The arrangement of Apostles in The Dormition of Mary echoes The Last Supper panel produced by Dieric Bouts between 1464-1468. Hugo’s painting of the Virgin Mary on her deathbed and surrounded by the twelve apostles of Jesus was completed at least a decade later.

Some of the Apostles are easily recognised, Peter and John, for example, but the whole group, it seems, has never been clearly identified by art historians. Jesus had a habit of renaming his disciples and giving them new identities, which may have partly inspired Hugo to take the same approach and apply more than one identitity to each man. But he does provide visual clues and each figure is usually placed to connect in some way to one next to it. This was the approach Dieric Bouts took with The Last Supper. So did Jan van Eyck when he painted the Just Judges panel of the Ghent Altarpiece.

First the identities of the twelve Apostles as placed by Hugo in the painting. Starting with the figure gripping the headboard and moving clockwise around the bed, they are: Thomas, Peter, Philip, Jude, Matthias (the replacement for Judas Iscariot), Simon (the Zealot), James (the Lesser), Matthew, James (the Greater), Bartholomew, John, and Andrew.

• More on this and some of the other identities in my next post.