Three days before the feast of St Nicholas, alias Santa Claus, this week’s picture shows four scenes from his legendary life. Painted by the early Renaissance Sienese master Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and once part of a larger polyptych, the episodes represented are (in clockwise order) The Resuscitation of a Boy Strangled by the Devil, The Saint’s Gift of Gold to a Destitute Family, The Consecration of Nicholas as Bishop of Myra and The Freeing of Myra from Famine. Done in the late 1320s, they are small but not minor works of art, which include what some art historians believe to be the earliest seascape in Italian Renaissance painting.

More than a thousand years separated Ambrogio Lorenzetti from his subject, who is said to have been born in in AD 271 in Patara, a port town in what is now modern Turkey. Nicholas’s cult is as celebrated as his history is obscure. The main (and entirely uncorroborated) events of his life were usually said to have involved persecution and imprisonment by the Emperor Diocletian and the working of numerous miracles. His prominence in the Christian canon of saints was enhanced after 1087, when enterprising merchants from the Italian town of Bari stole some bones said to be Nicholas’s remains from a church in Constantinople. The Western Church then took Nicholas to its heart, building numerous churches to him and ingeniously elaborating his myth. Jacopo da Voragine, whose mid-thirteenth century hagiographical encyclopedia The Golden Legend became the patternbook of the principal saints’ lives, fixed the popular image of Nicholas; and it was on his apocryphal account that Ambrogio based his paintings.

The tale of Nicholas rescuing the people of Myra from starvation is described in some detail in The Golden Legend: “It was so on a time that all...

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