The Miraculous Healing of the Daughter of Benvegnudo of San Polo

Most of the True Cross scenes this Venetian confraternity commissioned unfold in open squares and along canals. This one moves indoors. Mansueti sets the miracle inside a richly furnished Venetian room and inventories it with almost obsessive care, from the panelled walls to the objects on the shelves, so the picture doubles as a portrait of a well-to-do household around 1500. The event it shows was already old by then, dated to 1414. A girl paralysed since birth, the daughter of a man named Benvegnudo from the San Polo district of Venice, is restored the moment she touches three candles her father had set on the relic of the Holy Cross. Rather than isolate that instant, Mansueti crowds the chamber with witnesses turning and reacting to it. The child kneels among them, small against the tall decorated room that fills most of the canvas.