The painting was commissioned by Sebastiano Pandolfini del Turco for his family chapel in San Marco.

[1] The painting records a version of a miraculous event putatively experienced by Thomas Aquinas near the end of his life.

The painting, completed towards the end of Santi di Tito's career, has been described by Freedberg as a prime example of "Counter-Maniera" in Florence, expressing with a burgeoning realism a rebellion against stylized fancy.

This painting, in a proto-Baroque fashion, stresses a diagonal spatial composition, rising from the kneeling Thomas to the crucified Christ.

[4] The intrusion of the divine, often emerging from a dark background, into what is the realistic mundane world, would be a theme common to Roman altarpieces by Caravaggio within the next decade.