Miracle of the healed foot

Titian's Miracle of the Healed Foot, painted in 1511 for the Scuola del Santo in Padua, is one of three frescoes depicting miracles of Saint Anthony that together constitute the earliest surviving public commission attributable to him with documentary certainty — the payment records survive in the Scuola's archives. The miracle depicted shows the saint reattaching a severed foot to the leg of a man who had cut it off in fury, following the saint's posthumous intervention. The Scuola del Santo, the confraternity devoted to Padua's patron saint, commissioned these frescoes as part of the complex's decoration adjacent to the Basilica of Sant'Antonio, one of the great pilgrimage churches of Italy. The frescoes remain in their original location, making them uniquely important documents of Titian's early technique; fresco was a medium he rarely used, and these Paduan works show him adapting the atmospheric handling developed in oil painting to the more demanding and irreversible technique of buon fresco.

The fresco demonstrates Titian's command of narrative composition, with clearly articulated figural groups arranged in a convincing architectural space, rendered with the bold, direct brushwork demanded by the fresco medium.