Life of St. Roch: Detail, the spring and the shelter
Detail from a fresco
Museo del paesaggio, Verbania-Pallanza, Italy
On the right Roch arrives in Piacenza, from whence he will be expelled after he contracts the plague. In the center he prays for help in his exile and an angel brings a cloud to the earth, which becomes a spring for him to drink from. On the left, he has arranged some boughs into a shelter and is inspecting the wound in his thigh. He has placed an image of the Man of Sorrows against one post of the shelter.
Caxton repeats the assertion in his Latin source (Acta Sanctorum August vol. 3, 403) that the well has continued in use to his day. There is in fact a contemporary photograph on Wikimedia of a puits de Saint Roch, a "well of St. Roch" near Montpellier:
Read more about images of St. Roch
Read more about images of the Man of Sorrows.
Source of fresco image: this page at Wikimedia Commons.
Source of well photo: Anne Langevin via this page at Wikimedia Commons.
