In his life of St. Catherine of Siena, completed in 1395, Raymond of Capua relates the tale of the Dominican saint’s interactions with the Tolomei family of Siena.1 Raymond frames the story as one that reveals Catherine’s “singular gift of conversion” – in other words, her ability to reconcile wayward souls with God.2 The souls in question belonged to the eldest Tolomei son, Jacopo, and his sister Ghinoccia. Raymond tells of how Jacopo “lived very wickedly,” was “puffed up with pride,” and was “full of the poison of cruelty.”3 Although very young, he had already killed two men.4 For her part, Ghinoccia was vainly devoted to “adorning her body excessively.”5 Raymond goes on to describe how Catherine convinces Ghinoccia to reject her vanity, cut her hair (“which she took great pride in”), and embrace the Dominican habit.6 Jacopo proves to be more of a challenge, but Catherine is eventually able, with the help of Christ, to inspire him to “humble himself” and “confess his sins”; and subsequently, “a lamb was made from a wolf.”7 Jacopo, Raymond tells us, eventually married and lived peacefully, never again relapsing into his prior “bad habits.”8

On May 16, 1492 in Venice, Matteo Capcasa published the first illustrated edition of the Italian translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives, known as the Golden Legend.1 The Italian edition, edited and translated by Niccolò Manerbi, was printed at least eleven times between 1475 and 1499, with the final five editions illustrated.2 In the illustrated versions, each saint is assigned a single woodcut illustration, one meant to best encapsulate his or her life in one or two scenes. Francis of Assisi, for example, is shown receiving the stigmata. Peter Martyr is represented by a scene of his brutal murder at the hands of heretical assassins. Martin of Tours is accorded two scenes: dividing his cloak with a beggar and receiving his bishopric. Although there is some variation among the editions, especially between those printed in Venice and those printed in Milan, for most saints the same (or similar) images appear in each of the five illustrated printings.

Among the stories from the life of St. Vincent Ferrer in circulation in the years following his canonization in 1455, perhaps none was more famous than Vincent’s miraculous healing of a child who had been butchered and partially cooked by his insane mother.1 The version of the tale in the elaborate vita polyptych, painted for the church of San Domenico in Modena (Fig. 16), appears at first glance to depict unremarkable scenes of domestic life in fifteenth-century Italy (Fig. 118).2 The composition is divided by the architecture into four quadrants. At the bottom left, closest to the viewer, a woman with long blond hair, represented twice, prepares food outside of and inside an orderly kitchen. Further back in space, at the bottom right, we can identify figures seated at a table, perhaps for a meal. Upon closer examination, however, the illusion of domestic calm and normalcy unravels. The blond woman in the foreground is about to slaughter not an animal but rather a small child (Fig. 119). She betrays no hesitation as she steadies herself before lowering the knife that she wields in her right hand. The gleaming blade – the silver leaf has lost its original luster – guides the eye back to the kitchen, where the woman adds the dismembered body of the child to a steaming cauldron. To the left, on a shelf within a larder, more body parts rest in a shallow bowl.

In 1511, Titian completed his fresco of the so-called Miracle of the Jealous Husband (Fig. 87) for the Sala Priorale of the Scuola del Santo in Padua. This meeting place for the scuola, or confraternity, located just steps from the shrine of Anthony of Padua in the Basilica del Santo, was frescoed by multiple artists, over the course of the sixteenth century, with the deeds and miracles of the saint.1 Titian’s fresco depicts a miracle in which a Tuscan knight, overcome by a fit of madness and deranged suspicion, brutally beats his wife and leaves her for dead.2 Although the story fits the familiar model of the resurrection miracle, with Anthony credited with reviving the moribund woman, Titian puts the focus on the actions of the angry and violent husband. He opts for a split between the foreground, which shows the attack, and the background, where we see the guilt-ridden knight confessing to Anthony. While the outdoor setting is more informal, the background scene echoes the iconography of confession established in the previous chapter: an elite young man receives absolution for an act of violence from a mendicant friar. The bright red-and-white stripes of the husband’s dress enable the viewer to readily link the foreground and background scenes, underscoring the link between violent act and subsequent absolution.

In 1451, the painter Giovanni da Modena completed a large painted canvas featuring St. Bernardino of Siena surrounded by nine small scenes set in illusionistic niches (Fig. 4).1 Bernardino, who had been canonized just the previous year, holds a staff topped with his IHS trigram and wears the signature gray habit and zoccoli (wood-soled sandals) of the Observant Franciscans.2 Eight of the scenes depict Bernardino performing miracles, both in vita and posthumously; the ninth scene, at the bottom left, presents the so-called three crowns – three white miters representing the three bishoprics refused by the saint.3 Although the patron and original function of the painting are debated, it seems most likely that it was commissioned by the Franciscans of Bologna and displayed in an accessible part of their home church of San Francesco, probably on the now-lost tramezzo (rood screen).4

A late fifteenth-century visitor to the church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia would most likely have approached the structure from the east, probably taking one of the roads leading down from the center of town (Fig. 30). In common with many buildings in a city filled with steep climbs and dramatic vistas, San Francesco sits on a promontory: the terrain starts to descend rapidly beyond the cloisters, making an approach from the west less convenient. Before entering the church, the visitor would probably have paused before the façade of the adjacent oratory of St. Bernardino of Siena (Fig. 31), so as to examine the polychrome marble relief decorations featuring the saint and scenes from his life and miracles. Perhaps the visitor would also have entered the oratory itself to venerate Bernardino, as the structure served as a shrine to the recently canonized saint. Once inside the church of San Francesco (Fig. 32), he or she would likely have quickly encountered, possibly on the rood screen, another depiction of Bernardino and his thaumaturgical power: the so-called Niche of San Bernardino, an ensemble that combined an image of the saint – perhaps a sculpture – with eight painted panels depicting his miracles (Figs. 100, 113, and 116).1

The shifts in the ‘vita’ way of seeing observable in the Basilica del Santo speak to broader changes taking place in the sixteenth century. Between the installation of Antonio Lombardo’s Miracle of the Speaking Newborn (Fig. 144) and the final relief in the Cappella dell’Arca, The Miracle of the Resurrected Youth (Fig. 146), much had changed in the visual culture of miracles. By the 1520s, the predella – and its variant, the vita panel – had fallen from favor, largely supplanted by the single-field altarpiece. This shift can be partially explained by changing preferences in artistic patronage and production. The minutely-described anecdotal detail characteristic of the Erri Workshop and other fifteenth-century painters of miracle scenes was replaced by the increasingly monumental but more generalized styles of painters like Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolomeo. The few late predellas, like Garofalo’s ca. 1530 predella with miracles of Nicholas of Tolentino, from the Muzzarelli Chapel in Sant’Andrea, Ferrara, were among the last of their kind.1 My research has identified only a handful of post-Tridentine vita images of mendicant saints, among them a late-sixteenth century vita fresco of Bernardino of Siena in Sant’Antonio, Polla, and a seventeenth-century vita altarpiece of Nicholas of Tolentino in Sant’Agostino, Gubbio. These outliers aside, the visual phenomena I chart in this book largely ended in the first third of the sixteenth century.

In a painting of ca. 1500–5 (Fig. 1), the Augustinian saint Nicholas of Tolentino (1246–1305, can. 1446) miraculously saves two young men from execution at the gallows. Dressed in the black robes of the Augustinian order, Nicholas appears in the center of the compositional space, supporting the bodies of the condemned men with an effortless grace. The panel, now in Pisa, would have originally been part of a multiscene predella placed below a painted image of Nicholas crowned in glory.1 Before its late eighteenth-century dismantling, the ensemble would have been found in a prominent and easily accessible location – a nave chapel – in the church of Sant’Agostino, the principal Augustinian friary in the north Umbrian town of Città di Castello.2 In this open and bustling viewing context, the image of Nicholas’s miraculous act, juxtaposed with the figure of the saint, would have reached a wide and diverse audience from all walks of life.

Among the miracles of St. Bernardino of Siena depicted in the so-called Niche of St. Bernardino is the violent assault and subsequent miraculous healing of one Giovanni Antonio Tornano (Fig. 100). The panel is one of eight tempera-on-panel miracle scenes that originally bordered a figure of St. Bernardino, probably a sculpture; the ensemble would have been installed in a highly visible location, such as the tramezzo (rood screen), in a church in Perugia, most likely the Franciscan friary of San Francesco al Prato.1 In the panel, Bernardino, with his trademark gaunt visage, appears at the bedside of the sleeping (or unconscious) Tornano. The saint heals the wounded man with his outstretched right hand. In the right foreground, we move back in time to witness the fateful attack: two blade-wielding men assault Tornano, accompanied by a pair of accomplices. Further afield, two additional men serve as witness figures, the one in green exhibiting shock at the violent events unfolding before his eyes. The compositional structure of the panel is thus split, with the attack shown in the right foreground and the miraculous healing in the left mid-ground. This pictorial strategy privileges the violent events over their resolution, with the viewer’s attention drawn away from the saint and his charge to the bright colors and graceful poses of the dynamic combatants.

In 1447, the massari (overseers) of the Basilica of Sant’Antonio in Padua hired the Florentine sculptor Donatello to craft a new monumental high altar for their church.1 The high altar (Fig. 133) consists of seven nearly life-sized bronze figures, including the Franciscan St. Anthony of Padua, placed on a base featuring a number of relief sculptures of various subjects. For the front and back of the altar, beneath the monumental figural sculptures, Donatello created four gilded bronze relief panels depicting miracles of St. Anthony. This focus on the miracle-working power of Anthony was a logical one, as he was the titular saint of the church, and his relics were preserved there within a reliquary chapel. While divergent in medium and format from the vita images examined so far in this book, Donatello’s high altar would nevertheless have encouraged a similar ‘vita’ mode of seeing: the narrative reliefs, with their horizontal format and carefully described detail, would have operated, like predella panels, in a meaning-making dialogue with the sculpted figure of Anthony looming above.