In both Don Lorenzo's painting and Aretino's, a monk on the far right is looking up at the vision described in chapter 37 of Gregory the Great's life of the saint:
Lorenzo Monaco, The Death of St. Benedict
1414
Tempera on wood
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
This is a panel from the predella of the Coronation of the Virgin that Don Lorenzo painted for the Camaldolese church of St. Mary of the Angels in Florence. In a conventional deathbed image, St. Benedict lies on a bier while a monk in a black cape reads the Office of the Dead and others carry candles and a long cross. The kissing of the saint's foot is a feature also seen in images of the laying out of Christ's body
(example)
and is also seen in Spinello Aretino's 1387 painting of Benedict's death:
In both Don Lorenzo's painting and Aretino's, a monk on the far right is looking up at the vision described in chapter 37 of Gregory the Great's life of the saint:
That day two monks, one of them at the monastery, the other some distance away, received the very same revelation. They both saw a magnificent road covered with rich carpeting and glittering with thousands of lights. From his monastery it stretched eastward in a straight line until it reached up into heaven. And there in the brightness stood a man of majestic appearance, who asked them, "Do you know who passed this way?"
"No," they replied.
"This," he told them, is the road taken by blessed Benedict, the Lord's beloved, when he went to heaven."
In both images the man of majestic appearance is pictured as an angel pointing to Heaven, the magnificent road is a cuboid covered in glittery carpeting, and St. Benedict is traveling horizontally.
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Read more about St. Benedict.
Photographed at the Uffizi by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.