When the Saints Go Arting In: Cosmas & Damian
Today I’ve been learning about Cosmas and Damian, who were twins AND saints AND doctors, which means they probably did extremely well on the 3rd Century dating apps. Everybody knows that twins are creepy, including me, a twin. But when you’re twin doctors depicted in art, it hoists the creepiness by a factor of one thousand… what, leeches I guess? Add on top of that the fact that these guys amputated a white guy’s leg and replaced it with a black guy’s leg — a “miracle” I suppose — and you get some properly unsettling pictures. Anyway, in a creepiness competition between these guys, the girls in The Shining and Mary-Kate and Ashley, Cosmas and Damian would not come last. Mind you, the saints were tortured before being beheaded, so they’ve kind of got the jump on those other guys.
Right, yes! The art.
This first one’s fine, and just looks like two people in their dressing gowns having a very boring argument about traditional versus contemporary vases. Low creepiness, depending on what that liquid is.
The Greek Orthodox version ups the eerie a teensy bit by making the twins look absolutely identical save for dressing them in different colours, like so many mothers of twins insist on doing. It seems that while they were getting their hair professionally braided, Cosmas and Damian invented super-long spoons great for getting yogurt out of the very bottom of long square tubes, something nobody really wanted or needed.
In this one though, while the twins are busy tying a new leg onto a patient, his old leg has just been casually dropped on the floor, while an angel waves a chocolate Paddle Pop over it. What it lacks in anything even closely resembling good medical practice, it makes up for in whimsy and dessert.
Here’s the same procedure, but tidier — the artist is skilled enough to paint an angel holding the bloodied old leg, but not skilled enough to avoid giving everyone the same face. The angel in the background even breaks the fourth wall, asking us with its eyes if we can also see what’s going on — twins in brocade and velvet trying to attach a leg with… magnets, probably?
I’m no doctor, but I think, when using a recently-deceased man’s leg to transplant onto an alive man’s body, it is unnecessary to also place the alive man’s leg into the coffin of the dead man. So unnecessary that you might even call it completely ridiculous and thoroughly upsetting. I get that there’s a leg-shaped space available there, and a spare leg that needs to be put somewhere, but I enjoy the comfort of knowing that when I die, it’s fairly unlikely that I’ll be buried with a complete stranger’s body parts in my casket. Ideally.
Possibly even more unnecessary is having the recently dead guy lying on the floor of the room the leg transplant is taking place in, like in this absolute slap-in-the-face from the 1400s. Yep, better check his pulse, mate, to make sure that the guy with exactly your face and hairstyle is pulling through okay right next to the floor-corpse.
Frans Francken here apparently had a piece of mortadella in the fridge that he used as a model for a recently-amputated leg-stump. Here’s a tip, lads — perhaps put the old leg on ice and the patient in a bed. Despite the fact that this was clearly done with a very sharp knife, this is an extremely casual hospital, and I don’t like it.
Antoine de Favray preferred to show Cosmas and Damian working on a chest wound instead of the more traditional leg transplant, which is a huge relief, gore-wise. This painting shows one of the twins performing surgery, while the other one offers thoughts and prayers, a technique of equal effectiveness but with far less washing up.
But even the lives of pioneering doctors have to end sometime, and regardless of their obvious links to the occult, twins are human too. Fra Angelico used almost offensively chipper colours when depicting Cosmas and Damian being violently beheaded along with three other notable Christians in some kind of five-for-one deal. A bargain if you like murder efficiency, not so much if you dislike scooping brains off the street. Let’s call it even.
So there, that’s Saints Cosmas and Damian, two guys who would give their right leg to be transplant trailblazers. Well, your right leg.
Sorry.
