Altarpiece : St James, St William.
The saints represented in the side panels of the St Clare’s altarpiece are identified by Latin inscriptions below each figure, and also by traditional symbols. St William, Bishop of York, wears a bishop’s mitre and carries a crozier; St James carries a staff bearing a scallop shell, the badge worn by medieval pilgrims to his shrine at Compostella in northern Spain At least three of the saints depicted on the side panels of the St Clare’s Triptich were included because they were the name saints of the joint founders of St Clare’s, the brothers William James and Francis Ecksley Reynolds. Commemorating the donors of a work of religious art in this way was quite usual in the medieval and Renaissance periods.
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