SS Augustine and Thomas Aquinas above the Personification of the Council of Trent

This sketch is related to the fresco decoration of St Giles’s Church at the Dominican monastery in the Old Town of Prague. Reiner had close relations with the Dominicans and he had a family vault built in their church. He made a series of oil sketches for St Giles’s decoration, but it has only been preserved in fragments. This small painting, revealing a skilful use of a colour stain, and balancing cold and warm tones, represents St Thomas Aquinas in conversation with St Augustine. The saints are hovering above the representatives of the ecclesiastical orders assembled at the Council of Trent, presided by Ecclesia (Church), which embodies Papacy at the same time. Two disputing figures in the foreground - the Dominican with two raised fingers on the left, and the Jesuit with outstretched arms on the right led to a complaint presented by the Jesuits. They saw an allusion in the painting to the dispute about the manner of divine knowledge, which also expressed the tension of long years between the two orders, so that in the end the figure of the Jesuit was removed from the final fresco.