Saints Cosmas and Damian

In Ferrara in the early 1520s, Giovanni Manardi, the famous professor of medicine at the city's university, liked to tell his students that a good doctor should look at the patient's urine rather than consult the stars. This large canvas from those years was painted for the chapel of Sant'Anna, the great hospital of Ferrara. Cosmas and Damian were twin brothers, doctors said to have treated the sick without payment. Here they work on a labourer stripped to the waist. The seated saint holds his jaw, and the gallery reads the scene as pulling a tooth. The other raises a glass of urine with stones in it, a detail one scholar links to Manardi's advice. On the step below stands an apothecary's jar for ointment. The hospital gave up the picture in December 1607, and by the following May it had reached Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome.