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~ An exploration of saints, their relics, and their iconography in art

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Category Archives: Art History

Relic of the Holy Diaper: The Swaddling Clothes of Jesus

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Reliquarian in Textile

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Aachen, Croatia, Dubrovnik, Germany, Magi, Marienschrein, relic, reliquary, Saint Joseph, Saint Mary, swaddling clothes

Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, oil on panel (1477), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, oil on panel (1477), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The Swaddling Clothes

One of the more remarkable relics on display in the Reliquary Treasury of Dubrovnik Cathedral is the “diaper” of Jesus.  The relic is displayed in a bulky silver reliquary, profusely ornamented with winged figures, clunky arabesques, and other decorative accents.[1] While most translations into English describe the relic as a “diaper” or “diapers,” it could more accurately be described as the “swaddling cloth” or “swaddling clothes” of Jesus.[2]

Veneration of Jesus’ swaddling clothes is more frequently associated with Aachen, Germany, where a more famous set of swaddling garments has been kept since the 13th century.  Housed in the golden Shrine of Saint Mary (Marienshrein) at Aachen Cathedral, the swaddling clothes (Windel Jesu) were rarely put on public display prior to the 14th century.[3]  Since then, the relic has been exhibited in Aachen approximately every seven years.[4]  In comparison, the swaddling clothes kept at Dubrovnik Cathedral are regularly displayed in the cathedral’s astonishing treasury of saintly relics.

Marienschrein

Marienschrein (Shrine of Saint Mary), gold (1230-1239), Aachen Cathedral, Aachen, Germany

Christmas Stockings

In a paper on Jesus’ swaddling clothes, Sophie Oosterwijk explains that since antiquity, “medical tradition held that the newborn child might develop deformed limbs if left unswaddled; therefore, swaddling clothes were considered absolutely essential not just for ordinary infants but also for the Christ child.”[5] Consequently, until about the 14th century, depictions of the Nativity commonly showed the infant Jesus tightly swaddled, his face serene in a cloth cocoon.[6]

Some paintings of this period, however, show the infant Jesus unswaddled, presumably mere moments after his birth.  According to one tradition, Jesus’ struggling parents were forced to reuse Joseph’s hose, the only extra cloth they had at hand, as makeshift swaddling clothes.[7]  Paintings inspired by this story frequently portray Joseph removing his shoes and stockings or ripping his hose into strips as Mary waits nearby.  “Mary, take my hose and wind your dear baby in them,” Joseph tells Mary in an early 15th century Nativity painting from a church in Lezignan.[8]  In another, Joseph seated on the ground with one bare foot extended, carefully cuts his hose into strips with a knife while a recumbent Mary watches from a mattress.[9]  Rogier van der Weyden’s famous Columba Altarpiece has also been tied to this tradition, though Joseph’s stockings are portrayed more subtly:  two squares of cloth laid in Jesus’ manger have been interpreted as Joseph’s repurposed hose.[10]

Joseph Malouel?, Nativity, oil on tempera (c. 1400), Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Belgium (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Joseph Malouel?, Nativity, oil on tempera (c. 1400), Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Belgium (courtesy Wikimedia Commons). Here, Joseph can be seen cutting one of his stockings with a knife as Mary watches and the infant Jesus waits in a manger.

As Oosterwijk observes, the tradition of Joseph and his hose “illustrates the medieval need to explain the details of the Virgin’s reported confinement far away from the comfort of a regular nursery . . . , thus emphasizing Christ’s humility.  Instead, it is Joseph in his role of the family provider, rather than that of a natural father, who finds the solution for the lack of swaddling clothes by donating his own hose to cover the newborn Christ with in the cold winter night.”[11]

Adoration of the Magi (panel detail), Columba Altarpiece, oil on oak (c. 1455), Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany.

Adoration of the Magi (panel detail), Columba Altarpiece, oil on oak (c. 1455), Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany.  The two squares of cloth padding the manger at left have been interpreted as Joseph’s hose.

God and Man

A curious book titled Excrement in the Late Middle Ages further explores the history and deeper theological meaning of Jesus’ swaddling clothes.  As the author, Susan Signe Morrison, notes, while stories about the baby Jesus’s swaddling clothes may seem “obscene or blasphemous,” they were, in fact, “produced within the confines of the sacred.”[12]  Miracles associated with Jesus’ swaddling clothes were described in the First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ — a work condemned as heretical in the fifth century — and in stories describing the return of the Wise Men to their home countries.

Returning to the Christmas story as told in Luke 2:12, Morrison explains that Jesus’s swaddling clothes were provided “not just to keep him warm or to bind him in an imitation of the closeness of the womb.”[13]  Rather, “[t]he clothes clearly perform a key function:  to collect the filth the human baby ejects.”[14]  Morrison further explains that the “enfleshing of Christ is both most sacred (he became man to save us) and most profane (he took on the flesh that emits filth for us).”  Morrison concludes, “To be human is to eat; to be fully human, God must digest just as a human does.  As Tertullian argued, by taking on the filthy human body, Christ signals his profound humility and compassion.  God has divested himself of his omnipotence; what more overt way to do this than to become a helpless, wriggling, filthy infant, utterly dependent upon others for nourishment, shelter, and personal hygiene?”[15]

Madonna and Child

Bernardino Luini, The Madonna of the Carnation, oil on panel (c. 1515), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC


[1]  See, e.g., Ante Dračevac, La Cathedrale de Dubrovnik 50 (Françoise Kveder trans., 1988). Dating to the 16th century, the reliquary is the work of local Dubrovnik metalsmiths.  Id.

[2]  For example, an older guide to the cathedral, translated into French and no longer in print, describes the relic as “des langes de Jésus.”  Id.

[3]  Joan Carroll Cruz, Relics 23 (1984).

[4]  Id.

[5]  Sophie Oosterwijk, The Swaddling-Clothes of Christ:  A Medieval Relic on Display, 13 Medieval Life 25-30 (2000).

[6]  See id. at 25.

[7]  Incidentally, Saint Joseph’s hose is also purportedly stored in the Marienshrein, along with Jesus’ swaddling clothes, the robe of Saint Mary, and the beheading cloth of Saint John the Baptist.  Photographs of all four relics, which comprise the four great relics of the Marienschrein, can be found here.

[8]  Gail McMurray Gibson, “St. Margery:  The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Equally in God’s Image:  Women in the Middle Ages 152 (Julia Bolton Holloway et al., eds., 1990).

[9]  The painting is the Nativity panel of a polyptych by an unknown artist, possibly Jean Malouel, painted c. 1400.

[10]  See, e.g., Oosterwijk, supra note 5, at 28.

[11]  Id.

[12]  Susan Signe Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics 92 (2009).

[13]  Id. at 93.

[14]  Id.

[15]  Id. (internal citations omitted).

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The Head-Carriers: Headless Saints from Saint Denis to Saint Nicasius

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Reliquarian in Art History

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Béziers, cephalophore, Fourteen Holy Helpers, France, martyr, Montmartre, Paris, Rheims, Rouen, Sacré-Coeur, Saint Aphrodisius, Saint Cuthbert, Saint Denis, Saint Dionysius, Saint Firmin, Saint Nicasius, Saint Oswald, Saint Paul, Saint Valerie

Saint Denis - Notre Dame Cathedral

Saint Denis, Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France.  Photo by Reliquarian.

Saints Without Heads

As we’ve noted before, saints portrayed in Christian art often carry objects that help identify them in art.  While some saints carry relatively benign, pedestrian objects — Saint Anthony often carries a white lily, Saint Notburga an ear of corn — others tote more lethal implements including an assortment of knives, swords, arrows, and wooden stakes.  Martyrs in particular are frequently shown with deadly devices, generally the instruments of their martyrdom.  A curious subset of martyrs, however, are commonly shown carrying their own heads.  Known as cephalophores, literally “head-carriers” in Greek, these headless saints all suffered martyrdom by decapitation.  Although depicting cephalophores may at first seem straightforward, artists have struggled for centuries with an unusual problem presented by their portrayal:  Where does one place the halo on a headless saint?

Things Come to a Head:  Secular Examples of Animate, Headless Corpses

Headless Horseman

John Quidor, The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, oil on canvas (1858), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.  Photo by Reliquarian.

Stories of headless men and their improbable feats are not confined to the Roman Martyrology.  Secular examples include Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the 14th-century Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which features a remarkable contest known as a “beheading game.”  In the story of Gawain, a giant stranger known as the Green Knight appears before King Arthur’s court on New Year’s Day.  The Green Knight challenges the members of the court to strike him with his ax on the condition that he will return the blow in one year and a day.  Gawain accepts the challenge, and the Green Knight prepares to receive Gawain’s strike by brushing aside his long locks and laying bare his neck.  Gawain then grips the ax, raises it into the air, and lets it fall.

The author of the legend tells us, “The sharp edge of the blade sundered the bones, smote through the neck, and clave it in two, so that the edge of the steel bit on the ground, and the fair head fell to the earth . . . .”[1]  The Green Knight, however, “neither faltered nor fell,” but instead, with his hand out-stretched, caught the head, lifted it up, and mounted his steed “as if naught ailed him, and he were not headless.”[2]  Then the “grim corpse,” bleeding freely, held up the severed head and turned its face toward the gathered knights.  Its eyelids lifted open, and the head spoke, warning Sir Gawain to keep his promise.[3]

Head Cases:  Headless Saints and Their Post-Mortem Wanderings

Like the Green Knight and the Headless Horseman, whose severed head rested on the horseman’s saddle before he hurled it, dodgeball-like, at the hapless Ichabod Crane, the bodies of cephalophores remained animated even after the detachment of their heads.  They even performed with a remarkable degree of agency, often selecting the sites of their own burials.

Saint Denis, Patron Saint of Paris

St Denis - Sacre Coeur

Saint Denis, Basilique Sacré-Coeur, Paris, France. The Basilique Sacré-Coeur (Basilica of the Sacred Heart), located in Montmartre, is traditionally associated with Saint Denis’s beheading.  Photo by Reliquarian.

In The Golden Legend’s account of the death of Saint Denis, the saint collected his severed head and walked an appreciable distance with it after his beheading.  According to the story, after Saint Denis, also known as Saint Dionysius, had been beheaded by a sword, his body “[i]nstantly . . . stood up, took his head in its arms, and, with an angel and a heavenly light leading the way, marched two miles, from the place called Montmartre, the hill of martyrs, to the place where, by his own choice and by God’s providence, he rests in peace.”[4]  The abbey church of Saint-Denis was later erected on the spot where Saint Denis was buried.[5]  One of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, Saint Denis is often invoked for relief from headaches.

Saint Aphrodisius of Béziers

Another cephalophore, Saint Aphrodisius (or Saint Aphrodise) of Béziers, similarly retrieved and traveled with his severed head before settling on a final resting place.  Saint Aphrodisius, the first Bishop of Béziers, was decapitated on the site of the Roman circus at Béziers, and his head was unceremoniously tossed into a well.  Miraculously, the saint’s head was ejected from the well and rolled back to saint’s body.  The headless corpse then picked up the head and walked with it through the city to the site of the hermit cave where the saint had lived during his lifetime.[6]  The Basilica of Saint Aphrodisius of Béziers (Basilique Saint-Aphrodise de Béziers) was later erected on the spot where Saint Aphrodisius was buried.

Saint Nicasius of Rheims

Saint Nicasius - Munich

Joos van Cleve, Saints George and Nicasius with donors (detail of Saint Nicasius), oil on panel (c. 1515), Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Here, Saint Nicasius is depicted with just the top of his head missing.  Photo by Reliquarian.

Saint Nicasius of Rheims, is commonly portrayed with either his entire head or just a portion of head missing.  According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Saint Nicasius was a 5th-century Bishop of Rheims who was killed by a marauding army of Gauls.  Standing in the doorway of his church, Saint Nicasius was massacred with his deacon, Saint Florentius, and his lector, Saint Jucundus, by his side.  The Gauls apparently cut his head off, although, as noted, he is often shown missing just the top of his head.

Other Cephalophores

Other cephalophores frequently represented with their severed heads include Saint Just, Saint Ginés de la Jara, Saint Firmin, Saint Minias, the siblings Saints Felix and Regula, Saint Exuperantius, Saint Valerie, Saints Maxien, Lucien, and Julian, Saint Chéron, and Saint Osyth.  Although Saint Paul of Tarsus was martyred by beheading, he is more frequently depicted with a book of letters, signifying the letters he wrote to the earliest Christian communities, or a sword, the instrument of his martyrdom.  The Golden Legend notes that at his execution, “[a]s soon as his head bounded from his body, it intoned, in Hebrew and in a clear voice, ‘Jesus Christ.’”[7]  Meanwhile, although not a cephalophore, Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne can easily be mistaken for one.  Saint Cuthbert commonly carries a severed head, although it is not his own.  It belongs to Saint Oswald, whose head was buried with Saint Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral.

Saint Firmin

Saint Firmin Holding His Head, limestone and paint (c. 1225-75), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  Photo by Reliquarian.

The Secret to Getting A Head

In his essay in Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Scott Montgomery argues that stories describing the “post-mortem ambulation” of cephalophoric saints may have served a pragmatic purpose in certain communities.  He observes, “Cephalophores do not merely respond to their decapitation, but more actively direct the location of their resting place and subsequent veneration, establishing the locus sanctus of their cult.  Not surprisingly, it seems that the trope is commonly inserted into the saint’s tale by those claiming to possess [the saint’s] relics.”[8]  Montgomery observes that texts and images of cephalophory were frequently produced where the relics were kept, suggesting that such tales were effective at “establishing relic claims at the very location where the tale was inserted into the saint’s vita.”[9]

Double Halo!

Whatever the origin of the trope, artists entrusted to render the personalities of cephalophoric saints faced an uncommon challenge.  Saints in art were generally depicted with a halo or nimbus behind their heads, indicating their great dignity and sanctity.[10]  While many artists continued to follow this convention for cephalophores, the unusual placement of a cephalophore’s head, which artists often deposited in the headless saint’s hands, could visually diminish the effect of the golden, glowing halo.  Consequently, artists sometimes sought other ways to communicate the sanctity of cephalophores.

Saint Nicasius - Rouen Cathedral

Saint Nicasius, Rouen Cathedral, Rouen, France. Saint Nicasius is holding his bishop’s mitre and is missing the top of his head.  Photo by Reliquarian.

One approach involved placing the cephalophore’s halo around the saint’s neck, where the head had been.  Saint Denis is depicted this way on the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, as is Saint Nicasius above the north portal of Rheims Cathedral.  Another approach involved rendering a cephalophore with two halos:  one above the saint’s decollated head and one around the saint’s neck, which was sometimes shown spurting blood.  Saint Denis is depicted this way in a manuscript illuminated by the Master of Sir John Fastolf and on the coat of arms of the city of Krefeld, Germany.

Léon Bonnat’s famous Le martyre de Saint-Denis at the Pantheon in Paris depicts a variation of the double halo concept.  In Bonnat’s painting, the headless bodies of Saint Denis’s companions, Saints Eleutherius and Rusticus, are strewn to Saint Denis’s left and right while a bloody ax rests on steps in the foreground.  To the upper right of the painting, an angel swoops from the sky bearing a palm frond and crown of martyrdom.  Meanwhile, at the center of the painting, Saint Denis’s headless body is shown scooping up its head like a fumbled football.  The disembodied head is surrounded by a distinct halo, but the space above Saint Denis’s neck, where his head would have been, is also aglow.  Not quite a halo, nimbus, aureole, or other traditional marker of saintliness, the glow appears as a riot of sparks reminiscent of a holiday sparkler.

Saint Nicasius

The Martrydrom of Saint Nicasius, stained glass (early 13th century), Basilique Cathédrale Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais de Soissons, Soisson, France. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Heady Times:  Cephalophores Unbound

Cephalophory is, perhaps, one of the most dramatic examples of a saint’s triumph over death.  As Montgomery explains, “much of the potency of the trope is fed by the phenomenon . . . that the martyr is only dispatched by beheading after enduring a series of horrific tortures.”[11]  Saint Denis, for example, was stretched on an iron grill over a blazing fire; thrown to hungry, wild beasts; stuffed into an oven; and nailed to a cross before he was finally beheaded.  Decapitation, then, was frequently resorted to as a means of “martyr-dispatching” because it was so effective and so definitive.[12]  Accordingly, “the act of post-decapatory ambulation (and occasionally locution) is underscored as all-the-more miraculous.  Cephalophores dramatically enact their imitatio Christi and imitatio sancti in ‘surviving’ bodily death, essentially following the model of St. Paul in professing faith after decollation.”[13]


[1]  1 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:  A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose 15-16 (Jessie Laidlay Weston trans., 1900).

[2]  Id. at 16.

[3]  Id.

[4]  Jacobus de Voragine, 2 The Golden Legend:  Readings on the Saints 240 (William Granger Ryan trans., 1993).

[5]  4 Butler’s Lives of the Saints 67-68 (Herbert J. Thurston, S.J. & Donald Attwater eds., 2d ed. 1956).  Butler’s Lives of the Saints explains that the cultus of Saint Dionysius or Saint Denis was very strong in the Middle Ages and that by the 6th century he was already recognized as “the saint of Paris par excellence.”  Id. at 68.

[6]  See, e.g., Scott B. Montgomery, Securing the Sacred Head:  Cephalophory and Relic Claims, in Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 92-93 (Catrien Santing et. al, eds., 2013).

[7]  Jacobus de Voragine, 1 The Golden Legend:  Readings on the Saints 353-54 (William Granger Ryan trans., 1993).

[8]  Montgomery, supra note 6, at 85.

[9]  Id. at 85-86.

[10]  George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art 149 (1954).

[11]  Montgomery, supra note 6, at 86.

[12]  Id.

[13]  Id.

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The Marienschrein at Aachen Cathedral: Reliquary of the Cloak of the Virgin Mary

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by Reliquarian in Art History, Metal Reliquary

≈ 1 Comment

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Aachen, Chartres, cloak, Germany, Marienschrein, Nuremberg, relic, reliquary, Saint Mary, stained-glass window, textile, Virgin Mary

The Alba Madonna, Rafael, oil on panel transferred to canvas (1510), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Alba Madonna, Rafael, oil on panel transferred to canvas (1510), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Virgin in a Blue Dress

In his superb book on Christian symbolism, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art, George Ferguson writes, “No other figure, except that of Christ Himself, was so often portrayed in Renaissance art as the Virgin Mary.”[1]  Ferguson further notes that Saint Mary was traditionally painted wearing blue, the color of truth and a symbol of the sky, heaven, and heavenly love.[2]  But did the historical Saint Mary actually wear blue?  Evidence preserved in various shrines suggests the Virgin’s blue wardrobe may have been an invention of Medieval and Renaissance artists.  These artists expressed their devotion to the Virgin by using a very scarce and very expensive pigment to paint her garments.  The pigment, known as ultramarine, was a deep, celestial blue.

Madonna and Child with Saint Jerome and Saint John the Baptist, Cima da Conegliano, oil on panel (1492-1495), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Madonna and Child with Saint Jerome and Saint John the Baptist, Cima da Conegliano, oil on panel (1492-1495), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Marienschrein and the Four Great Relics of Aachen

The Marienschrein, or Shrine of Saint Mary, at Aachen Cathedral in Aachen (Aix-La-Chapelle), Germany houses four great relics:  the cloak of Saint Mary, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the beheading cloth of Saint John the Baptist, and the loincloth worn by Jesus at his crucifixion.  The relics were rarely displayed publicly before the 14th century; however, since about the mid-14th century, the relics have been removed from the shrine approximately every seven years for public veneration.[3]

Marienschrein (Shrine of Saint Mary), gold (1230-1239), Aachen Cathedral, Aachen, Germany

Marienschrein (Shrine of Saint Mary), gold (1230-1239), Aachen Cathedral, Aachen, Germany

I am unsure exactly what color the relic of Saint Mary’s cloak is, or appears to be, today.  Judging by a picture of the garment taken when it was last displayed in 2007, the cloak appears to be flaxen in color, or yellowish gray, with possible hints of light blue along its hem.  It is certainly not the deep blue favored by Renaissance artists, though perhaps it has faded significantly over time.  Or perhaps it was never blue to begin with.  [NOTE:  See update below for additional information.]

One other clue to what color Saint Mary may have worn during her lifetime is preserved 300 miles southwest of Aachen, at Chartres Cathedral in Chartres, France.  One of the cathedral’s most famous stained-glass windows, a 12th-century window known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière (Our Lady of the Beautiful Glass), depicts the Virgin and Child in a sedes sapientiae (seat of wisdom) arrangement with the Christ Child seated on the lap of the Holy Mother.  Victoria Finlay, in her engaging study of color and pigments, Color:  A Natural History of the Palette, suggests the window shows the Virgin Mary in a blue veil.[4]  “The veil,” she writes, “is a pale color, light enough to allow the sun to flood through and depict the young woman’s purity.”[5]  However, “it is unmistakably light blue, and worn over a blue tunic.”[6]  She further notes that the glass-makers who created the window in 1150 “would have had the ‘real’ veil to model their design on, which is curious, because when you see the precious relic in its gold nineteenth-century box . . . it is not blue at all.  More of an off-white:  the faded clothing of the melancholy mother of a martyr.”[7]

The Madonna of the Stars, Jacopo Tintoretto, oil on canvas (second half of the 16th century), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Madonna of the Stars, Jacopo Tintoretto, oil on canvas (second half of the 16th century), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

A Blue More Precious Than Gold

If the Virgin Mary did not wear blue, why did artists regularly paint her in blue garments?  Victoria Finlay offers several insights.  First, she explains that Saint Mary did not always wear blue in artistic representations.  In Russian icons, for example, the Virgin Mary more commonly wore red, and in Byzantine art, she often wore purple.[8]  On other occasions, she was portrayed in white to represent her innocence, or black to express her grief.[9]  Finlay also observes that artists commonly dressed her in a manner to honor her, and their choice of color was frequently decided by cost and rarity.[10]  She writes, “In fifteenth-century Holland, Mary often wore scarlet because that was the most expensive cloth; the earlier Byzantine choice of purple was similarly because this was a valuable dye, and only a few people were important enough to carry it off.  So when, in around the thirteenth century, ultramarine arrived in Italy as the most expensive color on the market, it was logical to use it to dress the most precious symbol of the faith.”[11]

Ultramarine pigment, Albrecht-Dürer-Haus, Nuremberg, Germany

Example of ultramarine pigment, Albrecht-Dürer-Haus, Nuremberg, Germany.

The deep, rich ultramarine prized by the artists of the Renaissance derived from lapis lazuli, an intensely blue, semi-precious stone found in only a few places on Earth.  For artists such as Michelangelo, Titian, and Dürer, the only source of ultramarine was Afghanistan, a “mythical land so far away that no European . . . had actually been there.”[12]  Finlay notes that ultramarine was once “the most valuable paint material in the world,” and artists such as Michelangelo would have had to wait for their patrons to procure it for them because they could not afford it on their own.[13]  Given its tremendous cost and unquestionable rarity, then, it is not surprising that so many artists chose to clothe the Virgin Mary in ultramarine.  Fortuitously, ultramarine also happens to be a serene and majestic color, one truly appropriate for the Queen of Heaven.

***

[UPDATE, 27 JUNE 2014.] The following description is from the Aachen Pilgrimage 2014 (Heiligtumsfahrt 2014) website: “St. Mary’s robe is an ancient work of domestic embroidery. . . .  It is made of naturally coloured linen and is embroidered with vertical and horizontal lines in a grid pattern.  In Israel flax and cotton were only to be found on the coast and in the lowlands of Jordan . . . .”  The website further notes that the dress is 153 cm long; the seam circumference is 246 cm; and the span of the sleeves is 132 cm.  The Aachen Pilgrimage 2014 homepage can be found here.  More information about the cloak of Saint Mary can be found here.  A picture of the robe can be viewed here.

***

Madonna and Child, Vittore Carapaccio, oil on panel (1505-1510), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Madonna and Child, Vittore Carapaccio, oil on panel (1505-1510), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Madonna and Child, Jan Gossaert, oil on panel (c. 1532), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Madonna and Child, Jan Gossaert, oil on panel (c. 1532), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Virgin and Child, sandstone with traces of polychrome (c. 1325-1350).

Virgin and Child, sandstone with traces of polychrome (c. 1325-1350), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Madonna and Child, stained-glass window, Strasbourg Cathedral, Strasbourg, France.

Madonna and Child, stained-glass window, Strasbourg Cathedral, Strasbourg, France.

Aachen Cathedral with High Altar and Pala d'Oro in foreground and Marienschrein (Shrine of Saint Mary) behind.

Aachen Cathedral with High Altar and Pala d’Oro in foreground and Marienschrein (Shrine of Saint Mary) behind.  Hanging from the vault above the choir is a wooden medallion of the Madonna and Child carved by Jan van Steffesweert of Maastricht in 1524.


[1] George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art 71 (1954).

[2] Id. at 151.

[3] John Carroll Cruz, Relics 23 (1984).

[4] Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette 317 (2002).

[5] Id.

[6] Id.

[7] Id.

[8] Id. at 292-93.

[9] Id. at 293.

[10] Id.

[11] Id.

[12] Id. at 282.

[13] Id. at 287.

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