Sts Cosmas and Damian

Luteri Giovanni called Dosso Dossi

(Tramuschio? 1487 ca - Ferrara 1542)

This large painting, commissioned for the Ospedale di S. Anna, a hospital, in Ferrara, was removed on 15 December 1607 and sent as a gift from the bishop of Ferrara to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a great admirer of Dossi’s work. The subject of the painting, although tied to its commission for a hospital, still has an element of iconographic originality: the two physician saints, Cosmas and Damian, are expert orthodontists, and if it weren’t for their halos and the format of the canvas, it would seem we were looking at a surgical operation.  Specifically, the scene depicts the extraction of a tooth using a dental elevator, called a ‘pelican’ in Italian because its rounded tip looks like the bird’s beak.  The sculptural rendering of the figures reveals the influence of the Roman painter Sebastiano del Piombo.

Object details

Commentary

Even before the Borghese inventories, this large painting of Sts Cosmas and Damian is documented among Cardinal Scipione’s artistic interests in the Ferrara area, as attested by the letters published between the 1950s and 80s and written on 5 December 1607 by the judge of the Savi of Ferrara, Battista Muzzarelli, to Enzo Bentivoglio, by the bishop of Ferrara to Cardinal Borghese and on 22 May 1608, from Monsignor Nappi in Rome, announcing the arrival of the painting at the house of the cardinal nephew (Della Pergola 1955; Maddalo-Marcolini-Marcon 1983).

The large painting was originally in the Arcispedale di Sant’Anna (a hospital) in Ferrara, and although we do not know exactly where it was hung it was reported in the sources from the subsequent centuries (Guarini 1621; Brisichella 1730-1735, ed. 1991; Scalabrini 1755). It depicts the twin-brother saints Cosmas and Damian while practising their trade as physicians, attending to a humble man who is wearing only trousers and work shoes. A ceramic pharmacy jar for ointments placed on a step in the foreground bears the enigmatic inscription ‘ONTO DA’, probably in reference to the oily contents of the container. Two other medical items are depicted, confirming the identification of the figures: a spatula held by the saint sitting in the foreground on the left, which he holds near the mouth of the patient, probably using it as a tongue depressor, and a glass containing urine and kidney stones held in the left hand of the other saint, in the background. According to Kristina Herrmann Fiore (2002), the glass is a reference to the famous University of Ferrara professor of medicine, Giovanni Manardi, who taught his students that a good doctors ‘needs to observe the patient’s urine rather than study the stars’. Through this reference, Dosso lent a more scientific air to his rendering of the patron saints of physicians, who were at the time still tied to magical and superstitious practices. On the far right, in the shadows, a woman with her back to us looks at the viewer with an enigmatic, proud expression. She wears a generous green dress trimmed in gold and a white shirt embellished with gold ribbons similar to the ones in her hair and might have been a noble benefactor of the hospital or the patron of the painting.

The dating of the painting is, as is often the case with the Ferrara school, controversial. According to some scholars, it is from Dosso’s late period, given the soft, swollen rendering of the figures (Gibbons 1968; Humphrey 1998 p. 146; Coliva 1998 p. 67), while others see it instead as from the 1520s, either around the beginning of the decade and in collaboration with his brother Battista (Ballarin 1993) or at the end of the decade (Mezzetti 1965). If it were possible to confirm the link to the physician Manardi, who returned to Ferrara in 1519, we could also accept Ballarin’s theory about the contribution of the artist’s brother Battista, who returned to Ferrara from Rome in 1520. This theory is strengthened by the strong influence of Michelangelo, as seen in the monumentality of the figures, who stand out bright and lively against the background with bold chiaroscuro effects, as we also find in the contemporary Learned Men now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara (inv. FE 103, FE 104) and the Allegory of Music in the Horne Collection, Florence (inv. 80).

Lara Scanu