Saints Anno and Gregor the Moor

Anton Woensam was a Cologne painter, woodcut designer, and printmaker who was one of the most productive and significant artists in early sixteenth-century Cologne. This panel of Saints Anno and Gregor the Moor, dated around 1520 and held in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, depicts two saints with particular Cologne connections: Anno II, the eleventh-century Archbishop of Cologne canonized in 1183, and Maurice the Moor, the African soldier-martyr. Cologne's rich tradition of religious painting and its position as a major center of late medieval piety made it one of the most important sites for devotional panel painting in the German lands.

Woensam presents the two saints in complementary standing poses, Anno in episcopal robes and Maurice in armour, their different identities expressed through costume and attribute. The Cologne style maintains elements of late Gothic figure conventions within a generally Renaissance formal vocabulary.