Holy hats

(Not terribly bead-related, this time, but on my recent trip -- you are going to get tired of hearing me say this -- I was fascinated by a lot of other things I saw as well.)

The Schnütgen Museum in Köln (Cologne, Germany) has some fascinating 15th- and 16th-century wooden figures of saints. I took photos of some of these, especially their hats, because I have friends who are interested in the details of German clothing.

Whether these hats correspond to what ordinary women and men actually wore on their heads, I don't know. Saints and other legendary figures in medieval and Renaissance art are notorious for wearing clothing that bears no relationship to reality. That's especially likely for saints like Mary Magdalene and the Three Wise Men, who were "exotic" characters. Even today, you see Bible illustrations that show people in rather vague, robe-like clothing that says more about the fact that they are Biblical characters than it does about what real people wore in the first century AD.

Here are some details from a carved wood altar panel. These rather crowded altarpieces with many figures seem to have been popular in the late 15th and early 16th century. You really have to stand there and look at them for awhile to appreciate them, because they are so full of detail. Here is an old photo from Bildindex of the one that particularly caught my attention:



This is a Passion Altar by Heinrich Douvermann, carved around 1530. Douvermann worked mostly in Kalkar in the Lower Rhine area, where the Saint Nicholas Church still has one of his pieces.

As is fairly common, this shows three scenes from left to right. The scene on the left is the taking down of Christ's body from the cross. In the center we see the lowering of the body into the tomb, and on the right the closed tomb with the guards sitting around it during the night.

In the scene on the left are three men and four women. The woman collapsing in the front is undoubtedly the Virgin Mary: both here and in the next scene she is the only woman wearing a veil over her head. One of the other women must be Mary Magdalene, since she is specifically mentioned as being present. The same four women (as you can tell by their headgear) appear in the center scene as well.

Here is a closeup of the "holy hats" on the lower two women in the left-hand scene. One has what looks like a gable hood in front, with a back decorated with netting. The other has something that looks like a puffed coif of some kind with a flat square on top.



And a closer view:



I didn't get a good photo of the third, upper woman on the left myself, but Bildindex has a photo of her from a different angle and without the cluttered background.

Like some other altarpieces, this one is actually made up of several pieces carved separately, and it's easier to see details when each piece is taken out and photographed separately. This woman is distinguished by the large roses on either side of her hat:



In the second scene, this same woman (wearing the same hat) appears kneeling in front of the tomb as Christ's body is lowered into it:



And in another photo from Bildindex, the woman with the puffed coif in the second scene is identifiable as Mary Magdalene, since she is holding a large covered cup, clearly meant to reperesent her ointment jar. This isn't visible in the assembled scene because her hands are hidden by a figure in front of her.



Also in the Schnütgen Museum were a couple of saint statues of about the same date, two of which I photographed for their especially interesting headgear.

One is Saint Margaret, identified by the dragon at her feet (which you can't see here). This statue originated in Brussels. Here's the rather amazing confection she's wearing on her head:



The other is Saint Elizabeth. This statue is from the Netherlands, and I'm not completely sure which of the several Saints Elizabeth this is: she appears to be pregnant, which suggests she is the mother of John the Baptist, though in that case I can't figure out why she is holding a book -- that's not usually one of this saint's attributes.



Finally, I was amused by this 15th-century statue of Saint Jerome. Note the dangling tassels of his (very anachronistic) cardinal's hat. I have cats, so I was utterly charmed to see Jerome's lion, which in this case is about the size of a large domestic cat. It's reaching up in very catlike fashion to play with the tassels. Saint Jerome seems to be enjoying it too.

The Holy Who?

Here's another "Living Color" picture from my trip to Europe: I'd seen this painting before in black and white, and was quite happy to be able to see it in person and appreciate the color. Here's a black and white detail of the part I was especially interested in:



The title of this painting in German, "Der Heilige Sippe," is actually rather intriguing. It means "the Holy Kinship" and refers to the Virgin Mary's (legendary) extended family. As Sally Fisher explains in The Square Halo (probably my favorite book on iconography), church fathers in the Middle Ages tried to reconcile the mention in the Gospels of Jesus's "brothers" with their idea that Mary remained a virgin all her life. Their solution was to imagine that Mary's mother Anna had been married three times, each time having a daughter named Mary. The children of those other Marys -- whom we would probably call cousins -- are the "brothers."

The "Holy Kinship" is therefore composed of Anna, her three husbands, Mary and Joseph and the Infant Jesus, together with Mary's two half-sisters and their husbands and children. Quite a crowd. Here's the whole scene, which I was able to see "backstage" at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum (to whom, thanks again!).



(I was thankful to see, by the way, that other photos of this same painting have the same problem this one does: the white veils and white faces tend to "wash out" because the features are very delicately shaded. It's not just my camera this time.)

In this particular painting, the four women toward the top with haloes are the Virgin and Anna (in the center), with the "other" Marys to either side, each with her husband behind her. The Mary on the far left is the mother of the apostles John the Evangelist (with goblet) and James the Greater (with pilgrim's staff). The one on the far right (thanks to Internet sources) I can identify as the mother of the apostles James the Less, Simon and Jude (though I'm not sure which is which here) along with another son, Joseph "the Just."

The tribe is further enlarged here by two more holy families: toward the bottom of the painting on the left is Mary's cousin Saint Elizabeth, her husband Zacharias, and son John the Baptist (pointing to a sacrifical lamb). The child on the right is Saint Servatius, grandson of Elizabeth's brother and identifiable by his key and bishop's staff (with which he is poking a pesky dragon).

In the back row, other than the two uncles on either end, are four men: on the right, Anna's three husbands, with Joachim directly above his grandson Jesus. To the left of Mary is Saint Joseph, and (to arrive at the whole point of this exercise) he is holding a rosary in his right hand.



Joseph is another of those saints who is often shown with a rosary -- to the extent that when I see Saint Joseph now, I automatically look for it. It's not always there, but quite often.

This time it's a rather ordinary rosary, really: a sort of generic series of plain brown beads, probably representing wood. I've seen others like it, and thanks to the extreme closeup view I was able to get this time, I can see pretty clearly just how the artist painted it. It's rather schematic and without a lot of detail: just a few shading strokes and a highlight on each bead, and a very light shadow painted on the wall behind (which is a nice touch). I don't think the numbers of beads are supposed to be precise here: what we see is a group of 10 small beads and a group that looks like 14, unless seven beads are hiding in Joseph's hand (where there's not really room for them).

LOLsaints

Consider this a bonus post for this week, especially since it's rather off topic :)

August is traditionally "silly season" in the newspaper biz -- when a dearth of the usual news means journalists are scrambling for stories, and things that wouldn't ordinarily get noticed make headlines.

I've been amusing myself recently creating "LOLsaints" -- analagous to LOLcats. Actually, I would have thought that LOLsaints were an obvious development. I'm amazed no one else seems to be doing them yet.

I have more ideas than this, but here's a start. Anyone should feel free to copy and use these icons (though obviously, not to commercialize them).









EDIT: Oops, forgot one:


Both large (300x300 pixels) and small versions of all of these are available on my Flickr page.

Protestants III: Addressing saints

protestants and the rosary, part 3

As I've mentioned, Protestants have problems with the idea of praying the rosary, and the "explanations" offered by Catholics often don't answer their questions.

The biggest problem is the status of the Virgin Mary, and I hope I've explained here why she is not regarded as a "goddess" by Catholics (as Protestants sometimes believe). The next problem I think Protestants have with the rosary is the one pointed out in the Thirty-Nine Articles that defined the separation between the English and Roman churches that began with Henry VIII. Article 22 describes the invocation of saints as "a fond thing vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God." Is it really legitimate to address "prayers" to dead human beings (saints) and to ask them for favor?



(I decided these posts would be much nicer with photos, even if they're not strictly relevant photos. The three here are details of a painting commissioned from Herlin Friedrich by the Gundelfinger family southern Germany in about 1490. The family is shown kneeling at the foot of a Crucifixion scene, hence the bloody feet in the center. The skull and bone at the foot of the Cross represent Adam.)

"Invocation" really means "calling on," so this is really two questions: (1) Can saints in heaven hear requests addressed to them by living people? and (2) Is it legitimate for living people to ask saints for help? By and large, I think Protestants are taught that the answer to (1) is "No," rendering (2) rather pointless. Catholics, on the other hand, would answer "Yes" to both.

Question (1) is really about the different ways Catholics and Protestants see the doctrine called "the communion of saints" (as creeds usually call it). Both will tell you they believe in the communion of saints, but they mean different things by this statement. For Protestants, it means that living believers and dead believers together make up a single (though rather theoretical) body of believers -- but that the two are separated by the boundary of death. We may know that the dead live on in Heaven, but we have no contact with them, although God (of course) has contact with both. Only at the end of time will we all be truly united.



(By the way, he peculiar mark on the little shield by Papa Gundelfinger's knees is the family's "merchant's mark" or logo, telling you who they are.)

Catholics, on the other hand, tend to take the "communion" as a literal, present-day reality: although we don't generally see or hear dead saints, God has made the boundary between death and life porous, at least one way (from us to them) and occasionally both ways (living people having visions -- which Protestants profoundly distrust). This means we can address our thoughts to the saints and reasonably have faith that God will grant them the ability to hear us.

I personally don't think there is clear support for either view in the Bible, although I don't doubt that my evangelical friends can find some that satisfies their view. Both sides seem to believe what they believe simply because that's what they have always been taught.

In part, this reflects the inclination of Catholics to accept "tradition" as a source of truth along with the Bible. In the Catholic view, traditions of belief passed from person to person in the early Church contributed to and shaped what we now know as the Bible, so that if both are transmitted accurately, and correctly understood, they will not contradict each other. But one of the basic tenets of the Protestant Reformation is that tradition has been demonstrably wrong in the past, and is too easily twisted to support illegitimate authority, so only the Bible is reliable.



I will readily grant, as a statement of fact, the part of Article 22 that says the invocation of saints is "grounded upon no warranty of Scripture," whether this is taken to mean that it doesn't originate in the Bible (true) or that it's not explicitly supported by the Bible (also true, I think). But I would point out that "a fond thing vainly invented" -- which in modern terms more or less means "a fantasy made up out of someone's head" -- and "repugnant to the Word of God" are both statements of opinion, and I think a thoughtful person may agree or disagree with those.

If you believe saints can hear us, it is a relatively short step to believing it's legitimate to ask them for favor -- at least for the favor of praying for us. Many Christians believe that praying for others is a Good Thing, even if we don't fully understand why such a thing would matter to an omniscient and omnipotent God. We ask people we love and admire on earth to pray for us; if we can make ourselves heard to the people we love and admire in Heaven, by asking them to pray for us we are not asking them for anything different or requiring "godlike" powers.

posts in this series:

Part I: Protestants and the Rosary
Part II: Worship, honor, and the Virgin Mary
Part III: Addressing saints
Part IV: Can Protestants hail Mary?