Saint Vitus is placed in a cauldron of boiling oil. Nothing in his depiction suggests the terrible pain he is suffering: with his hands folded in prayer, he endures the torment in quiet resignation. According to a Sicilian legend from the 6th century, he was martyred in this way because of his Christian faith.

The craftsmanship of the sculpture is characteristic of the new realism in 15th-century art. The face and upper body are rendered in a relatively naturalistic way, with an implied skeletal structure and musculature. While the figure itself is a more than 500-year-old work from the workshop of the Ulm master Michel Erhart, the cauldron was reconstructed in the 1990s based on comparisons with other depictions of Saint Vitus.