Category: Art Flashes
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Caduceus versus the Staff of Asclepius
This painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is attributed to Gaspare Pagani, a relatively obscure sixteenth century artist from Modena, Italy, the world capital of balsamic vinegar. It shows an elderly man carrying a staff with two serpents coiled around it, serving to identify him as a physician. The man has made no momentous…
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Lorenzo Lotto: Portrait of a surgeon
During his long peripatetic career the Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto produced two paintings of medical interest, both in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The earlier painting, also shown as an Art Flash (qv), is of the physician, Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his son Niccolò, dated 1513. This painting, dated 1544, is…
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Saint Peter Martyr
Saint Peter Martyr, 1205-1252, was a Verona born Dominican friar who became Papal Inquisitor and preached against prevailing heresies. Killed by an assassin, who struck his head with an axe, he was canonized by Pope Innocent IV within one year of his death. While alive, he had many miracles attributed to him. The painting from the Metropolitan Museum in…
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Dr. Ralph Schomburg, a fashionable physician
This painting by Thomas Gainsborough is from the National Gallery in London. It shows the physician, Dr. Ralph Schomburg (1714–1792). While residing in Bath, Dr. Schomburg attended on Gainsborough himself as well as on his daughters. Story has it that Gainsborough painted this portrait in lieu of paying the doctor’s fee. It is reported that…
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Théodore Géricault: Kleptomania
Kleptomania is defined as a recurrent compulsion to steal. Affected persons often act on impulse and are not motivated by economic necessities. They tend not to use the objects they steal but may return them, hide them, or throw them away. They seem to get gratification from the very act of stealing, or at least…
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Saint Roch
Saint Roch is the patron saint of dogs, bachelors, surgeons, tile makers, invalids, and diseased cattle. He helps pilgrims and is invoked against epidemics and diseases of the skin. In the Italian Renaissance painting by Giovanni Buonconsiglio (ca. 1465, ca. 1535) he is shown in traveling attire, pointing at his plague bubo, in company of…
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Saints Cosmas and Damian, patron saints of doctors
Unlike many other doctors, Cosmas and Damian were also saints. They lived in what today is modern Turkey, where they practiced healing the sick. They may also have been color blind (!), replacing (as in the paintings shown here) a patient’s gangrenous leg with one of the wrong color. But the Florentine Filippo Lippi clearly…
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Lorenzo Lotto: Portrait of a physician
Giovanni Agostino della Torre was an eminent wealthy physician in the northern Italian town of Bergamo. Believed to have been 61 years old when his portrait was painted, he died in 1535 at 81, then presumably no longer in active medical practice. In this painting, now at the National Gallery in London, the doctor is…
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Giulio Clovio: Miniaturist and manuscript illuminator
For much of his career, Giorgio Giulio Clovio, the greatest miniaturist and manuscript illuminator of his time, was pursued by ill luck. Born in Croatia in 1498 and first working in Venice, he went to seek his fortune in the service of the King of Hungary. But unfortunately the King was defeated and killed by…
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The Fountain of Youth
But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.—Yeats Since time immemorial, people in most countries of the world have looked for remedies to repair the ravages of time and make them young again. This has given rise to many tales about miraculous springs of water they could drink or bathe in…