Botticelli, Three Miracles of St. Zenobius

1500-1510
Tempera on wood Metropolitan Museum of Art, 11.98, John Stewart Kennedy Fund

The painting comprises three primary scenes and one additional scene in the right background, as follows:

The first miracle on the left is recounted in all three of the vitae published in the Acta Sanctorum (May vol. 6, 53, 55, 60-61). Zenobius and his clergy were on their way to a church that was outside the city walls when they saw a group of people headed for the burial grounds. The people were going to inter a young man there, but when they saw Zenobius they implored him to pray for the young man's resurrection. He demurred, but they were so insistent that he did say a prayer and in fact the youth rose up alive. In the painting, the young man on Zenobius's left is his archdeacon, St. Eugenius.


The second miracle is described in the museum's label but is not in the Acta Sanctorum lives. According to the museum, Zenobius raised a man who had been killed while bringing relics from St. Ambrose. (The relics, two corpses, are seen in the casket.) St. Eugenius appears again in this panel, standing with the processional cross behind St. Eugenius.


The third miracle is recounted in the Acta Sanctorum (ibid., 53, 55) and is shown in two phases. Inside the house on the right Zenobius visits his archdeacon St. Eugenius, who is sick in bed. He gives Eugenius some blessed water and tells him to go and sprinkle it on a man who has recently died. The man is a visitor from Florence, a relative of St. Ambrose.
Then in the scene at bottom right, Eugenius has poured the water and the dead man (wrapped like Lazarus) rises and presses his hands together in prayer.

Read more about images of St. Zenobius.

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