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Before an ornamented gold brocade ground kneels the figure of a young man in prayer, his head outlined by a halo. There is a lectern before him and an open prayer-book on it, resting on a purple cushion. He raises his enraptured eyes to the figure of Christ on the Cross on the left-hand side wall. Peter of Luxembourg, according to early sources, died at the age of eighteen, by which age he was already a cardinal. He had subjected himself to every type of mediaeval self torture and ascetic mortification of the flesh: "Ascetic, horribly dirty and covered with vermin, amidst the unbridled luxury of the courts of Berry and Burgundy, and incessantly confessing to sins he had probably not committed." Such is the picture his contemporary Froissart gives of him in his chronicle, but in this painting produced, some sixty years after his death (1387), the grim mortification of the ascetic has been modified to the figure of an idealized young saint, now the object of a religious cult. In Huizinga's words "a striking representative of the type of 'under-witted' saint", he had been transformed into a saint in the course of the years immediately following his death, and the Avignon master was more influenced by his later reputation than by the reality of his life.
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