The Dream of Aesculapius

This scene comes from the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and behind it lies a real Roman memory. A plague was ravaging the city, and when Rome consulted its books of prophecy, the answer sent its envoys south to Epidaurus in Greece, to the sanctuary of Aesculapius, god of healing. Ricci shows the moment the god comes to one of those envoys in his sleep. He floats in on a bank of cloud, an old man leaning on the staff with a serpent wound around it, and tells the sleeper he will follow the ship home in the body of a great snake. He did, so the story goes, and the Romans built his temple on the island in the Tiber. Look for that coiled snake on the staff. It is the same emblem doctors still put on their signs today.