding patron.

The arrangement of kneeling and prostrate figures around the elevated tomb demonstrates Berruguete's increasing command of figural grouping in depth, each devotee individualized through posture and gesture rather than through the generic types of earlier Spanish altarpiece traditions. The tomb itself is rendered as a richly carved architectural object drawing on Italian sculptural programs.