Mariotto di Nardo, Scenes from the Legend of Saints Cosmas and Damian

James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

The panel, of a vertical wood grain, is 2.4 centimeters thick, cradled, and waxed on the reverse. Two vertical splits, 22.5 and 44 centimeters from the left edge, have been braced by wider cradle members and filled with gesso. A new split, 57 centimeters from the left edge, may have been provoked by the rigidity of the cradle. Two nail holes, 19.5 centimeters from the left edge and 7.5 centimeters from the top, and 57.5 centimeters from the left edge and 8 centimeters from the top, have been filled with putty but do not seem to have caused appreciable paint loss on the surface. The paint surface is very poorly preserved, having been selectively and aggressively abraded in recent and probably in earlier restorations.¹ The blue draperies of the figure at far left are surprisingly well preserved, as are the bed and bedclothes in the scene at right, whereas much of the rest of the image has been obliterated by scrubbing.

The panel represents two separate posthumous episodes from the legend of Saints Cosmas and Damian, as recounted in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. At the left are shown two moments from the story of a husband who, gone on a journey, left his wife in the protection of the two saints. The husband was to have sent his wife a sign when she was to join him, but the devil, intercepting the sign, brought it to her in the guise of a messenger. In the scene shown at the left of the Yale panel, the wife forces the devil to swear on the altar of Saints Cosmas and Damian that he will bring her safely to her husband. Heedless of this oath, the devil tries to kill her on the journey by pushing her off her horse, but she is rescued by the miraculous appearance of Saints Cosmas and Damian: the scene portrayed in the center of the Yale panel. At the right of the Yale panel is represented the dream of the deacon Justinian, in which Saints Cosmas and Damian appear to him in his sleep with salves and ointments for his cancerous leg, which they then replace with the leg of a recently deceased Ethiopian. Upon waking the following morning, Justinian finds the dream to have come true.

The Yale Scenes from the Legend of Saints Cosmas and Damian was catalogued in the Jarves collection as the work of Lorenzo di Bicci and as a fragment probably of an ex-voto.² Osvald Sirén corrected the attribution to Mariotto di Nardo, a contention that has not been questioned since, but described it as part of the predella to an altarpiece.³ The vertical wood grain of the panel support implies that it probably did not form part of a conventional altarpiece predella, as almost invariably these are painted on a long horizontal plank appended beneath the main tier of the structure. It is more likely that the Yale “predella” formed the lower portion of a single large ex-voto panel, either representing Saints Cosmas and Damian or in some other fashion dedicated to them.

Only one painting among the surviving works of Mariotto di Nardo is known that might present itself as a candidate for this ex-voto: a Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Donors (fig. 1) in the Perkins Collection at the Sacro Convento di San Francesco at Assisi.⁴ The framing members attached to this panel, although regilt and redecorated, are apparently original; the predella bears an inscription—“FECIT FIERI M[AGISTER] GIOVANNI M[AGISTR]I IACOBI P[RO] A[N]I[MA]E SV[A]E MCCCCIIII” (Master Giovanni, son of Master Jacopo, had this made for the salvation of their souls, 1404)—identifying the donors as father and son, Jacopo and Giovanni, who are both dressed as doctors. Cosmas and Damian are the patron saints of doctors. The Perkins panel, which measures 196 by 92 centimeters overall (154 by 92 centimeters, picture surface), appears to be complete in its present configuration, missing only the spiral colonettes and half-capitals that must have linked the framing arches at the top to the pilaster bases in the predella. Although it was suggested by Federico Zeri,⁵ and more recently by Sonia Chiodo,⁶ that the Perkins panel was the center of an altarpiece triptych, the form of its frame would be highly unusual in that context. It appears instead to have been designed for insertion into an outer frame that would enclose the panel at the sides, as an independent tabernacle. The abrupt profile of the vertical molding alongside the spandrels in the mixtilinear arch at the top of the panel and the repaired moldings on the pilaster bases, the outer returns of which are new and are not mitered in the front, are most easily explained by presuming that they once abutted such an enclosing outer frame. If so, an outer frame might well have enclosed a second painted predella beneath the present gilt and inscribed band. It should be noted that the Perkins panel has two vertical splits in its support, approximately 20 to 22 centimeters apart—the splits in the Yale predella are situated 21.5 centimeters apart—and located off-center in nearly the same position as those in the Yale predella. It is difficult to say if this correspondence is significant.

In 2008 Chiodo published a notice from the chroniche of the Dominican church of Santi Jacopo e Lucia in San Miniato al Monte, near Pisa, that recorded the foundation by testamentary bequest from “Maestro Giovanni di Maestro Jacopo da San Miniato” in 1384 of a chapel dedicated to Saints John the Baptist, James, and Lucy. The bequest, apparently, was received in 1401, and a later commentator in the chroniche recorded the existence in the chapel, constructed with the proceeds of the bequest, of an altarpiece that included these three patron saints and that bore an inscription: fecit fieri Magister Johannes Magistri Jacobi pro rimedio animae suae MCCCCIIII.⁷ Chiodo quite reasonably concluded that the Perkins panel by Mariotto di Nardo, the inscription beneath which corresponds almost exactly with this one, must have been the center panel of this altarpiece. If this were so, it is unlikely, for the reasons stated above, that the chapel was provided in the first instance with a conventional altarpiece and probable instead that the Perkins panel was adapted later by the addition of flanking saints matching the chapel’s dedication.⁸ It remains possible, of course, that Maestro Giovanni di Maestro Jacopo commissioned a second ex-voto from Mariotto di Nardo and that the Perkins panel was not, in fact, painted for this chapel. Two sons of Maestro Giovanni, Jacopo and Girolamo, commissioned such an ex-voto to hang on the wall alongside their father’s chapel on the occasion of the meeting of the provincial chapter of the Dominican order in Santi Jacopo e Lucia in 1411.⁹ That painting, showing Saint Jerome in his study, by Cenni di Francesco di Ser Cenni, is now in the Museo d’Arte Sacra, San Miniato. Such speculative possibilities, however, would be moot but for the physical evidence linking the Yale and Perkins panels, and there is as yet no certainty that this evidence is consequential rather than coincidental. —LK

1. The harsh modern treatment of this panel is unrecorded in the Yale University Art Gallery’s archives but must have occurred after 1970. Charles Seymour, Jr., says that the painting was restored by Hammond Smith in 1915 but not cleaned since. He speaks of a “much overpainted surface,” which is no longer in evidence; of damage “along two seams running horizontally,” which is impossible; and of “a deep crack at left running through the left-hand figure,” which can only be accurate if he were reading an x-radiograph in reverse. See Seymour 1970, 54. The painting is not included in Seymour et al. 1972. ↩︎

2. Jarves 1860, 45, no. 33; Sturgis 1868, 41, no. 36; Rankin 1895, 142, no. 36; and Rankin 1905, 9, no. 36. ↩︎

3. Sirén 1909a, 325, pl. 1, no. 2; and Sirén 1916a, 75–76, no. 29, fig. 29. ↩︎

4. Zeri 1988, 26–27, no. 5. ↩︎

5. Zeri 1988, 26–27, no. 5. ↩︎

6. Chiodo 2008, 81–94. ↩︎

7. Chiodo 2008, 81–94. See also Belinda Bitossi, in Ciardi et al. 2013, 90–91. ↩︎

8. A fragmentary predella with scenes from the life of the Baptist by Mariotto di Nardo, still in the church of Santi Jacopo e Lucia, may have come from a different chapel; see Bitossi, in Ciardi et al. 2013, 102–3. ↩︎

9. Daniela Risso, in Ciardi et al. 2013, 90. ↩︎