Saint Fidelis of Sigmarigen and Saint Joseph of Leonessa

On 29 June 1746 Benedict XIV made saints of two Capuchin friars at once. Fidelis of Sigmaringen had been killed in 1622 in the Swiss Grisons while preaching against the local Protestants, and Joseph of Leonessa had died in the mountains east of Rome in 1612. The Capuchins in Parma wanted an altarpiece of their brand-new saints, and the commission went to Tiepolo, probably after he came home from three years of frescoing the prince-bishop's palace at Wurzburg. He put the two friars in dark, worn habits against open sky, and laid Heresy under their feet as a young woman half wrapped in ochre cloth. The sketch he worked the composition out on is in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin. The altarpiece itself left the Capuchin church when Napoleonic rule suppressed the convent, and it has been in the Parma gallery since 1810.