Martellino’s false healing at Saint Arrigo’s shrine

Martellino’s false healing at Saint Arrigo’s shrine shows how quickly a performance designed to exploit popular devotion can reverse into violence. Martellino pretends to be crippled to gain access to the crowded shrine; when his staged recovery is exposed, the crowd attacks him, and a false accusation of theft brings him before a hostile judge.

The shrine and its reputation

At Treviso, Arrigo of Treviso had been a poor German laborer who carried burdens for hire, yet the townspeople regarded him as a man of notably holy life. After his death, the great church’s bells were said to have rung without anyone pulling them. Whether or not the report was true, the people treated it as a miracle: they proclaimed Arrigo a saint and carried his body to the cathedral. The halt, the impotent, the blind, and others with illnesses or disabilities were brought there in the hope that touching his body would restore them.

The performance at the cathedral

Three Florentine entertainers—Stecchi, Martellino, and Marchese—arrive in Treviso amid the throng gathered around Saint Arrigo’s body. They are accustomed to amusing spectators at the courts of princes and lords by disguising themselves and imitating other people with unusual skill. The cathedral is so packed, and guarded against disorder by armed men, that Marchese doubts they can get inside. Martellino, eager to see the shrine, proposes using the crowd’s expectation of a miracle to make a way through: he will pretend to be unable to walk, while his companions support him as if bringing a sufferer to be healed.

In a secluded place, Martellino contorts his hands, fingers, arms, legs, mouth, and eyes until his body appears horribly palsied. Stecchi and Marchese carry him toward the church with an air of deep concern, asking people to make room for them. The crowd readily parts for what looks like a disabled man seeking help, and those nearby lift Martellino onto Saint Arrigo’s body. As everyone watches for a cure, he carefully stages one: first a finger moves, then a hand, then an arm, until he stretches his whole body straight. The apparent recovery provokes a roar of praise for the saint. The trick succeeds because the very crowd Martellino means to deceive helps enact the miracle it longs to witness.

Exposure and the second accusation

The deception breaks when a Florentine in the crowd recognizes Martellino only after he has straightened his body. The man had not identified him while he was contorted as a supposed cripple; seeing him apparently restored, he laughs and tells those nearby that Martellino had always been as straight as anyone else and was exceptionally skilled at imitation. What had looked to the crowd like a saint’s healing is recast, in an instant, as deliberate mockery of the saint and the people who came seeking help.

The Trevisans seize Martellino, pull him down from the shrine, tear at his hair and clothes, and beat him with fists and kicks. He cries out for mercy and tries to defend himself, but the blows multiply as others join in. Stecchi and Marchese recognize the danger yet are afraid to intervene; they even cry out with the crowd for Martellino’s death while trying to find a way to get him out of its hands. Their predicament sharpens the story’s reversal: the companions who had helped him pass as a helpless invalid cannot safely admit their part in the performance.

Marchese turns to the officers outside the church and invents a different charge, claiming that Martellino has stolen a purse containing a hundred gold florins. A dozen sergeants push through the crowd and drag him away, bruised and disheveled, to the palace. The rescue from immediate mob violence thus exposes him to formal punishment—and gives the crowd a fresh pretext for its anger. People who already feel affronted by his apparent fraud now claim, one after another, that he has stolen their purses too.

The Provost’s judge takes Martellino aside and questions him. Martellino answers in a joking manner, as though he makes light of being arrested; the judge, described as ill-tempered, takes this as further provocation. He orders Martellino put to the strappado, intending to force a confession to the thefts and then have him hanged. The episode’s final turn is therefore not a miraculous cure but a perilous collision between theatrical skill, offended religious feeling, opportunistic accusation, and a judge willing to use torture. The account leaves Martellino under threat of execution, with the false theft charge now as dangerous as the false healing that began the affair.

Narrative framing and the limits of disguise

The story is introduced as an example of how an attempt to fool people in a sacred setting can end in ridicule and real danger. Its account carefully separates the Trevisans’ belief from what the episode establishes: the bells’ unbidden ringing is reported as their claim, while Martellino’s bodily transformation is explicitly a performance. His skill at impersonation first lets him pass as a sufferer, but the disguise lasts only until recognition changes the meaning of the scene. The crowd’s praise, fury, and accusations follow in rapid succession, making the shrine a place where appearances acquire immediate force—and where a comic deception can become a threat of torture and execution.