St Benedict Exorcises a Monk

Around 1415, Niccolò di Pietro painted a moment from the life of Benedict of Nursia that turns on a single act of will. One young monk in the community could never settle at prayer. He kept wandering out of the church, and no one could say why. As Gregory the Great told the story, the cause was a demon quietly tugging the monk away by his habit. Benedict frees him with the lightest touch of a thin rod to the head. The painter saved his best invention for the devil: it bolts from the scene so fast that it snaps the slender column of a mullioned window on its way out. Behind the kneeling monk, inside the church, stands a small triptych of the Redeemer and saints beneath a hanging lamp. The panel passed from a palazzo in Verona to a villa collection at Fiesole before reaching the Uffizi in 1937.