The Young St Benedict Miraculously Repairs the Broken Sieve

The first miracle in Benedict of Nursia's life was a small, domestic one. As Gregory the Great tells it, the boy's old nurse had borrowed a terracotta sieve to clean some grain, and it slipped from a table and broke in two. She wept, and Benedict, moved by her tears, prayed over the pieces until the sieve came back whole, with no sign of the break. The townsfolk of Enfide hung the mended sieve at their church door, where it stayed for years. Niccolò di Pietro sets the miracle inside a grand late-Gothic palazzo of northern Italy, full of loggias, trilobed arches and marble inlay. It is one of four scenes from Benedict's life he painted around 1415 to 1420. Three are here at the Uffizi and the fourth is in the Poldi Pezzoli in Milan.