Pedro Fernández was one of many Spanish artists who worked in Italy around the turn of the 16th century. Facilitated by Spanish rule in Naples and attracted by the vestiges of antiquity, Fernández and other Iberian artists were instrumental in developing and disseminating the visual language of the High Renaissance. The circulation of artists around the Mediterranean fertilized the growth of new forms and layered new meaning onto preexisting ones. In this panel, for instance, Fernández embroiders the hem of the saint’s mantle with an invented, Arabizing script. Such pseudoscripts were common in Italian painting of earlier generations, where they were deployed to signify the otherworldly status of sacred figures. But for Fernández, Arabic calligraphy was a more proximate phenomenon, as his native Murcia, Spain shared a border with the Islamic Kingdom of Granada (1232–1492). Appearing in a painting made by a Spaniard working in Italy, the evocation of Arabic letterforms testifies to the plurality of the Renaissance, a movement galvanized by cross-cultural exchange.