Endocrinology and art. A goiter at the court of Theodolinda, queen of the Lombards: a fifteenth-century painting.

Abstract

The Zavattari were a family of painters and stained-glass makers operating in Milan and western Lombardy during the fifteenth century. Franceschino Zavattari and his sons Gregorio and Giovanni were believed as the authors of a cycle of wall paintings—depicted between 1441 and 1446—in a chapel in the Monza Cathedral. The paintings, recently restored, tell the life of the founder of the cathedral, Theodolinda (ca. 570–628), queen of the Lombards. According to the legend, during a dream, a dove indicated the queen where she had to build a church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, original nucleus of the cathedral [1]. A young bricklayer with a bi-nodular goiter is shown in the 34th scene of the cycle that portrays the groundbreaking ceremony of the church. It should be noted that during the fifteenth century, Italian stonecutters and bricklayers generally came from alpine and pre-alpine valleys set between Bergamo and Sondrio in the northern Lombardy [2]. In these areas, inhabitants often suffered from endemic goiter due to dietary iodine deficiency. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that an actual bricklayer with a thyroid disorder may have inspired the Zavattari in their work (see Fig. 1).