Saint Luke painting the Virgin

Versions of the subject were sometimes painted as the masterpiece that many guilds required an artist to submit before receiving the title of master.

The legend of Saint Luke as the author of the first Christian icons had been developed in Byzantium during the Iconoclastic Controversy, as attested by 8th century sources.

By the 11th century, a number of images started being attributed to his authorship and venerated as authentic portraits of Christ and the Virgin Mary.

Many Guilds of St. Luke were conglomerate associations of various professions, including painters, paint-mixers, book illuminators, and sellers of all of these things.

Saddle-makers too were members of these guilds: like illuminators, who worked with vellum, they too painted on leather when creating the colorful military harness of the day.

Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin , by Rogier van der Weyden , c. 1435–40, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
16th-century Russian version showing copy of the Theotokos of Vladimir
Frans Floris depicted his friend the painter Rijckaert Aertsz as Saint Luke. Floris himself models the pigment grinder, c. 1560.
Giorgio Vasari paints himself and the Virgin, 1565.
El Greco, 1608, Toledo