Sassetta, The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Prison in Florence (1437-44)
And yet it wasn’t this unassuming image that I took with me as my final impression as I was driven out of the temple but rather the thought of a panel, also almost miniature, in which Saint Rainerius flew through the air, in front of the smooth wall of the prison in which he had blown a hole, with a wave of his hand, in order to free the paupers who had been thrown into the cellar. The saint wasn’t floating: he was roaring around like a bullet, his legs disappearing in a flaming cloud. The wall that he was set against was of a cool gray, a few of the prisoners had already escaped from the hole at its juncture with the smooth earth, fleeing toward the left on the square and into an alleyway off in the distance, while another, in gown and belt, was in the process of heaving himself out of the dungeon. There was a tiny, dark door in the foreground, above some steps on the short side of the building, with the opening revealing the thickness of the stone walls. The bleak, cube-like building took up two-thirds of the space of the image, the gray scale was divided into three, from the light gray of the shadowless, regular surface of the ground to the muted gray of the front with the protruding staircase. The building in the background on the corner of the alleyway, half castle, half market hall, exhibited arrow slits at the top, and beneath, a row of arched, shuttered windows bore slanted awnings which sheltered the stalls, the doors of which were pulled shut. The patch of sky in the upper left and the halo of Rainerius were rendered in gold leaf. —Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance (Volume 2)
