The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian

Fra Angelico's Healing of Justinian by Saints Cosmas and Damian, painted around 1439, depicts the most famous miracle attributed to the physician-saints: the transplanting of a leg from a recently deceased Moor onto a living patient. This extraordinary medical miracle made Cosmas and Damian patrons of physicians and surgeons. Fra Angelico — born Guido di Pietro, known in religion as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole — was a Dominican friar whose painting practice was inseparable from his spiritual vocation. Working primarily for his own order and for Florentine civic and private patrons, he created some of the most luminous and spiritually powerful images in the history of European art.

The scene is set in a bedchamber with the sleeping patient attended by the haloed saints, rendered in Fra Angelico's clear spatial construction and luminous tempera, the contrast between the dark-skinned transplanted leg and the patient's body creating a visually striking detail.