St. Bernardino Cures the Daughter of Giovannantonio Petrazio da Rieti

Bernardino of Siena, the fiery Franciscan preacher, had been dead only about 30 years and freshly made a saint when these panels were painted in 1473, in Perugia, to celebrate the miracles worked at his tomb. There are eight of them, small and bright, and this one shows a young woman, the daughter of a man from Rieti, cured of an ulcer as her family kneels nearby. The scene plays out not in a sickroom but on a broad sunlit piazza of pale classical buildings, the kind of clear geometric space Umbrian painters had learned from Piero della Francesca. The work was shared among several young artists, and this group of figures is generally given to Perugino at the very start of his career, before he trained the young Raphael. The panels were rediscovered long after and hang together in Perugia still.