medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (1. December) is the feast day of:
Ansanus (d. 303 or 304, supposedly). A. (Amsanus, Ampsanus, Anisanus; in Italian: Ansano, Sano) is one of Siena's patron saints. According to his legendary early Passio (BHL 515; thought to be of the seventh century), he was the son of a pagan Roman senator who belonged to the prominent family of the Anicii. Without his parents' knowledge, let alone consent, he was educated in the Christian faith by an angelically inspired Roman priest who baptized him at the age of twelve. When his godmother then cured a blind person, both she and A. were imprisoned (in a much later version, this happened at the urging of A.'s father). She was tortured to death but A. managed to escape to Siena, where he he preached, baptized, and performed healing miracles.
When the Great Persecution broke out A., who was now nineteen, was arrested at Siena. He miraculously survived an attempted execution by boiling in oil and other substances and was then executed by decapitation on the road between Siena and Arezzo. By ca. 550 there was a church dedicated to A. at his reputed site of execution and burial at Dofana in today's Castelnuovo Berardenga (SI), His cult is documented from shortly afterward in other places in what are now southern Tuscany and northern Lazio. In 867 A. had a church on the Pizza del Campo in Siena and in 1107 his relics were translated from Dofana to the cathedral of Siena. A.'s second Passio (BHL 516; a revision and expansion of its predecessor) is also from the twelfth century.
In Duccio di Buoninsegna's recently restored great window from 1287-88 for Siena's cathedral (now in the Museo dell'Opera della Metropolitana), A. is the second of the patron saints flanking the central panel (the order here is Bartholomew, Ansanus, Crescentius, Savinus). In the same artist's great Maestą for the same cathedral (1308-11), he is the first (the order here is Ansanus, Savinus, Crescentius, Victor).
Two views of Duccio's window:
http://tinyurl.com/2ouzaa
http://www.wga.hu/art/d/duccio/buoninse/31window.jpg
Detail (portrait of A.):
http://tinyurl.com/2s2v8e
An illustrated, Italian-language discussion of this window is here:
http://tinyurl.com/fxjt8
A view of Duccio's Maestą del Duomo di Siena:
http://www.casa-in-italia.com/info/Duccio_fr.html
An expandable detail view, with A. in the front row at left, is here:
http://www.wga.hu/art/d/duccio/buoninse/maesta/maest_04.jpg
In Simone Martini's Maestą (1315) in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico the order of the four patron saints is the same (Ansanus, Savinus, Crescentius, Victor) and they are again in the front row. Here's an expandable view:
http://tinyurl.com/28k4sw
Detail view of A.'s portrait:
http://tinyurl.com/2347ne
A. is again at the left in this Annunciation by Simone Martini and Filippo di Memmo (Lippo Memmi) from 1333, executed for A.'s chapel in Siena's cathedral and now in the Uffizi in Florence:
http://www.wga.hu/art/s/simone/6annunci/ann_2st.jpg
Here's a later fourteenth-century polychromed wooden statue of Ansanus from Siena in that city's collection of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena
(last image on right):
http://tinyurl.com/26nwuo
And here's Paolo Uccello's predella panel of Sts. John and Ansanus from the Quarate altarpiece (1435-40) now in the Museo Arcivescovile in Florence:
http://www.wga.hu/art/u/uccello/6various/2quarat4.jpg
And here's a predella panel from the 1440s by Giovanni di Paolo, now in the Christian Museum at Esztergom and showing A. baptizing:
http://www.wga.hu/art/g/giovanni/paolo/ansanus.jpg
The same artist's depiction of A.'s martyrdom, now in the Bargello in Florence, is from the same altarpiece:
http://tinyurl.com/ywv8jq
In 1143 a church in Spoleto that had been built over the remains of an ancient temple and adjacent space in what had been the city's Roman-period forum was dedicated to A. and to St. Isaac of Spoleto. Its crypt (now called that of Saint Isaac), whose floor consists of paving stones from the forum, seems to be of eleventh-century origin. It survived when the original church was reworked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and replaced by the present Sant'Ansano at the end of the eighteenth.
A view of Sant'Ansano's Cripta di Sant'Isacco is here:
http://tinyurl.com/lbgcx
A different view will be found on this page, which also lists the subjects (insofar as these are identifiable) of the recently restored late eleventh- and/or early twelfth-century frescoes which adorn the crypt:
http://www.conventosantansano.it/cripta_di_sisacco.htm
More views:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spoleto#Sant.27Ansano
Two views of the originally twelfth-century chiesa di Santi Ansano e Tommaso at Castelvecchio in Pescia (PT) in Tuscany:
http://tinyurl.com/2z5jva
http://tinyurl.com/2donz5
A small church dedicated to A. at Brento in today's Monzuno (BO) in the Appennine portion of Emilia-Romagna is securely recorded from the thirteenth century onward. It was rebuilt in 1487 and destroyed along with most of the village by an Allied aerial bombardment in 1944. Some earlier twentieth-century views of it are here:
http://www.anconella.com/chiesa-sant-ansano-di-brento.html
Best,
John Dillon
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