Crucifixion of Saints Cosmas and Damian

The legend Fra Angelico was illustrating does not let its heroes die easily. When the physician brothers Cosmas and Damian refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods, the story goes, they were bound to crosses and the crowd was ordered to stone them, but the stones flew back and struck the throwers. Archers were sent next, and their arrows turned back on them too. This panel gathers those failed executions into one scene, and the museum's title names all three, crucified, stoned and shot with arrows. Only beheading would finish the saints, and that scene, which followed on the altarpiece, is now in the Louvre. Fra Angelico painted the series around 1438 to 1440 beneath the high altar of San Marco in Florence. Munich has four of its nine panels, bought for Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria in 1818 and 1822.