The Martyrdom of Saint Maurelius

The Martyrdom of Saint Maurelius, painted around 1480 and now in the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, depicts the decapitation of one of Ferrara's patron saints — Maurelius, the city's first bishop, martyred in the early Christian era. Cosimo Tura painted a series of panels on the life and martyrdom of Saint Maurelius for the Ferrara Cathedral, which held the saint's relics and whose patronal cult was central to the city's identity. These panels — which also include The Trial of Saint Maurelius — represent Tura's most sustained narrative painting project and demonstrate the full maturity of his extraordinary style: compressed space, harsh light, strange landscape backgrounds, and figures of almost hallucinatory intensity.

Tempera on panel with Tura's distinctive treatment of narrative violence — the executioner's gesture arrested by paint, the saint's expression combining resignation and transcendence, the surrounding crowd rendered in Tura's characteristically angular, emphatic physiognomies. The landscape background is one of his impossible geological formations combining rocky outcrops with distant architectural fantasies.