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

"[2][3] The painting converts the experience into a larger colloquy with various saints, with the crucifix becoming the crucified Christ in person.

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.