Niccolò di Pietro
St. Benedict Mends a Broken Sifter

1415-20
Tempera on panel
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

This is the story told at the beginning of the Golden Legend's life of St. Benedict. When he was a child, his nurse dropped a sifter (capisterium) and it broke into two pieces. The boy prayed over the sifter, and it became whole again. In the painting the nurse looks on as the St. Benedict kneels in prayer before the sifter.

In this picture the sifter comprises two round pieces, only one of which has broken. In other images of this episode the device is rectangular and the second piece is for holding the sifted grain, as is well illustrated in this other picture of the episode:

Detail from Giovanni di Consalvo's fresco in Badia Fiorentina. Fitting on the raised sides of the capisterium is a rod that the user shuttles back and forth over the slits to separate the seeds from the husks and extraneous material. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

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Photographed at the site by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.