Anthony the ordinary

Previous Saint Anthony posts:

Tickling Saint Anthony
More beads for Saint Anthony

Two more Saint Anthonys with paternoster beads today: one from Spain, one from the Netherlands, both from the third quarter of the 15th century.

Nuño Gonsalves painted the St. Vincent Altarpiece in 1467-69 for Lisbon Cathedral (it's now in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga). The deacon Saint Vincent of Zaragoza is one of the patrons of Lisbon. This is a huge, six-paneled piece crammed with faces. The ones in the front rows seem to be saints, Portuguese royalty, and other famous figures, and behind them are the faces of about thirty spectators. (By the way, out of about 60 figures I count exactly two women in this picture: Saint Margaret kneeling in the front of the left central panel, who has a small dragon apparently dancing on her head and is also holding paternoster beads, and another woman behind her, who is thought to be the Infanta Isabel, daughter of King João I.) Saint Vincent appears dressed in red and gold deacons' robes in both of the central panels. Six panels is a bit unusual for an altarpiece, but if there was ever a seventh panel in the middle showing the Virgin and Child or some other scene, it's been lost or hasn't been identified yet.



Many of the figures (especially among the spectators) are thought to be portraits of actual 15th-century people from Lisbon, including the artist and Prince Henry the Navigator, though there's some uncertainty as to exactly who is who. There is more information here.

At any rate, Saint Anthony appears in a curious crouched position in the front of the second panel from the left, called the "Fishermen" panel. He shows next to no distinguishing marks, so my identification of him as Saint Anthony is based on his brown robe (which is apparently a signal meaning "hermit") and on what the book I got it from says. The photo in the book is rather small, so this is the best reproduction I can get, and it's not very good.



About all we can really see in this fuzzy photo is that his beads, too, are wood-colored, and they seem to be rather loosely strung. I can't even be sure of their shape -- they could be disk-shaped, they could be round or oval.

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The real star of this series, however, is Saint Anthony's beads in the Portinari altarpiece, painted by Hugo van der Goes (1440-1482), and now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

In some ways these are the most interesting beads so far, because they are painted in a way that suggests these are real beads that might have been owned by a very ordinary person, painted (more or less) from life, rather than an abstract concept of beads (as the Ghent altarpiece beads seem to be). Here is Saint Anthony, on the left. The figure on the right is Saint Thomas the Apostle; that vertical pole he's holding is a spear, one of his attributes. Saint Anthony is nicely identified by his T-shaped staff and by the bell in his other hand.



Clothing historians often complain that they never get to see much of what ordinary people wore in history, since both the surviving garments and surviving documents such as wills and inventories focus mainly on the clothing of royalty, the Church, and the wealthy, and these are also about the only people who ever get their portraits painted. Well, here we get to see what I think are a very ordinary person's beads, and it's nice to get such a good look at them. (I love books with BIG photos!)



The beads themselves look very real. There are 28 beads that look like they are probably made of bone, shaped like fat rounded disks (rondelles), one or two fatter than the rest. There are seven transparent beads -- a very small one right above the little equal-armed cross, three smallish spheres, two large spheres, and one rondelle. The bead just below the cross might also be transparent and just doesn't look that way because it's against a dark background and shows no highlights or reflections -- or it might be black. Anyway it's another large sphere.

It's very interesting that these beads are so irregular in size and shape. Common sense suggests this could have been quite normal for the beads of a common, not too well-off person. They might have been homemade, or if they were bought, irregular beads would likely be cheaper. And if your purpose is to count prayers and not to show off (more expensive beads were often "conspicuous consumption" pieces) then a few irregularities don't matter.

The transparent beads I would guess to be glass, as the cheapest of the transparent materials available. (Amber and crystal were luxury materials.) Again they don't all match. If you compare the beads with the size of the saint's fingers, they are by modern standards quite large for rosary beads, the biggest nearly an inch across. I have a theory that the reason modern rosary beads are usually only about 1/4 that size is that modern people generally don't display their rosaries like jewelry, but stuff them into a pocket or purse.

What is probably not quite realistic is the bead count. Not counting the marker beads, I see groups of 5 (or 6), 10, 7, 5, and 5, which doesn't match any pattern of prayers I can think of.

Usually when I see bead numbers that don't make sense -- especially when the bead groups don't all have the same number -- I attribute it to artistic license, the artist painting to make a nice picture rather than feeling compelled to reproduce a real model exactly. These beads are otherwise so realistic looking, however, that I am now wondering whether that's a correct assumption, or whether there really were prayer beads like this, or whether perhaps the artist might be painting a real set of beads that has been damaged and imperfectly mended. I'll keep my eyes open now for more evidence on this question.

Or I can just add it to my list of questions for, "If I ever get to heaven, I am going to track down so-and-so and ask....."!

More beads for Saint Anthony

For reasons I haven't yet figured out, certain saints are more often pictured with paternoster beads than others in medieval painting and sculpture. Saint Jerome, for instance, if he's shown in his study will very often have a string of beads hanging somewhere in the background.

Saint Anthony Abbot is another saint often pictured with a paternoster. Probably one of the reasons is to signal his status as a prototype of all holy hermits, along with his friend Saint Paul of Thebes. Another major reason is that tradition says Saint Anthony counted his prayers using a pile of pebbles, throwing one away after each repetition of his prayer, which makes him a forefather of the rosary as well. His beads, however, are generally not shown as a pile of pebbles, but as an ordinary strung paternoster of whatever time period the painter decided was appropriate -- usually the painter's own century.

As I think I've mentioned, the temptation of Saint Anthony by demons is a popular scene, and in most of these scenes he is holding a string of beads, often rather more conspicuous than the small glimpse of beads we see in the Isenheim altarpiece. One of my favorite "Temptations" is this one, a detail from the Penitence of Saint Jerome triptych by Joachim Patinir, painted about 1515-24 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



The Square Halo, a favorite book of mine about saints and their depiction in medieval paintings, notes that these demons appear to be rather quiet and polite as demons go -- tapping gently at the saint's book to get his attention, rather than pulling his hair or tweaking his nose. Enlarging this part of the painting reveals details of the beads and also some rather intriguing details of the book he's reading -- perhaps it's even identifiable, but in any case it has a very fine tooled leather cover.



The beads appear by their color to be wood, which makes sense if the saint is off in the wilderness somewhere. There are probably supposed to be five decades -- set off by marker beads somewhat larger than the others -- but the painter didn't quite count them precisely as there is one "decade" with only eight beads.

A rather more magnificent set of beads is held by Saint Anthony in the forefront of another painting, the Hermit Saints panel (labeled "Heremite Sancti") of the very famous Ghent altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan and Hubert van Eyck, painted for Saint Bavo Cathedral around 1432. This is a huge painting, with many panels showing saints of various types all surrounding the central picture: there are groups representing virgins, martyrs, apostles, popes and clerics, soldier saints, hermits, pilgrims and so forth.



The holy hermits are in panel 13 (bottom row, just to the right of the central scene) and Saint Anthony and Saint Paul of Thebes are in the front row, as befits their role as prototypes. You can tell which is which by the fact that Saint Anthony has his staff -- L-shaped rather than T-shaped this time. There is supposed to be a blue Tau-cross on his robe, but I can't see it in this reproduction. Also, as is often the case when these two saints are shown together, Saint Anthony is on the left (heraldic "dexter," the position of honor), indicating he has precedence in rank.



Since the events in the painting are supposed to be taking place in Heaven, or at least in the Book of Revelations, Saint Anthony is not restricted to plain wooden beads, but has a long straight string of about 35 beads that are probably supposed to be rock crystal. It also has fancy pearl-embellished tassels on both ends; clearly in Heaven, wealth is infinite and saints can afford whatever they like!



The beads carried by Saint Paul of Thebes in the same painting are black, on a red string, and are probably supposed to represent jet. I can't think of any particular association between Saint Paul and jet, but these would be valuable beads, although not as valuable as Saint Anthony's. There are 21 beads visible, though the exact number is probably not significant. Of more interest, there seems to be a flat cross of some sort at the bottom of the loop of beads. This area of the painting is quite dark and it's difficult to see details of the cross in a reproduction. It appears to be a cross pattée with the arms narrow at the center and wide at the ends.



I have another couple of Saint Anthonys to show, but I'll save them for another post.

Tickling Saint Anthony

There's at least one more interesting set of beads I want to mention in the Isenheim Altarpiece, this time on one of the inside panels. Here's the altarpiece with the inner wings open:



This altarpiece was probably commissioned for a church or guild honoring Saint Anthony Abbot, traditionally a fourth-century Egyptian hermit, one of the "Desert Fathers" of the early church. (There's a lot more information about him here.) The two painted panels on the innermost wings of the altarpiece show, on the left, the visit of St. Anthony to his good buddy St. Paul of Thebes, another of the Desert Fathers, and on the right, St. Anthony's temptation by demons. Here's the left panel:



And the right one:



And, for completeness, a closer view of the statue of St. Anthony -- note the pig nestling under his robes on the right, and another held by his follower:



Saint Anthony is distinguished by a Tau (T)-shaped or sometimes L-shaped staff. This is actually an early version of the more familiar curly-headed bishop's crozier. The crutch-like shape may also relate to the fact that St. Anthony is almost always shown as a very old man.

The "Temptation of Saint Anthony" is one of those classic scenes artists seem to have really enjoyed painting, perhaps because it gave them carte blanche to exercise their imaginations and dream up some really interesting demons. The moral of this story is that being alone in the desert doesn't eliminate the possibility of sinning, it's just that it comes to visit you instead of you having to go look for it. Hieronymus Bosch painted the scene several times, with his usual weird creatures in the background (for instance here and here), though for some reason most of those directly tempting St. Anthony in this case appear to be human. Jan Wellens de Cock, Pieter Bruegel, Bernardino Parenzano, and Lucas van Leyden were other examples I could readily find, with the last-named having particulary interesting creatures on offer. But Grünewald's version in the Isenheim altarpiece has them all beat.

As you can see in Grünewald's Temptation panel, the demons are combinations of animal parts and nightmare, and there's a bit of confusion about exactly which parts belong to whom where they are all jumbled together. They are pulling the saint's hair, threatening to beat him with sticks and making terrifying faces (not that they can help that last part).



As you might expect, my attention went straight to the saint's right hand, which something with a bird beak is trying to bite. In that hand you can see he is holding his staff and also a string of beads:



As beads, there is nothing particularly remarkable about them; we can see just five plain round red beads. Being red, they are likely intended to be coral, which was probably not popular with fourth-century hermits but very popular with those who could afford them in 15th-century Alsace.

It's really the expression on Saint Anthony's face that I find the most intriguing thing in this picture. I am no art historian, so I don't have a good feel for how fifteenth-century painters depicted facial expressions; it's entirely possible that this particular expression means something I'm not aware of. But to me, it looks as though Saint Anthony is laughing, or perhaps giggling. I suppose this is as good a reaction as any when one is being tempted, especially when one has no intention whatever of giving in.

Or perhaps the demons have been given Supernatural Tickling Powers. Oh horrors.

Beads in the Isenheim altarpiece

Christmas vacation finally gave me a few days when I was actually home during the day on a week day, and fortunately, they were also days when it was neither too hot nor pouring rain... so I've finally been able to get down to the university library. I'm quite thankful that I live less than a mile from an excellent library on one of the University of California campuses, and they have a "Library Associates" membership that lets you take out ten books for two weeks at a time. I've had an Associates card there almost continuously since I finished graduate school there.

On this visit, while looking for a book that wasn't there on the shelf, I happened upon something else: Gothic and Renaissance Altarpieces by Caterina Limantani Virdis and Mari Pietrogiovanna. This is a true feast for the eyes, especially for us old, tired eyes over 40, since it features nice BIG detail pictures, four or five of them for each piece. (And by BIG I mean full-page photos nearly a foot square).

Needless to say, my eyes go straight to the beads :)

As I've come to expect, about half the paintings have rosary or paternoster beads in them somewhere -- held in someone's hand, lying casually on the step below a throne, or hanging from someone's belt. In many cases they are included in the details of the painting that are enlarged to full-page size, and often they are so meticulously painted that it's quite easy to count the beads, see what color thread they are on, and make a good guess about what material they're supposed to be. The paintings are also full of other fascinating little details -- close-up views of locks and keys, stirrups, book covers, candlesticks, fire screens, and a blue and white painted vase containing flowers. Ordinary books with just one photo of the whole painting simply don't show this kind of thing.

The book goes into detail on thirty selected altarpieces, ranging in date from about 1375 to somewhere in the early 1500s, and in location from the Low Countries to France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Some are single paintings, but several consist of elaborate cabinets that may have one set of paintings on the outside doors, which would be displayed on ordinary days, and then on feast days and special occasions the doors or wings would be opened, revealing more paintings on the inside of the wings and in the center.



The first piece I want to share from this book is a panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece, which was originally painted sometime before 1520 for a church in Alsace. The painting is usually attributed to Matthias Grünewald, who is supposed to have produced a large body of paintings mostly in the Rhineland and Alsace, but it's not at all clear who he was, or indeed whether the work of several painters with similar names has become confused.

As an altarpiece, this is unusual in having not just one set of wings, but two, one inside the other. Opening the outer doors reveals four panels showing first the Annunciation, then an intermediate panel with the Virgin Mary and celebrating angels, a Virgin and Child scene, and the Resurrection of Christ. When the inside wings are opened, two paintings from the life of St. Anthony flank an elaborately carved and gilded wooden sculpture of St. Augustine, St. Anthony enthroned and St. Jerome. Here is the altarpiece opened to show the four panels:



The Virgin and Child scene from a bit closer:



And finally, a detail of the beads:



This is only the second (I think) instance I've found where the Infant Jesus is playing with a string of paternoster beads that are not red coral. As I've mentioned in other posts here, quite a few paintings of the Virgin and Child show the infant playing with this very anachronistic accessory, probably because it gives the painter a chance to emphasize the Holy Child's humanity -- anyone who knows babies knows beads are the sort of thing they love to play with (and chew on). Red coral was often given to babies as a good-luck charm or teething toy, since it was thought to avert the "evil eye."

These beads look as though they might be amber, especially as they seem to be a little irregular in size. They are round, and about the same color as the Virgin Mary's hair or the gold clasp at her neckline. There appear to be about fifteen beads, plus one larger element that might be a much larger bead or some sort of medallion -- we can only see the edge of it, as it's falling down behind the Infant's little round stomach. He is holding two of the beads very delicately between his thumbs and index fingers, and both mother and child are smiling.

Amber may range anywhere from transparent to almost completely opaque, and it has always been a favorite material for rosary beads, despite the fact that it is softer and more easily damaged than the harder types of semiprecious stone. As a luxurious and expensive material, it could also provide an opportunity to show off one's wealth and good taste as well as piety. Amber also has a sweet, resinous scent when warmed, and when rubbed briskly with a cloth will attract little bits of lightweight paper or chaff -- a very mysterious phenomenon in the Renaissance, which we now know is due to static electricity.

Of crosses, bells and pigs

(I promise this is my last post about Twelfth Night this year!)

One of the best gifts anyone gave me this Twelfth Night was a little gold cross. It was the gift of a friend to whom it was personally meaningful, and who thought I would likely appreciate both the cross and the meaning. I do.



This is a type of cross called a Tau cross, shaped like a capital T (Tau in Greek). It's a little over an inch high, and hollow. On the front it has a representation of the Holy Trinity (you can see God on his Throne and Christ on the Cross -- and supposedly a dove at God's right hand, though I can't make it out). On the back is the Virgin and Child. The engraving is done mostly in short, angled strokes, and there are distinctive, cross-hatched triangular "flowers" in the corners.

The more I looked at this cross, the more intrigued I became, because it looked familiar. I was sure I'd seen it before. So I started pulling books off my shelf and looking for pictures. My hunch was that this was one of the handful of named medieval crosses from England: there are several, of which some have descended through families and others have been found in archaeological contexts.

Sure enough, I found a tau cross with a name -- the Winteringham Cross. After considerable hunting, I discovered I did have a photo, in my copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York's Mirror of the Medieval World. Here it is:



Clearly it's a match.

The Winteringham Cross was found by an amateur archaeologist with a metal detector, near Winteringham in north Lincolnshire, and was acquired by the Met in 1990. I was able to find out a good deal more about it from a paper published in 1992 in the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin, accessible in libraries or through academic paper sources like JSTOR (if you have access to that).

The paper, written by the curator of the Cloisters medieval collection, compares this cross with other medieval crosses, such as the Clare cross, the Matlaske and Bridlingham crosses, and another one found in Bath. It's worth looking at as an example of how artifacts like this are studied.

Metal detecting is far from ideal from an archeological point of view, since items found this way are seldom dug up with careful attention to soil layers, associated pottery shards, color changes in nearby soil, and other clues archaeologists are trained to look for. These can often be very helpful in determining an object's date and context. On the other hand, there are no doubt plenty of medieval objects that fell out of someone's pocket in the Middle Ages and don't have much context anyway.

One way to make at least an educated guess at the date of such objects is to look at the artistic style. For paintings, this has been studied by art historians in intensive detail, such that they can often tell just by style who painted something. In this case, there are similar motifs, including the cross-hatched flowers, on two English rings, one associated with Wytelsey, archbishop of Canterbury. These suggest a date for the Winteringham cross of around 1485. (Of course, dating by style assumes you do have a reliable date for at least one object you're comparing a new one with.)

Another helpful clue to an object's meaning is iconography, that is, what people or motifs are shown on it. Since we often have documentary evidence of when and where certain stories or things became common, sometimes this provides clues to possible dates or origins for a displaced object, as well. Here's where the bells and pigs come in.

In this case, while tau crosses are associated with St. Francis of Assisi, the story of Moses, the apostles Philip and Matthew, and Christian stories about the Passover, what drew the author's attention in particular was its association with St. Anthony Abbot. This St. Anthony was a fourth-century Egyptian hermit, one of the "Desert Fathers" of the early church. A Tau-shaped staff was an early symbol of bishops and other authority figures, an earlier symbol in fact than the later curly-headed crozier or shepherd's crook. There are several surviving bishops' staffs with this shape and it's still common in the Eastern church. It is also associated with Egypt, and its crutch-like shape may relate to the fact that St. Anthony is supposed to have lived a very long life.

Saint Anthony is said to have founded a hospital in Egypt, and an order of canons, the Hospitalers of Saint Anthony (different from the more familiar Hospitalers of St. John in Palestine), was established in Paris around the beginning of the 13th century. By mid-century they had hospitals in London and York.

To raise funds for the hospital, they went around town ringing bells to announce their presence, rather like a medieval version of the Salvation Army. They also sold little Tau crosses and bells of bronze or lead, similar to the pilgrim tokens sold by shrines to those who came to visit.

Associations of lay supporters, like the modern "Friends of..." associations, quickly sprang up, and a number of paintings such as this and this show people wearing a collar or chain with a Tau cross with a bell suspended from it. The Winteringham cross also has a hole at the bottom, which may have held an attachment loop, suggesting a bell may have hung from it originally. (But as you can see, that's speculation rather than evidence.)

The pig often shown with St. Anthony may have originally symbolized the evil spirits with which he struggled in the desert. But the Antonine canons in London obtained the privilege of letting their pigs run free in the streets, foraging on whatever food they could find. They were identified as "St. Anthony's pigs" by bells tied around their necks, and it was considered an act of charity to feed them.

Another theory about the pig is that it's associated with St. Anthony because he was the saint invoked against a degenerative disease that resulted in gangrene and the amputation of arms and legs. One theory is that this disease was erysipelas, a bacterial infection of deep skin and fat tissues once thought to be associated with pigs. In fact, it was more likely ergotism, also called St. Anthony's fire. This is now known to result from eating bread made from rye grain infected with the ergot fungus. It causes impaired circulation in hands, feet, arms and legs, and in the Middle Ages its cause was not known, and there was no treatment for it except amputation.

The paper goes on at some length about this association, also suggested by a gold Tau cross found in Bath, which is engraved with a figure of St. Anthony holding a bell and accompanied by a pig. The author suggests that because the Winteringham cross is a Tau cross and hollow, it may have contained either saints' relics or protective herbs against St. Anthony's fire.

That's certainly possible, but nothing about the Winteringham cross supports it specifically. Crosses are often hollow, Tau crosses not necessarily more often than any other type. Nothing about the images shown on the Winteringham cross suggests St. Anthony. He was certainly a popular saint, and perhaps would have been the most common to associate with a Tau cross in the late Middle Ages. But it's important to be clear how much of this reasoning is from actual evidence and how much is speculation.

I wouldn't be so arrogant as to suggest that my interpretation is necessarily any better than that of a museum curator who probably has ten times my education and background in the subject. But my point is that museum curators also engage in guesswork and speculation. Dates, identifications, and meanings are not set in stone just because they are on a museum label. If we're interested in something, we have a responsibility to gather the evidence and think for ourselves.

The cross is something I'm delighted to have. It's an excellent reproduction of a piece with a lot of history behind it, and being the gift of a friend makes it even more valuable. I don't think my friend knew its full history and significance, but a gift that leads me to new discoveries is a gift indeed.