Stories of Saint Nicholas of Bari

In the spring of 1087 sailors from Bari, a port in southern Italy, landed at Myra, on the coast of what is now Turkey, and took away the bones of its fourth-century bishop, Nicholas, over the objections of the monks who kept his tomb. From then on he was Nicholas of Bari, and a saint already known for calming storms became the patron of seafarers all over the Mediterranean.

In Florence his church, San Niccolò, stood on the south bank of the Arno, and in 1425 the Quaratesi family had Gentile da Fabriano paint its high altarpiece. These four small scenes ran along its base. One shows the saint's birth, the newborn already standing upright in his bath, as the legend tells. Another shows his secret gift of dowries to three poor girls, and a third the three boys he brought back to life after they had been killed and put in brine.

The picture shown here is the fourth. Nicholas swoops down from the sky over a ship caught in a storm. Gentile also painted the sea floor beneath the waves, with a starfish, the wreck of an older ship and a mermaid swimming nearby. A fifth scene from the same strip, pilgrims at the saint's tomb, is now in Washington.