The Basilica of St Francis

The Raising of Lazarus

The third painting illustrates one of the most extraordinary miracles performed by Jesus at the grave of his friend Lazarus, who had been dead for four days. The episode, which anticipates the Resurrection of Christ, is recorded in the eleventh chapter of John's Gospel which pictures Mary and Martha, sisters of the deceased, expressing their grief for the lost brother to Jesus, who is stirred: “When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. And said, Where have ye laid him?”. They said unto him: “Lord, come and see”. Jesus wept.” (Jh,11, 33-35). The painting depicts the moment in which Lazarus, still wrapped in his bands, emerges from the tomb after the stone that had closed it had been removed. Jesus, in the centre, blesses his friend who is helped by the disciples to free himself of the shroud. On the right, kneeling, Martha and Mary, emotionally moved, participate in the scene, together with a crowd of onlookers who had flocked from the city. Next to the women in the foreground stands a little page in modern clothes pointing at the miracle that is taking place, his feet upon a tombstone with the crest of a noble family. This detail was added by the artist to indicate that even the deceased members of the family who commissioned the painting will rise from the dead. The painting, made by Alessandro Casolani and completed by Vincenzo Rustici in the second half of the sixteenth century, decorated the altar of the Cospi family.