The story
In the upper hall of the Scuola del Santo, beside the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, one fresco shows the saint restoring a young man's severed foot. The legend behind it is a stern one. The youth confessed to having kicked his mother, Anthony told him such a foot deserved to be cut off, the boy took him literally, and the saint made him whole again. The painter was Titian, still in his early twenties, who worked here from April to December 1511, two years after Venice had won Padua back in the War of the League of Cambrai.
The fresco is one of three he painted here, his first large independent commission. The others show a newborn baby speaking to defend his mother's honour, and a jealous husband who stabs his wife, whom the saint later brings back to life. Around them runs a cycle of Anthony's miracles by several painters of the Veneto, among them Bartolomeo Montagna from Vicenza, beneath a coffered ceiling painted between 1506 and 1510.
The building belonged to the Archconfraternity of Saint Anthony, a lay brotherhood devoted to the saint. Its members built the ground-floor chapel, the Scoletta, between 1427 and 1431 and added the upper hall in 1504. From the balcony over the churchyard three popes have blessed the crowds, the last of them John Paul II in 1982.
