medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Blasius of Sebaste (d. ca. 316, supposedly). Not to be confused with his homonyms Blasius of Amorion, Blasius of Caesarea, Blasius of Veroli, and Blasius of Verona, this saint is popularly known in English by a French form of his name (Blaise; other European forms include, but are certainly not limited to, Blasios / Vlasios, Vlaho / Blaž, Blasius, Blas, and Biagio / Biase). His cult is first attested from the sixth century, when the medical encyclopedist Aetius of Amida reports his being invoked in cases of illness of the throat.
Blasius has both a legendary pre-metaphrastic Passio (BHG 276-276c) and a metaphrastic one (BHG 277); there are versions in Latin and in other languages. These make him a physician of Sebaste in Armenia (now Sivas in Turkey) who is elected bishop, goes into hiding to avoid the Licinian persecution, lives in a cave where with the sign of the cross he cures sick animals, is sought out, arrested and imprisoned, tends the sick, operates miracles, is tortured, and finally is decapitated. Later versions have him flayed with carding combs prior to execution. Blasius' miracles include saving a boy from choking to death on a fishbone and causing a wolf to restore to a widow a piglet that it had taken from her. In the later Middle Ages his reputed care for ailments of the throat caused Blasius to be numbered among the Fourteen Holy Helpers; his association with animals made him a patron of keepers of livestock.
Since the tenth century Blasius has been the patron saint of Dubrovnik (formerly Ragusa), where an originally twelfth(?)-century head reliquary of him, formed as a Byzantine crown, is kept in that city's early modern cathedral of the Assumption of the BVM:
http://www.azad-hye.net/media/e1/bishop-nareg-in-dubrovnik-02.jpg
http://www.akg-images.de/Docs/AKG/Media/TR5/2/4/1/0/AKG570800.jpg
There's an arm reliquary as well (in these photos shown along with the head reliquary):
http://tinyurl.com/ppqbucl
http://www.manfredhorvath.com/photos/f4l250120/
Some medieval images of Blasius of Sebaste (chiefly from southern Europe):
a) Blasius' martyrdom as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 390):
http://tinyurl.com/p4yf9p7
b) Blasius delivering the piglet to the widow (upper register) and Blasius' martyrdom as depicted in the late eleventh- or very early twelfth-century frescoes of the Chapelle des Moines at Berzé-la-Ville (Saône-et-Loire):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/magika2000/8268154248/
Detail view (Blasius delivering the piglet to the widow)
http://www.wga.hu/art/zgothic/mural/11c1/14berze.jpg
c) Blasius (at left) as depicted in an early twelfth-century mosaic in the cupola di San Leonardo in Venice's basilica cattedrale di San Marco:
http://www.wga.hu/art/zgothic/mosaics/6sanmarc/2cusouth.jpg
d) Blasius as depicted in the mid- or slightly later twelfth-century mosaics of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo:
http://tinyurl.com/28mj2e
e) Blasius (lower register, second from left) receiving a book from duke Henry as depicted in the late twelfth-century Gospels of Henry the Lion (ca. 1188; Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, cod. Guelf. 105 Noviss. 2°, fol. 194r):
http://www.wga.hu/art/zgothic/miniatur/1151-200/1german/2gospel1.jpg
f) Blasius (second from right) as depicted in the late twelfth-century frescoes (1196) of the chiesa rupestre di San Biagio at San Vito dei Normanni (BR) in Apulia:
http://tinyurl.com/ln866mw
g) Blasius as depicted in a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century fresco in the santuario di Maria SS. Regina (a.k.a. Santa Maria d'Anglona) at Tursi (MT) in Basilicata:
http://tinyurl.com/yhkhges
h) Blasius as portrayed in late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century gold and enamel work on his head reliquary in the treasury of Dubrovnik's katedrala Velike Gospe:
http://www.akg-images.de/Docs/AKG/Media/TR5/f/0/f/6/AKG570801.jpg
i) Blasius confronting the Roman governor persecuting him as depicted in a thirteenth-century glass window panel from the area of Soissons, now in the Louvre:
http://tinyurl.com/2lkkb6
j) Blasius in the act of healing as depicted in a mid-thirteenth-century gradual (ca. 1250-1260) for the Use of the abbey of Fontevrault (Limoges, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 63v):
http://www.enluminures.culture.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht1/IRHT_043441-p.jpg
k) Blasius (at left; at right, pope St. Urban I) in the late thirteenth-century Livre d'images de Madame Marie (ca. 1285-1290; Paris, BnF, ms. Nouvelle acquisition française 16251, fol. 91r):
http://tinyurl.com/yk9p76d
l) Blasius' martyrdom as depicted in a late thirteenth-century copy of French origin of the _Legenda aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 32v; image greatly expandable):
http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/ds/huntington/images//000962A.jpg
m) Blasius (at center, betw. Sts. Eleutherius of Illyria and Hypatius [of Gangra?]) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the nave of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/d2mrvqk
Detail view (Blasius):
http://tinyurl.com/lm44odu
n) Blasius as portrayed in an earlier fourteenth-century (second quarter) chiefly silver reliquary bust probably of French manufacture, formerly in the collegiate church at Braunschweig dedicated to him (commonly known as the Braunschweiger Dom) and now in the Bode Museum in Berlin:
http://tinyurl.com/pqzvjwv
http://tinyurl.com/lfkjpyh
o) Blasius (at left; at right, St. Babylas) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the altar area of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/y89acds
p) Blasius' flight from persecution as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century copy (1348), from the workshop of Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston, of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 65v):
http://tinyurl.com/yzmwu82
q) Blasius (at far right, after Sts. Spyridon the Wonderworker and Clement of Ohrid) as depicted in the later fourteenth-century frescoes (1360s and 1370s; restored in 1968-1970) in the church of St. Demetrius in Marko's Monastery at Markova Sušica (near Skopje) in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/3vvktdw
Detail view (Blasius):
http://tinyurl.com/3lz8o3z
r) Blasius (at left) as portrayed on a later fourteenth- or fifteenth-century mezzanino struck by the Republic of Ragusa:
http://www.coingallery.de/Heilige/B/Blasius_1.jpg
s) Blasius (second from left, after St. Bartholomew the Apostle) as depicted by Masaccio in his earlier fifteenth-century San Giovenale triptych (ca. 1424/25) in the chiesa di San Pietro in Cascia di Reggello (FI) in Tuscany:
http://www.wga.hu/art/m/masaccio/z_panels/giovena1.jpg
t) Blasius' martyrdom as depicted by Mariotto di Nardo in an earlier fifteenth-century predella panel (ca. 1425) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes:
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/image/joconde/0677/m021104_894-34-2_p.jpg
u) Blasius as depicted in a mid-fifteenth-century initial (ca. 1450-1460) by the Master of the Murano Gradual, cut from a gradual and now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles:
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2005/miniature/index.shtm
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/power_piety/
v) Blasius as depicted in a later fifteenth-century Novgorod School icon in the Karelian Fine Arts Museum, Petrozavodsk, Russia:
http://www.icon-art.info/hires.php?lng=en&type=1&id=590
w) Scenes from Blasius' legend as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (1463) of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language translation by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 58r):
http://tinyurl.com/yjmvnju
x) Blasius as depicted in the central panel of Martín de Soria's later fifteenth-century San Blas Altarpiece (1464) in the iglesia de San Salvador at Luesia (Zaragoza):
http://tinyurl.com/yk7rrbk
The altarpiece as a whole:
http://tinyurl.com/yj9m9rq
Blasius' martyrdom as depicted in one of the predella panels:
http://tinyurl.com/yazthrb
Expandable views of panels depicting scenes from B.'s legend start about halfway down this page:
http://tinyurl.com/ye3b3qn
y) Blasius as depicted in a detached later fifteenth-century fresco (betw. 1475 and 1500) from the refectory of the convento di San Biagio in Cesena (FC) in Emilia-Romagna, now in that city's Pinacoteca comunale:
http://tinyurl.com/7z2y7qf
z) Blasius holding a model of Ragusa as portrayed in a later fifteenth-century statue on the Ploče Gate in the same city (now of course Dubrovnik):
https://travelsofed.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/100_4555.jpg
aa) Blasius (at left; at right, St. John the Baptist) holding a candle as depicted by Hans Memling on a wing of his Passion (or Greverade) Altarpiece of 1491 in the Museum für Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte in Lübeck:
http://www.wga.hu/art/m/memling/5late/37nogr4.jpg
bb) Blasius (third from left; after St. Florus of Illyricum and St. Nicholas of Myra and before St. Anastasia of Sirmium) as depicted in a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century Novgorod School wooden triptych now in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=513
cc) Blasius (at left; at right, St. Paul the Apostle) as depicted holding a model of Ragusa by Nikola Božidarević / Nicholas of Ragusa in his very early sixteenth-century triptych (ca. 1501) in the Dominican convent in Dubrovnik:
http://tinyurl.com/owlbllk
The triptych as a whole:
http://tinyurl.com/oxl6aru
dd) Blasius as portrayed holding a model of Ragusa as portrayed in an early sixteenth-century statue (1503) the Kulturno-povijesni muzej in Dubrovnik:
http://dumus.hr/files/g/3-28/VA-85.jpg
Detail view (model of Ragusa):
http://dumus.hr/files/g/3-28/530x350-7/VA-85_1.jpg
ee) Blasius portrayed in a stone bust on the early sixteenth-century Field Gate (1506) at Ragusa's former dependency of Ston (Dubrovačko-neretvanska županija) in Croatia:
http://www.kroatien-netz.de/data/media/148/Ston_Saline_Stadt_Kloster_030_680.jpg
ff) Blasius as depicted by Fermo Stella in an earlier sixteenth-century panel painting (1536) of the Madonna between St. Blasius and St. John the Baptist, now in the the Museo Valtellinese di Storia e Arte at Sondrio (VA) in Lombardy (detail view):
http://www.wwmm.org/immagini/z_848.jpg
gg) Blasius as depicted in an earlier sixteenth-century polyptych (1537) in the chiesa del Purgatorio at Ruvo di Puglia (BA) in Apulia (image greatly expandable):
http://www.ruvodipugliaweb.it/sanbiagio/programma_S__Biagio.jpg
Živio sveti Vlaho!
Viva San Biagio!
Best,
John Dillon
(matter from older posts revised)
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion
|