Cenni di Francesco di Ser Cenni, The Coronation of the Virgin with Saints: Detail, a miracle of St. Stephen
1390s
Tempera and gold leaf on panel
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
This is a most perplexing image, and I offer these comments with less than complete confidence. The person in the center of this image can be identified as St. Stephen by the dalmatic and the red-cross banner, both of which appear in his portrait on the left wing of the altarpiece. In The City of God (XXII:8) St. Augustine lists a great number of miracles in his own time in which a dead person was brought back to life after family members had prayed to St. Stephen. That seems to be what Stephen is doing in this image, taking a deceased man by the hand from the margin of the underworld while a woman in white prays before the saint. A devil behind the man pushes him toward Stephen, as if he did not belong in Hell like the other souls portrayed.
In another miracle that Augustine said he himself had observed and that was also recounted in the Golden Legend, a brother and sister who had been cursed with palsy by their mother were cured by coming to Augustine's church and praying at the relics of St. Stephen. The young man and woman entering the building on the left in this panel could represent the two siblings.
The red-cross banner, identical with
the one Christ carries in traditional Resurrection images, may refer to Augustine's explanation in the following chapter that "these miracles witness…to this faith which preaches Christ risen in the flesh" (XXII:9).
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Photographed at the museum by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.