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Saint Thomas Becket: Murder at Canterbury Cathedral

12 Thursday Jul 2018

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IMG_0371 copy

Chasse with the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket (detail), gilded copper with champlevé enamel (c. 1190).  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In the introduction to his acclaimed play Becket, Jean Anouilh describes how he became inspired to write about his most famous protagonist, Saint Thomas Becket.  Unlike the zealous pilgrims of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or the ardent knights of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Anouilh did not purposely set out in search of Becket.  Rather, he discovered Becket by happenstance—in the pages of a winsome old history book about the Norman Conquest. 

“I am not a serious man,” he freely admits.  “I wrote Becket by chance.”[1]  In his introduction, Anouilh recounts how he purchased Augustin Thierry’s The Conquest of England by the Normans from one of the many book sellers that line the Seine.[2]  “I did not expect to read this respectable work, which I assumed would be boring,” he explains.  “I bought it because it had a pretty green binding and I needed a spot of green on my shelves.”[3]

Anouilh returned home and was gently browsing its pages—he insists he is “well-mannered with old books”—when he happened on the story of Saint Thomas Becket.[4]  The story “might have [been] taken to be fiction,” he writes, “except that the bottom of the pages were jammed with references in Latin from the chronicles of the twelfth century.”[5]  Anouilh was “dazzled.”[6]  “I had expected to find a saint—I am always a trifle distrustful of saints, as I am of great theatre stars—and I found a man.”[7]

The Life of Thomas

According to the Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Thomas Becket was born in London on 21 December 1118, the Feast Day of Saint Thomas the Apostle.[8]  At the age of 21, Becket lost both his mother and father in short succession, and after working for several employers, Becket obtained a post in the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury.[9]  Theobald trusted and respected Becket, and in 1154, Theobald nominated Becket to become Archdeacon of Canterbury.[10]  A year later, King Henry II appointed Becket Chancellor of England.[11]

Saint Thomas Becket

Detail of Saint Thomas Becket, stained glass window, Canterbury Cathedral. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas and Henry II developed more than just a close professional relationship during Thomas’s Chancellorship.  As Butler explains, “their friendship was not confined to a common interest in affairs of state, and their personal relations at times of relaxation have been aptly described as ‘frolicsome.’”[12]  When Theobald died in 1161, Henry II told Thomas he intended to appoint him the new Archbishop of Canterbury.[13]  Becket was reluctant.  “Should God permit me to be archbishop of Canterbury,” he told the king, “I should soon lose your Majesty’s favour, and the affection with which you honour me would be changed into hatred.  For several things you do in prejudice of the rights of the Church make me fear you would require of me what I could not agree to . . . .”[14] 

The king remained undeterred, and on 23 May 1162, Becket’s election was confirmed.[15]  Many of Staunton’s biographers suggest that Becket underwent a genuine conversation following his elevation to Archbishop.[16]  Suddenly Becket, who had grown accustomed to wealth and luxury as Chancellor—his household apparently rivaled that of the king—exchanged the finery of his previous life for a simple black cassock, linen surplice, and sacerdotal stole, under which he wore a hair-shirt.[17]  More significantly, he wholly immersed himself in the life of an ascetic.  He regularly celebrated Mass at 9 o’clock in the morning, and at 10 o’clock distributed alms—which he had doubled—to the poor.  He cherished the “monastic regularity” of his new office, and he personally examined and selected candidates for holy orders.[18]

Thomas’s commitment to the Church would eventually bring him into open conflict with the king.  After a series clashes that pitted the king’s secular power against Thomas’s authority as Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry II’s anger finally boiled over when he learned that Thomas had excommunicated three bishops who had participated in his son’s coronation.[19]  “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry raged.  Four knights interpreted the king’s appeal as a call to action, and they hastened to Canterbury in search of Thomas. 

Death Comes for the Archbishop

In the years immediately following Saint Thomas Becket’s death, a number of Vitae detailing Becket’s life and death were written.  Though the exact number of works is unknown, the volume of biographical accounts produced was unusually high.  In his insightful book Thomas Becket and His Biographers, Michael Staunton suggests Becket’s popularity was due in large part to his compelling life story.  Staunton writes, “That so many people chose to write about him in the years immediately after his murder is due not only to the explosion of popular veneration in the early 1170s but to the fact that his life and death provided such rich biographical material.”[20]  Thomas Becket and His Biographers examines ten such works, nine of which were written within seven years of Becket’s death. [21]

Five of Staunton’s chosen biographers actually witnessed Becket’s assassination, and their accounts are vivid.[22]  Staunton reminds us that while our familiarity with Becket’s story has “dimmed the shock of the event,” for Becket’s contemporaries, the event would have been far more visceral and alarming.[23]  After all, Becket was “the leader of the English Church at the height of his fame, murdered in his own cathedral by agents of the king in a place and time where such martyrs must have seemed an exotic reminder of a distant past.”[24]

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Reliquary Casket with Scenes from the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket, gilded silver with niello and glass (1173-80).  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The biographer known as Anonymous I provides one of the most concise accounts of Becket’s final moments.  After discovering Thomas in the cathedral at Canterbury, Henry’s knights confronted him.  Becket, sensing his impending death, “joined his hands and opened his eyes” before addressing his prospective executioner, the knight Reginald FitzUrse.[25]  “I commend myself to God and St Denis and St Aelfeah,” he told the knight.  At this, Reginald “approached and struck him powerfully from the side in the head, and cut off the top of his crown, and knocked off his cap.  The sword fell upon the left shoulder-blade, and cut all his clothes to nakedness.”  Then the knight William de Tracy “approached, and struck him with a great blow on the head; but still he did not fall.  The same William struck another powerful blow and at this the holy man fell prone on the pavement.”  The knight Richard le Bret then took a turn, striking Becket “as he lay on the pavement,” shattering his sword in the process.  Finally, the knight Hugh Mauclerk, “the most wicked of all men, approaching as he lay, put his foot on his neck and thrusting the point of the sword into his head spread his brains on the pavement, crying out and saying, ‘Let us go, the traitor is dead.’”[26]

Staunton notes that for some of Becket’s biographers, the act of scattering Becket’s brains on the cathedral floor was an outrage.[27]  John of Salisbury, for example, compares the knights unfavorably with Jesus’ executioners, who at least refrained from breaking Jesus’ legs when they realized he was already dead.[28]  In Edward Grim’s account, once Becket’s crown had been separated from his head, “the blood white from the brain, and the brain equally red from the blood, brightened the floor with the colors of the lily and rose, the Virgin and Mother, and the life and death of the confessor and martyr.”[29] 

In art, Saint Thomas Becket is sometimes portrayed with a bleeding head, signifying the first blow of his attackers.[30]  Becket’s other attributes in art are a long sword, representing the sword with which he was martyred, and the palm branch or martyrdom.[31]  In some cases, the sword is shown cleaving, or inserted in, the saint’s head.  The presence of a bishop’s mitre also helps identify him.

Pilgrims’ Progress

Soon after the assassination, miracles were attributed to Becket’s intercession, and a cult quickly grew around the saint.  Staunton attributes the cult’s popularity to its versatility.  “One of the reasons for Thomas’s broad appeal as a saint is that he meant many different things to different people.  Each could take from his memory and his image what they sought, whether it was the miracle-worker, the martyr, the champion of the Church, or a combination of these.”[32]

IMG_0381 copy

Gold Reliquary Pendant with Queen Margaret of Sicily Blessed by Bishop Reginald of Bath (1173-77).  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  On the opposite side, the pendant used to contain a crystal under which a number of relics were kept.  An inscription on the pendant indicates the relics included “blood of St. Thomas Martyr” as well as parts of his vestments stained with blood, including his cloak, belt, hood, shoe, and shirt.

The notoriety of the Becket’s death and reports of his miracle-working relics naturally attracted pilgrims to Canterbury.  Pilgrimages, though certainly not unique to Christianity, were a common form of religious expression in Medieval Europe.[33]  Christians regularly undertook these journeys to shrines and other holy places to fulfill vows, to seek cures, as penance, or merely to deepen their faith.[34]  Indeed, The Canterbury Tales begins with a paean to the religious pilgrimage: 

When the sweet showers of April fall and shoot
Down through the drought of March to pierce the root,
Bathing every vein in liquid power
From which there springs the engendering of the flower,
When also Zephyrus with his sweet breath
Exhales an air in every grove and heath . . .
Then people long to go on pilgrimages . . . .[35]

The text further hints that at least some of the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury are veterans of previous pilgrimages.  The Wife of Bath, for example, is described as having “thrice been to Jerusalem,” as well as “to Rome and also to Boulogne, / St James of Compostella and Cologne.”[36]  The Pardoner is portrayed has having sewn a “holy relic on his cap,” most likely a pilgrim’s badge commemorating an earlier trip to some holy site.[37]  Their tales and the tales of their fellow pilgrims unfold as they wend their way to Canterbury.

Saint James - Metropolitan Museum

Saint James the Greater, pine with paint and gilding, South German (1475-1500), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Saint James is depicted here with one of the earliest and most recognizable pilgrim’s badges—a scallop shell—attached to his cap. Sea shells like this were associated with pilgrimages to Saint James’s shrine at Santiago de Compostela.

Once at Canterbury itself, a number of sites would have formed part of the pilgrimage experience.  As Paul Webster explains in The Cult of St. Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World, key pilgrimage sites at Canterbury Cathedral included “the site of the martyrdom, the crypt tomb, the principal shrine itself, and the chapel known as the Corona, housing ‘Becket’s crown’, the shrine of that part of his head removed by his murderers.”[38] 

As at many medieval shrines, pilgrimage souvenirs, including pilgrim’s badges or ampullae, were available for purchase at Canterbury.  Most depicted scenes from Saint Thomas Becket’s life or death, or featured images from the cathedral itself.  Depictions of the saint’s assassination—scenes restless with fretful knights and drawn swords—were popular.  Renderings of the saint’s shrine were also common and help establish what the shrine might have looked like to a medieval visitor. 

A pilgrim’s badge in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York includes a representation of the shrine dating to the late 14th century.[39]  The jeweled shrine, ordered by Archbishop Thomas Langton and dedicated on 2 July 1220, rested above a golden tomb containing an effigy of Saint Thomas in ecclesiastical vestments; the effigy is clearly visible on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s pilgrim’s badge.[40]  The shrine itself was “encrusted with jewels on a trellis-like ground and surmounted by two ship models.”[41]  It also featured what was purportedly the largest ruby in the world, donated to Canterbury by the king of France in 1179.[42]  (Look closely and you may spy a small figure pointing directly at the famed ruby.)

Pilgrim's Badge

Pilgrim’s Badge of the Shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury, cast tin-lead alloy (1350-1400).  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Conclusion

Following his elevation to Canterbury, Thomas Becket underwent a religious conversion, the sincerity of which has remained a subject of much speculation ever since.  Citing John of Salisbury, Stauton describes how some “deliberately misrepresented his behaviour, interpreting his zeal for justice as cruelty, his magnificence as pride, his pursuit of God’s will as arrogance, his protection of the Church’s rights as rashness.”[43]  Staunton further observes how Thomas’s character “seemed to feature a preponderance of traits which could be interpreted either way,” noting that “there is a thin line between bravery and foolhardiness, between constancy and stubbornness.”[44]

At the end of Anouilh’s Becket, King Henry is shown kneeling before Becket’s tomb, naked, as monks whip him with ropes.  The play, which is told in flashback, begins as it will conclude.  “Well, Thomas Becket, are you satisfied?” Henry exclaims.[45]  “I am naked at your tomb and your monks are coming to flog me.  What an end to our story!  You, rotting in this tomb, larded with my barons’ dagger thrusts, and I, naked, shivering in the draughts, and waiting like an idiot for those brutes to come thrash me.  Don’t you think we’d have done better to understand each other?”[46]

Understanding Saint Thomas Becket may, perhaps, have been too much to expect.

[1] Jean Anouilh, Becket at xvii (Lucienne Hill trans., 1960).
[2] Id.  The stalls Anouilh describes are still a familiar sight along the Seine, and many continue to sell curious and wonderful books.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] 4 Butler’s Lives of the Saints 629 (Herbert J. Thurston, S.J. & Donald Attwater eds., 2d ed. 1956).
[9] Id.
[10] Id.
[11] Id.
[12] Id. at 630.
[13] Id. at 631.
[14] Id.
[15] Id.
[16] See, e.g., id. at 631; Michael Staunton, Thomas Becket and His Biographers (2006).
[17] 4 Butler’s Lives of the Saints, supra note 8, at 630-31.
[18] Id. at 631.
[19] Id. at 634-35.  The Archbishop of York, who performed the actual coronation, had usurped Canterbury’s right in conducting the coronation.  Id. at 634.
[20] Staunton, supra note 16, at 216.
[21] In particular, Thomas Becket and His Biographers describes the works of John of Salisbury, Edward Grim, William of Canterbury, William Fitzstephen, Guernes of Ponte-Ste-Maxence, Herbert of Bosham, Anonymous I, Anonymous II, Benedict of Peterborough, and Alan of Tewkesbury.  Staunton suggests that the various Vitae, or Lives of Thomas, “are not only exceptional witnesses to Thomas’s life and death and the events in which he was involved,” they are also “literary works of high quality, more complex and sophisticated than has always been recognized.”  Id. at 2.
[22] Id. at 184.
[23] Id.
[24] Id.
[25] Id. at 195.
[26] Id.
[27] Id. at 198.
[28] Id.
[29] Id.  Notably, Edward Grim was standing next to Becket during the attack, and his arm was nearly severed by the blow that cleft the top of the saint’s head.  In Grim’s own account, he identifies the first blow to Saint Thomas Becket’s head as the “same blow [that] almost cut off the arm of this witness.”  Id. at 196.
[30] Rosa Giorgi, Saints in Art 354 (Thomas Michael Hartmann trans., Stefano Zuffi ed., 2002).
[31] Id. at 353.
[32] Staunton, supra note 16, at 216.
[33] Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, “Pilgrimage in Medieval Europe,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pilg/hd_pilg.htm.
[34] Id.
[35] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales 25 (Nevill Coghill trans., 1952) (1392).
[36] Id. at 37.
[37] Id. at 44
[38] The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World, c. 1170-1220 (Paul Webster and Marie-Pierre Gelin eds., 2016).
[39] “Pilgrim’s Badge of the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/473470.
[40] Id.
[41] Id.
[42] Id.
[43] Staunton, supra note 16, at 216-17.
[44] Id. at 217
[45] Anouilh, supra note 1, at 1.
[46]  Id.

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

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Art History

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Saint Denis - Notre Dame Cathedral

Saint Denis, Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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, Rouen, France

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

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.

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

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.

Saint Charles Borromeo: A Tale from the Crypt of Milan Cathedral

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Music History, Tomb / Sarcophagus

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Sarcophagus of Saint Charles Borromeo, Milan Cathedral, Milan, Italy. The sign to the right reads, "Reliquie di San Carlo Borromeo, Cardinale Arcivescovo di Milano."

Sarcophagus of Saint Charles Borromeo, Milan Cathedral, Milan, Italy. The sign to the right reads, “Reliquie di San Carlo Borromeo, Cardinale Arcivescovo di Milano.”

A Poem Wrought in Marble 

In 1867, Mark Twain spent several months touring Europe and the Holy Land aboard the steamship Quaker City.  He recorded his observations of the trip, which he later published as his first book, The Innocents Abroad, one of the great travelogues of the English language and one of the bestselling travel books of all time.  Among his impressions are those of Milan Cathedral (Duomo di Milano), the majestic seat of the Archbishop of Milan and currently the fifth largest cathedral in the world.  Milan Cathedral simply mesmerized him.  “What a wonder it is!  So grand, so solemn, so vast!  And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful!  A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in the soft moonlight only a fairy delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath! . . .  It was a vision!—a miracle!—an anthem sung in stone, a poem wrought in marble!”[1] 

Twain was awed by Milan Cathedral’s spires,[2] its luminous windows,[3] its sculptures,[4] and its sheer mass.  He called the cathedral “the princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived”[5] and could imagine no greater church building in the world.[6]  “They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter’s at Rome,” he remarked.  “I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human hands.”[7]

Altar of San Giovanni Buono, Milan Cathedral

Altar of San Giovanni Buono, Milan Cathedral

Nevertheless, despite his obvious and unbounded enthusiasm for the cathedral, Twain managed to devote nearly half his chapter on the cathedral to a subject unrelated to the aesthetic merits of the building—namely, saints and holy relics.  In particular, he dwelt on the earthly remains of Saint Charles (Carlo) Borromeo, a former Archbishop of Milan, who was displayed in the cathedral’s crypt in a “coffin of rock crystal as clear as the atmosphere.”[8]  “To us it seemed that so a good a man . . . deserved rest and peace in a grave sacred from the intrusion of prying eyes,” he rued, “but peradventure our wisdom was at fault in this regard.”[9] 

Twain on Saints and Relics

Twain did not have a particularly positive opinion of saints or relics.  In The Innocents Abroad, for example, he criticizes “coarse” depictions of saints as suffering martyrs[10] and he decries the veneration of relics as “Jesuit humbuggery.”[11]  In his book The Reverend Mark Twain, Joe B. Fulton explains that Twain questioned not only the “theological concept of a saint,” but also the “aesthetic practices of martyrology.”[12]  Twain found “visual depictions of the saints unintentionally grotesque, using his own ‘grotesque realism’ to undermine their reverential seriousness.”[13]  In Italy, for example, Twain complained of the “huge, coarse frescoes of suffering martyrs” he found painted on the facades of roadside inns.[14] Twain, who rejected the “ideology inherent in the martyrological form,”[15] wryly noted that “[i]t could not have diminished their suffering any to be so uncouthly represented.”[16]  Twain was similarly disturbed by the statue of Saint Bartholomew at Milan Cathedral (pictured below), which depicts the martyr with his skin flayed.  “It was a hideous thing,” he wrote, “and yet there was a fascination about it somewhere.  I am very sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it now.  I shall dream of it sometimes.”

St Bartholomew - Milan CathedralStill, Twain complained “less about the idea of sainthood than about relics and the depictions of them.”[17]  To Twain, the veneration of relics was an irrational, antiquated practice, a holdover of the “peculiar devotional spirit of the olden time.”[18]  As Fulton observes, “[r]elics of the saints trigger comedy rather than reverence” for Twain, and relics are a frequent target of his irreverent humor in The Innocents Abroad.[19]  While recounting his visit to Genoa, for example, he paused to ruminate on the multiplicity of relics he had encountered.  “But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone?” he begins skeptically.[20]  “We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together.  I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails.  Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame.  As for the bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.”[21]  (Saint Denis, pictured below from Rheims Cathedral, is commonly depicted carrying his decapitated head in his arms.)

St Denis - Rheims Cathedral

Twain is not the only one to have expressed exasperation at the multitude of saintly relics displayed throughout Europe.  A French anti-clerical cartoon from the early 1900s, for example, “reconstructed” Saint Blaise—complete with five heads, six arms, and six legs—from “authentic” bones displayed in various cities.[22]  Twain’s avowed skepticism of relics, however, did not preclude a certain fascination with the sainted figures who supplied them.  Later in his career, in fact, Twain would actually engage in hagiography, although he arguably never really altered his view of saints, sainthood, or Catholicism generally.[23] 

Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, published in 1896, is a fictionalized account of Saint Joan of Arc’s life as retold in the (fictional) memoir of her page, Louis de Conte.  The book’s seriousness and the “air of absolute reverence” with which Twain portrays Joan of Arc represent such a stark break from his previous work that he initially published it anonymously.[24]  Years later, however, Twain fully acknowledged his authorship and embraced the book as his greatest work.  “I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books and it is the best,” he declared.[25]  “[I]t furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; 12 years of preparation & 2 years of writing.  The others needed no preparation, & got none.”[26]  Twain valued Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc even more highly than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.[27] 

Good Saint Charles Borromeo

Twain manifested an interest in the life of another saint, Saint Charles Borromeo, in his much earlier The Innocents Abroad.  Twain described Saint Charles with reverence and admiration, characterizing him as “a good man, a warmhearted, unselfish man,” even though he bristled at the way the saint’s corpse had been placed on public display.[28]  Inviting readers to descend with him into the crypt, under the grand altar of Milan Cathedral, he prepared them to “receive an impressive sermon from lips that have been silent and hands that have been gestureless for three hundred years.”[29]

St Borromeo - Crypt3“The priest stopped in a small dungeon and held up his candle,” Twain begins.  He and his companions now stood in Saint Charles’s tomb.  Recognized as one of the great 16th century reformers of the Catholic Church, during a period known as the Counter Reformation, Saint Charles was responsible for, among other things, establishing seminaries to educate priests and ministering with great compassion to victims of the plague.[30]  He was born an aristocrat and could easily have taken advantage of the ease and luxury his station afforded.  Instead, he showed little interest in worldly goods and devoted his life to serving others.

Saint Charles was born on 2 October 1538 at Arona Castle on Lake Maggiore.  His father, Count Gilbert Borromeo, was a “man of talent and sanctity,” and his mother, Margaret, was a member of the Medici family, one of the most power and influential families of the Renaissance.[31]  He received the tonsure at the age of twelve and after his uncle’s election to the papacy in 1559, he served in various offices in Rome.  He was ordained a priest in 1563 and was subsequently appointed Archbishop of Milan in 1564.  

Milan Cathedral - Spires 3

Spires of Milan Cathedral, as seen from roof

After arriving in Milan, he immediately set to work reforming the diocese.  According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, “[w]hen St Charles came first to reside at Milan he sold plate and other effects to the value of thirty thousand crowns, and applied the whole sum for the relief of distressed families.”[32]  Meanwhile, despite earning a considerable income from various sources, he chose to live modestly.  Francis Panigarola, Bishop of Asti, recounted how he once found Saint Charles on a very cold night studying “in a single tattered cassock.”[33]  He said, “I entreated him, if he would not perish with cold, to put on some better garment.  He answered me smiling, ‘What if I have no other?  I am obliged to wear a cardinal’s robes in the day; but this cassock is my own and I have no other, either for winter or summer.’”[34]

St Carlo Borromeo Tended by an Angel, by Francesco Caccianiga, oil on copper (early 18th century) (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

St Carlo Borromeo Tended by an Angel, by Francesco Caccianiga, oil on copper (early 18th century) (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

To curb the gross abuses he discovered in his diocese, Saint Charles established strict regulations governing the clergy, who he found “lazy, ignorant and debauched” upon his arrival.[35]  He also established seminaries to “remedy the disorders engendered by the decay of medieval life.”[36]  His broader reforms, however, were not always well received, and they created many enemies.

On 26 October 1569, a priest by the name of Jerome Donati Farina was sent to murder him while he attended evening prayers.  As Saint Charles kneeled before the altar and a choir performed a motet by Orlando di Lasso—“It is time therefore that I return to Him that sent me,” they sang—Farina fired an arquebus, striking Saint Charles in the back.[37]  Believing himself mortally wounded, Saint Charles “commended himself to God.”[38]  However, as the Lives of the Saints explains, “it was found that the bullet had only struck his clothes in the back, raising a bruise, and fallen harmlessly to the floor.”[39]  A painting titled Farina’s Assassination Attempt by Gian Battista della Rovere (Fiammenghino) located in the south transept of Milan Cathedral depicts the event.[40]

Reliquary (St Borromeo) - KrakowSaint Charles died many years later in Milan on 4 November 1584 at the age of forty-six.  He had celebrated his last mass at Arona, his birthplace, several days earlier, and arriving in Milan, he immediately took to bed and asked for the last rights.  After receiving the final sacrament, he whispered Ecce venio (“Behold, I come”), and expired.  He was canonized by Pope Paul V in 1610.[41]  (The reliquary, pictured left, contains a relic of Saint Charles.  It is located at the Archdiocesan Museum in Krakow, Poland.)

The Vanities of Earth

Twain was clearly familiar with Saint Charles’s story, and he alludes to several of the saint’s virtues, particularly his generosity and his compassion, in The Innocents Abroad.[42]  Twain writes, “His heart, his hand, and his purse were always open,” and he imagines the saint’s “benign countenance moving calmly among the haggard faces of Milan in the days when the plague swept the city.”[43]  In the presence of Saint Charles’s corpse, however, Twain’s thoughts turn to death and the impermanence of earthly things. 

Relics of Saint Charles Borromeo, Milan Cathedral

Relics of Saint Charles Borromeo, Milan Cathedral

The body, he states, was “robed in costly habiliments covered with gold embroidery and starred with scintillating gems.”[44]  Meanwhile, Saint Charles’s “decaying head was black with age, the dry skin was drawn tight to the bones, the eyes were gone, there was a hole in the temple and another in the cheek, and the skinny lips were parted as in a ghastly smile!”  After describing other treasures arrayed about the body, Twain declares, “How poor and cheap and trivial these gewgaws seemed in the presence of the solemnity, the grandeur, the awful majesty of Death!”[45]  Saint Charles’s “sermon,” delivered by silent lips and still hands, was this:  “You that worship the vanities of earth—you that long for worldly honor, worldly wealth, worldly fame—behold their worth!”[46]

In the end, the body of Saint Charles—the relics of Saint Charles—had greater power over Twain than perhaps he realized.

Post Script:  Charles Borromeo and Palestrina, the “Savior of Church Music”

View of the Roman Forum. Palestrina's music has been called the "soundtrack" of Rome. He composed over 100 masses and 250 motets here during his lifetime,

View of the Roman Forum. Palestrina’s music has been called the “soundtrack” of Rome. He composed over 100 masses and 250 motets here during his lifetime.

One of the issues taken up by the Council of Trent, the 16th century Ecumenical Council convened to debate and implement extensive reforms in the Catholic Church, was the future of sacred music.  By the mid-16th century, liturgical music had grown so elaborate and unintelligible in its complexity that the Council considered banning polyphonic music from the liturgy altogether.  According to popular legend, Cardinal Borromeo, then a member of the Council, commissioned Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina to compose a Mass to convince the Council otherwise.[47]  The result was the extraordinary Missa Papae Marcelli (Mass for Pope Marcellus).  Palestrina’s Mass demonstrated that polyphonic music could be simultaneously beautiful, pure, and textually clear, and it changed the minds of those on the Council, which ultimately abandoned the movement to ban sacred music from the liturgy. 

In reality, Palestrina likely composed the Missa Papae Marcelli years earlier, probably in 1555, eight years before the Council of Trent sought a resolution on the fate of sacred music.  Nevertheless, regardless of whether the Missa Papae Marcelli was commissioned for the purpose, Palestrina’s music, and the Missa Papae Marcelli in particular, were undoubtedly highly influential in saving polyphony.  As Will Durant has noted, “by its fidelity to the words, its avoidance of secular motives, and the subordination of musical art to religious intent” Palestrina’s music “played a part in leading the committee to sanction polyphonic music.”[48]

Milan Cathedral, as seen from roof

Milan Cathedral, as seen from roof

For a fantastic overview of Palestrina and his music, see the BBC’s extraordinary series Sacred Music, series 1, episode 2, on “Palestrina and the Popes.”  Presented by Simon Russell Beale with music performed by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen, the episode originally aired on 28 February 2008.

[1]Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad 124 (Signet Classic 1980) (1869).

[2]Id.  (“Away above, on the lofty roof, rank on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond.”).

[3]Id. at 125 (“We loitered about gazing aloft at the monster windows all aglow with brilliantly colored scenes in the lives of the Saviour and his followers.  Some of these pictures are mosaics, and so artistically are their thousand particles of tinted glass or stone put together that the work has all the smoothness and finish of a painting.”).

[4]Id. at 124 (noting that the bas-relief carvings on the cathedral’s doors were “so ingeniously carved out of the marble that they seem like living creatures—and the figures are so numerous and the design so complex that one might study it a week without exhausting its interest”).

[5]Id.

[6]Id. at 130.

[7]Id.

[8]Id. at 129.

[9] Id. at 128.

[10] See id. at 149.  During his journey through Italy, Twain observed, “Here and there, on the fronts of roadside inns, we found huge, coarse frescoes of suffering martyrs like those in the shrines.  Id. at 149.

[11] Id. at 43.

[12] Joe B. Fulton, The Reverend Mark Twain:  Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content 106 (2006).

[13] Id. at 105. 

[14] Twain, supra note 1, at 149.

[15] Fulton, supra note 12, at 106.

[16] Twain, supra note 1, at 149.  Twain concludes dismissively, “We were in the heart and home of priestcraft—of a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and everlasting unaspiring worthlessness.”  Id.

[17] Fulton, supra note 12, at 105 (internal citations omitted).

[18] Twain, supra note 1, at 179.  Twain described the veneration of relics as a belief in “the protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy by contact with holy things.”  Id.

[19] Fulton, supra note 12, at 105.

[20] Twain, supra note 1, at 119. 

[21] Id. at 119–20.  Later, while exploring Milan Cathedral, Twain is shown, among other relics, “two of St. Paul’s fingers and one of St. Peter’s,” a “bone of Judas Iscariot (it was black),” “part of the crown of thorns (they have a whole one at Notre Dame),” and a “picture of the Virgin and Child painted by the veritable hand of St. Luke,” the second he had seen.  Id. at 129.

[22] See, e.g., Europski Dom Dubrovnik, Saint Blaise:  Veneration Without Boundaries 21 (2012) (featuring an illustration titled “Les Reliques Authentiques”).

[23] Fulton, supra note 12, at 107–08.  Twain published Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, a novel about Joan of Arc, in 1896.  Fulton argues that since “Twain’s attitudes toward Catholicism remained negative before, during, and after the writing of the work, one must find some other, more reasonable, explanation to make sense of it.  Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc marks no sea change in Twain’s attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church, or indeed toward religion generally.”  Id. at 108.

[24] See 17 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature 29 (A.W. Ward et al. eds., 1907–1921) (2000) (“Recognizing that the book was quite out of his customary vein, Mark Twain published it first anonymously . . . .”).

[25] Id. at 29.

[26] Id.

[27] Fulton, supra note 12, at 108 (explaining that Twain ranked Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc above Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). 

[28] Twain, supra note 1, at 127.

[29] Id.

[30]4 Butler’s Lives of the Saints 255–62 (Herbert J. Thurston, S.J. & Donald Attwater eds., 2d ed. 1956).   Butler’s Lives of the Saints declares that “with Pope St Pius V, St Philip Neri and St Ignatius Loyola, he is one of the four outstanding public men of the so-called Counter-reformation.”  Id. at 255.

[31] Id. at 255.

[32] Id. at 257. 

[33]Id.

[34] Id.

[35] Id. at 258.

[36] Id.

[37] Id. at 259. 

[38] Id. at 259–60.

[39] Id. at 260.

[40] See Ernesto Brivio, The Life and Miracles of St. Carlo Borromeo:  A Pictorial Itinerary in Milan Cathedral (2006), fig. 11.

[41]Butler’s Lives of the Saints, supra note 30, at 261–62.

[42] Twain, supra note 1, at 127. 

[43] Id.

[44] Id. at 128.

[45] Id.

[46] Id.

[47] Will Durant, 6 The Story of  Civilization:  The Reformation (1957).  Importantly, another major reason for the movement to ban sacred music was the realization that some composers drew inspiration for their compositions from common, often bawdy, popular songs of the day.  In addition to rejecting the unintelligibility of polyphonic compositions, which regularly resorted to overlapping melodies and multiple, interwoven lines of text, the Council sought to “exclude from churches all such music as . . . introduces anything of the impure or lascivious, in order that the house of God may truly be seen to be . . . the house of prayer.”  Id.

[48] Id.