In Cardeto, the church of Santi Pietro e Paolo [Saints Peter and Paul], houses a valuable eighteenth-century painting of saints Sants Cosmas and Damian.

Principal works of art

The painting, which stands, today, on the main altar of Cardeto’s mother church, probably belonged, from the beginning of the eighteenth century on, to an older place of worship, dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian. It portrays the two doctors, intent on treating two patients in the presence of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child, assisted by angels who pass them their medical instruments. On the right side two women observe the miraculous cure, with great amazement. Some attribute the painting to the Bolognese artist Vicenzo Gotti, others to an anonymous artist from Puglia, on the basis of archival records of a ‘payment, in 1771, for “a new picture of Saints Cosmas and Damian,” painted in Reggio by a Pugliese painter. This anonymous artist’s style recalls Corrado Giaquinto’s approach and reveals a clear knowledge of both the Roman Cortonesque and Neapolitan Solimena-inspired schools.

This parish is the owner of a precious chalice with a paten in gilded silver and enamel by the Demarquet brothers, goldsmiths who worked in Paris between 1868 and 1890, donated to Cardinal Luigi Tripepi (Cardeto, 1836 – Rome, 1906) by the Spanish Queen, Maria Cristina, in 1879 and sent by the prelate to his native town. From 2012 this beautiful artefact is on show at the “Monsignor Aurelio Sorrentino” diocesan Museum, Reggio Calabria.