The Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian
Fra Angelico (c. 1395-1455) · c. 1438-1443
On a hillside outside a city, an executioner swings his sword over the kneeling figures of Cosmas and Damian, the twin physician saints, and their three brothers. Heads already lie on the grass. The scene is framed at the sides by two gilded half columns painted in trompe l'oeil, and the little panel is only forty six centimetres wide, yet the drama is complete: the calm of the condemned, the swing of the blade, the trees and the pale sky of a Tuscan morning. The colours are clear and bright, as in all of Fra Angelico's work.
The panel comes from the predella, the strip of small scenes at the base, of the altarpiece that Fra Angelico painted for the high altar of the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici, whose patron saints Cosmas and Damian were. The main panel is still in Florence, and the other predella scenes are scattered between Florence, Dublin, Munich and Washington. This one left the convent in the nineteenth century, passed through collections in Florence and Rome, and belonged to the painter Charles Timbal; the Louvre bought it from his widow in eighteen eighty two.
Did You Know? The two saints were doctors who treated the poor without payment, which is why Cosimo de' Medici, whose own name echoes Cosmas, chose them as his family's patrons.
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