ABSTRACT
Health, infirmity, and healing were intertwined in the theological and devotional language–textual, visual and oral–of fifteenth-century Florence. In the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine, for example, the dramatic, innovative rendering of the scenes from St Peter’s life both drew the imagined devotees into a narrative which reached back into biblical history and also effectively connected them to the present with familiar local figures, current clothing, and Florentine streetscapes. Images like the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel or those illustrating the miracles of preacher-saints, as we will see, provide access to a ‘medicalized culture’. The exemplum was the key device which allowed the preacher to adjust spontaneously to the mood, needs, and expectations of hearers clustered around the pulpit.
