The Miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrer

Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar from Valencia, spent the last 20 years of his life travelling the roads of Spain, France and Italy as a preacher, and he died in Brittany in 1419. In 1455 a pope from his own Valencia, Calixtus III, declared him a saint. So when this panel was painted in Bologna in 1473, the saint was still new, and the Dominicans, whose founder lies buried in Bologna, were working to spread his cult.

The panel is more than two metres long and only about 30 centimetres high. It ran beneath an altarpiece by Francesco del Cossa in the Griffoni chapel of San Petronio, the great church built by the city itself. Ercole de' Roberti set five miracles in one continuous stretch of streets, buildings and countryside, so the episodes follow each other with no frames between them. A lame woman is healed, a rich Jewish woman is raised from the dead, a child is saved from a burning house, a little boy killed by his mother in a fit of madness is brought back to life, and an injured man is cured.

In the next century the biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari singled out this strip of small figures and praised it above the large panels it once supported.