THE MOST HUMBLE FRANCISCAN WHO PRAYS PROSTRATE IN THE PANEL OF THE FISHERMEN

In the foreground, in the panel of the Fishermen, the most humble Franciscan (clad in homespun friar's cloth), kneeling and propped upon his elbows, appears to be Prince Henry the Navigator (Infante D. Henrique), who, as is well known, was wont to wear only the homespun habit of the tertiaries or else armour.

He directs his prayers towards the beholder of the Polyptych and not towards the focus of veneration. He holds a kind of rosary made up of fish vertebrae stripped of their bones.

The lighting of this panel differs from that observed in the other five. It comes from the left and has always constituted the great obstacle as regards the arrangement of the boards of the Polyptych.

Why is it that on the pavement of the same panel, to the left of the figure praying in the foreground, there is to be discerned a dark patch that is obviously neither a shadow cast by it, nor by any other visible body?

It is an enigmatic and, assuredly, symbolic anomaly, perhaps grounded in the belief that Prince Henry (depicted as a New Christ on the transverse doorway of the Jerónimos) was, as Zurara portrays him to us, a “Prince little less than divine” and, according to Duarte Pacheco Pereira, “illumined by the grace of the Holy Spirit and moved by divine mystery”.