Fidel Schabet, St. Martin Brings a Youth Back to Life
1846
Church of St. Martin, Unteressendorf, Germany
In Caxton's translation of the Golden Legend, "when a youngling [Latin iuvenis] was dead, his mother prayed St. Martin, with weeping tears, for to raise him to life. And he kneeled down and made his prayer, and the child arose tofore them all. And all the paynims [pagans] that saw this converted them to the faith of Jesu Christ."
To this account the artist adds features drawn from Christ's resurrection of the son of the widow of Naim (Luke 7:11-16), specifically that the event occurs as the youth is being carried out of the city accompanied by a crowd that is then amazed at Jesus' power. Luke says the young man's body was in a loculum, literally a coffin, but traditional images have him on a stretcher just like the one in this painting. Also, Martin is not pictured on his knees in the painting. He stands with his deacons, just as Jesus stands with his disciples in the Naim images.
Read more about images of St. Martin.
Read about images of the Naim miracle.
Source: this page at Wikimedia Commons.
