Saint Fiacre

Holding a shovel in one hand, Saint Fiacre is presented as the patron saint of gardeners. According to the legend of this seventh-century saint, Fiacre earned the right to establish a hermitage and a hospice for the poor after single-handedly clearing an entire forest in one day. Famed for growing many different kinds of vegetables and herbs in his garden in Meaux, France, he made and dispensed many herbal remedies. Credited with miraculous cures, Saint Fiacre was particularly renowned for curing hemorrhoids. Devotion to the saint and his relics was predictably strong at the monastery he founded near Brie in the diocese of Meaux.

Alabaster was quarried near Meaux during the later Middle Ages. Just before 1500, the city's bishop commissioned an alabaster enclosure decorated with reliefs for the choir of his cathedral, and a century later an Italian chronicler remarked that alabaster statuettes "a foot and a half high" were for sale in this city. As a result, it was long believed that this sculpture’s materials were sourced locally. Technical analysis, however, has revealed that the stone comes from Nottingham, England, which was famous for its alabaster carvings in the fifteenth century.