Miraculous Healing of a Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian

This story was already more than two centuries old when the panel was painted. It comes from the Golden Legend, a book of saints' lives compiled around 1275. A sacristan at the Roman church of Cosmas and Damian, the brothers revered as doctor-saints, had a leg eaten away by disease. The saints came to him in his sleep and replaced it with the leg of an Ethiopian man buried that day in another churchyard. When that grave was opened, the sacristan's own leg was found inside. Here a man lies asleep in bed, while in the middle a young man in a red robe lifts his gown to show a dark leg. Further back, against the gold ground, a crowd gathers at an open grave. The Belvedere gives the panel to an anonymous painter from the workshop of the Master MS, an artist known only by his initials.