Uffizi: fifteen masterpieces recount the healing and saving power of art

The Uffizi Galleries present their virtual exhibition thatcan be visited on the official website of the Florentine museum venue. Title chosen is Miraculous Healings. Sickness and Divine Intervention. Art Interprets the Miracle in Works from the Three to the Twentieth Century, which aims to emphasize the healing and salvific power of art: art saves from suffering.

Making up the virtual exhibition are fifteen works belonging to the museum’s collections, but not only, created by great masters such as Beato Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, and Rembrandt.

The exhibition tour kicks off with a scene of a miracle of Blessed Humility in the Uffizi polyptych by Pietro Lorenzetti, executed around 1335: the leg of a monk who had refused its amputation is healed. The gesture prefigures the similar gesture of the two saints Cosmas and Damian in the predella compartment of Beato Angelico’sSan Marco Altarpiece: here, the two replace the gangrenous leg of the deacon Justinian with that taken from an Ethiopian buried in the cemetery of San Pietro in Vincoli.
Cosmas and Damian, protectors of the Medici, also appear in Botticelli’s St. Ambrose Altarpiece, displayed in the Gallery of Statues and Paintings.
The miracle of the healing of the blind man born, narrated in the Gospel of John, is featured in the drawing attributed to the school of Raphael, while the miraculous power of the thaumaturgic gesture is expressed by anengraving by Rembrandt and by St. Peter Heals the Sick with His Shadow, a painting attributed to the French Laurent de La Hyre: a subject for which Florence boasts an illustrious 15th-century precedent, the fresco by Masaccio on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine.
The exhibition concludes with Giovanni Colacicchi ’s 1943 depiction of a Saint Sebastian not pierced by arrows, but characterized by a seductively perfect body.

“What we want to tell with Miraculous Healings is the victory of hope over suffering, over evil, over sickness,” explained the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt, “sending a strong message of support to the many people who are still in danger and to those who went through terrible times during the pandemic. The experience of illness is part of the human condition, and recovery reminds us of the many reasons why life is worth living: it is the inexplicable miracle that fills us with hope and reminds us that we must be grateful for all that existence holds for us.”

The project is carried out by the Uffizi Galleries under the coordination of Patrizia Naldini.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Madonna and Child Enthroned and Saints John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Francis, Catherine of Alexandria, Cosmas and Damian (c. 1470; tempera on panel, 170 x 194 cm; Florence, Uffizi)

Uffizi: fifteen masterpieces recount the healing and saving power of art

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