The Saints Cosmas and Damian with their Brothers before the Proconsul Lysias

Cosimo de' Medici paid for the high altarpiece of San Marco in Florence, the first great altar the Medici commissioned, and the saints along its base were personal to him. Cosmas and Damian, physician brothers martyred in the early Christian centuries, were the namesakes of Cosimo and of his twin brother Damiano, who had died young. Fra Angelico, himself a friar of San Marco, painted the base around 1438 to 1440 as a row of nine small scenes, and the museum notes that nobody had told this rarely painted legend in such detail before. This is where the story begins. The two saints stand with their three brothers before Lysias, the Roman proconsul, who is about to order them to sacrifice to the gods.