This work was commissioned by Hans Gerster, for many years Town Archivist of Basel, in which capacity he had to convey important state papers to other councils with which that of Basel had negotiations. From this it came about that from the year when Basel entered the Swiss Confederation, in 1501, Gerster was almost as much at home in the "City of Ambassadors" as in his own, and the Dean or _Probst_ of the Solothurn Cathedral--the "Cathedral of St. Ursus and St. Victor"--became not only his spiritual director, but one of his most intimate friends. Many circumstances which cannot be given here make it pretty evident that in 1522 Gerster, probably under the advice of the Probst, the Coadjutor Nicholas von Diesbach, made this picture an _expiatory_ offering for some secret sin of grave proportions. There are hints that point to treachery to the Basel troops, in the Imperial interests, sympathy with which finally cost him, as well as his friend Meyer zum Hasen, his official position. Gerster himself was not a native of Basel, although his wife, Barbara Guldenknopf, was. Be this as it may, it is apparently in direct connection with this confessed sin that "the sinner's saint," St. Martin of Tours, is chosen as Intercessor for Gerster, wearing the prescribed chasuble for this office. And it seems likely that the addition to his mitre of the figure of St. Nicholas was Gerster's wish, in order to specially associate the name-saint of his friend--Nicholas von Diesbach--with this intercession. It is assumed by those who have patiently unearthed these details of circumstantial evidence, that the beggar is introduced to mark the identity of the boundlessly charitable Bishop of Tours. But I venture to suggest still another reason: this is, that in the uplifted, pleading face of the mendicant, whose expression of appeal and humility is a striking bit of realism in these ideal surroundings, we may have the actual portrait of the donor, Hans Gerster himself. That this should be so would be in strict accord with the methods of the period. There is a striking parallel which will occur to all who are familiar with the St. Elizabeth in the St. Sebastian altar-piece at Munich. Here the undoubted portrait of Hans Holbein the elder is seen as the beggar in the background. It is, as has been said, a marvellous story by which this glorious painting,--in which the introduction of the patron-saint of Solothurn proves that it was created for one of her own altars,--was completely lost to her, and to the very histories of Art, and then returned to the city for which it was originally destined; all by a chain of seemingly unrelated accidents. But only the skeleton of that story can be given here.[4]