A Resurrection in Florence - Ciro Ferri’s "Miracle of Saint Zenobius" This long ignored painting shows St Zenobius, the first bishop of Florence stopping during a procession to listen to the pleas of a woman asking him to bring back to...
moreA Resurrection in Florence - Ciro Ferri’s "Miracle of Saint Zenobius"
This long ignored painting shows St Zenobius, the first bishop of Florence stopping during a procession to listen to the pleas of a woman asking him to bring back to life her son. An iconographic analysis reveals that Ferri was intimately familiar with the legend forming the basis for his composition: he depicts the boy hovering between life and death - his slightly opened mouth seems to herald his awakening, but the head slumped on his shoulder and his lifeless left arm reference a celebrated motif of death: the pictorial formula developed by Annibale Carracci, which, in turn, is based on Michelangelo’s Pietà. In addition, Ferri departs from both Florentine pictorial tradition and the saint’s legend by using the two women kneeling in the foreground to portray two different conditions experienced by the bereaved mother: one is active, praying for the resurrection of her son, the other lost in grief.
A comparison with an extant preparatory sketch and the evaluation of infrared photographs shows that Ferri transposed his square composition directly onto the canvas. Dispensing with intermediary steps, the artist skilfully introduced the modifications necessitated by this change of format by “expanding” the triangular arrangement of figures in the foreground (cf. the drawing) to balance procession and miracle.
In conjunction with the artful and allusive iconography, Ferri’s use of costly materials (expensive pigments, large canvas) is indicative of the work’s high-ranking and erudite recipient: painted for Principe Leopoldo de’ Medici, it was unveiled in the Palazzo Pitti in 1665. The close dynastic connections between the Medici and the Habsburgs brought the picture to Vienna in the seventeenth century.