Giovanni di Balduccio, Tomb of St. Peter Martyr: Detail, back panels
1336-39
Marble
Portinari Chapel
Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio
The three panels of the back of the sarcophagus present famous miracles of St. Peter of Verona, a Dominican who preached against the Catharist sect in northern Italy and served for a time as an inquisitor.
In the first panel, the saint "put his finger into the mouth of a mute young man, broke the string that tied his tongue, and obtained for him the blessing of speech" (Ryan, I, 257).
The second panel is the miracle of the clouds. As his trial drags on in the summer heat, a Catharist "heretical bishop" challenges Peter, sitting as inquisitor, "if you are as holy as these stupid people say you are, why…don't you ask the Lord to put a cloud in front of the sun to keep the people from death by overheating?" (Ryan, I, 256). In the sculpture the heretic is the large man on the right shaking his fist at Peter, the man in the pulpit looking up at the cloud that is God's answer to his prayer.
For the third panel, the chapel's label says "healing of an invalid and an epileptic during a visit to a hospital." I have not found any account of two invalids cured in a hospital, but the women's branch of the Umiliati order did have a hospital at the time, and a vita in the Acta Sanctorum says that Peter cured one of the sisters there who had lain sick for seven years (April vol. 3, 696). She should be the invalid on the right, who is probably a woman because she does not look young yet has no beard.
In the scene on the left in the same panel a man who is clearly not Peter is laying a mantle on an invalid, from whose mouth something long and black is emerging. In the Golden Legend a nobleman's son had been cured of a throat ailment when Peter put his mantle over him. Later the nobleman fell sick with "violent tremors" (possibly epilepsy?) and called for the mantle to be laid on his chest. At that, he vomited up a great worm and was cured. This would surely be the episode illustrated here.
The events shown here, and especially the miracle of the cloud that affirmed Catholic teaching against the Cathars, lead into the narrative on the left end of the sarcophagus – the saint's assassination by Cathar brigands.
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Photographed at the chapel by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.