The Miracle at the Birth of Saint Nicholas

This little panel once ran along the base of an altarpiece, the strip of small scenes called a predella that worshippers studied up close while the tall saints loomed above. It was painted in Siena around 1437, and it tells the first episode in the life of Saint Nicholas: his birth. The midwives have lifted him for his first wash, and the newborn stands upright in the basin on his own, only hours old, a sign that a holy life had already begun. There is a quiet catch to it. That bathing miracle, and the story that the infant refused his mother's milk on Wednesdays and Fridays to keep the fast, seem to have belonged first to another holy man, Nicholas of Sion, whose life a Byzantine writer folded into that of Nicholas of Myra around the year 900. The gold behind the figures is not paint but beaten leaf, laid onto the wood before any colour.