medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (3. July) is the feast day of:
1) Thomas the Apostle (d. 1st cent.). Today's well known saint of the Regno is also a rather well traveled one. According to Origen (so Eusebius, _Historia ecclesiastica_, 3. 1), T. evangelized Parthia. According to the _Acts of Thomas_ (seemingly Syrian in origin) and to the late antique tradition of the church of Edessa, T. was the apostle of India and was martyred there. St. Gregory of Tours, who had at least one Syrian informant, knew this version of events. T.'s Indian apostolate is the principal subject of his at least mostly earlier thirteenth-century window in the cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres:
http://tinyurl.com/n9q2c6
Fourth-century Christians believed that T. evangelized Edessa in Syria (today's Sanliurfa in Turkey). For an English-language version of the pilgrim Egeria's account of her visit to his major cult site there, see paragraphs <30> through <32> here:
http://www.ccel.org/m/mcclure/etheria/etheria.htm
And in 1258, so the story goes in his _Translatio Ortonam_ (BHL 8149), the commander of a Venetian flotilla operating in the Aegean on behalf of Manfred, king of Sicily, found T.'s relics on Chios, whither they had been brought from Edessa by Christians fleeing the Muslim capture and sack of that city. (As the Crusader county of Edessa had reverted to Muslim rule in 1144, the refugee monk who is said to have been the Venetian commander's informant must have been extraordinarily aged at the time of their encounter.) On 6. September of the same year, the commander's ship landed in the Regno at the port of Ortona in today's Chieti province of Abruzzo, where T.'s remains were solemnly deposited in the local cathedral. They have been there ever since, less the piece of an elbow that was "returned" in 1953 to Cranganore (now Kodungallur) in India.
Ortona's originally thirteenth-century cathedral (now a co-cathedral of the archdiocese of Lanciano - Ortona) is dedicated to T. It underwent major rebuilding in the Early Modern period. During the battle of Ortona in 1943 (20.-27. December, thus including T.'s own Big Day as it was then fixed -- 21. December) it sustained major damage:
http://www.junobeach.org/e/2/img/PA-136308-pic-e.htm
Here's a view of the cathedral in its current state:
http://tinyurl.com/5chxu2
And here's a view of the reconstructed main portal:
http://tinyurl.com/58aojx
T.'s current resting place:
http://www.jmanjackal.net/photos/2004/pil05.jpg
Other dedications to T.:
a) At Rome, the newly formed Trinitarians rebuilt in 1209 the ancient church of San Tommaso in Formis, situated on an out-of-the way piece of land next to an aqueduct. Next to this they built a hospital. From the street one can see remnants of the hospital's ornamental portal:
http://www.romeartlover.it/Vasi52f5.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/lpb3d
The restored early thirteenth-century mosaic above the entrance:
http://tinyurl.com/ol5f8
, showing an enthroned Christ between two slaves, one white and one black, is signed by Jacopo Cosmati the elder and by Cosma Cosmati, early members of the famed family of mosaicists and stoneworkers.
b) At Ascoli Piceno (AP) in the Marche, the originally eleventh-century church of San Tommaso Apostolo as rebuilt in the thirteenth century and restored in the twentieth:
http://tinyurl.com/67xwxl
c) At Castello-di-Rostino (Haute-Corse; in Corsican, Castellu di Rustinu) in Corsica, the originally eleventh-century church of Saint-Thomas de Pastoreccia (San Tumasgiu di Pastureccia):
http://www.enkiri.com/europe/france/corse/st_thomas021.html
http://www.viaggiaresempre.it/005CorsicaValleGoloSTommaso.jpg
received some noteworthy late fifteenth-century (ca. 1485) frescoing:
http://www.viaggiaresempre.it/006CorsicaValleGoloSTommaso.jpg
http://www.viaggiaresempre.it/007CorsicaValleGoloSTommaso.jpg
http://www.aroots.org/notebook/IMG/jpg/doc-55.jpg
d) In Strasbourg/Straßburg, the originally thirteenth- to sixteenth-century église Saint-Thomas / Thomaskirche (apse rebuilt in the eighteenth century), now a Protestant church:
http://tinyurl.com/m3rpwh
http://tinyurl.com/mpglhp
Some depictions of the Doubting (or the Incredulity) of St. Thomas:
a) An eleventh-century capital in the église Saint-Pierre at Rucqueville (Calvados) in Normandy:
http://www.art-roman.net/rucqueville/rucqueville11x.jpg
b) A later eleventh-century relief in the eleventh-/twelfth-century monastery cloister of San Domingo at Silos (Burgos), Castilla y León:
http://tinyurl.com/y6f4zo
http://tinyurl.com/3eh9e9
c) A walrus ivory plaque (ca. 1140) now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York:
http://tinyurl.com/knsh2k
d) A later panel (dated variously to ca. 1240 and to perhaps the fifteenth century) at the bottom of the Thomas the Apostle window at Chartres' cathedral of Notre-Dame:
http://tinyurl.com/ne9xfh
e) At lower right in this view of the historiated pulpit (ca. 1250) by Guido da Como (Guido Bigarelli) in the church of San Bartolomeo in Pantano at Pistoia (PT) in Tuscany:
http://tinyurl.com/mp3sxx
The fourth image here offers a closer view:
http://tinyurl.com/nw5q2m
f) An illumination in a Coptic-Arabic Gospels produced at Cairo in 1250 and now in the Bibliothèque de Fels, Institut Catholique de Paris:
http://tinyurl.com/m4b6gj
g) An illumination from 1268 by Toros Roslin in the Malatia Gospel (Yerevan, Matenadaran Ms. 10675):
http://tinyurl.com/oxye8f
h) A late thirteenth- or earlier fourteenth-century wall painting in the church of St Denys in Rotherfield (E. Sussex):
http://www.paintedchurch.org/rotheinc.htm
i) A manuscript illumination in a very early fourteenth-century (ca. 1302-1305?) breviary for the Use of Verdun (Verdun, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 107, fol. 90v):
http://tinyurl.com/mvmelg
j) A panel painting by Duccio di Buoninsegna on the rear crowning section of his Maestà (commissioned, 1308; completed, 1311) in the Museo dell'opera del duomo in Siena:
http://tinyurl.com/nu5g4g
k) A relief on Tino da Camaino's monument to Gastone della Torre (ca. 1318), now in the Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce in Florence:
http://tinyurl.com/mnddfo
l) A relief on the fourteenth-century choir screen in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris:
http://tinyurl.com/ml9mx4
m) An illumination in a Franciscan missal of ca. 1400-1415 (Le Mans, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 249, fol. 126r):
http://tinyurl.com/nyrrez
n) A probably fifteenth-century wall painting in the rupestrian Romitorio di Selva Oscura at Bassiano (LT) in southern Lazio:
http://tinyurl.com/cpz2b9
o) An icon from the year 1500 by assistants of the painter Dionisy, now in the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, from the dismantled iconostasis of the Trinity cathedral in the St. Paul Obnorsk (Pavlo-Obnorsky) monastery at Obnorsk (Vologda Oblast):
http://www.dionisy.com/eng/dionisy/1014/index_photos.shtml?06
p) An icon from ca. 1500 now in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow:
http://www.icon-art.info/hires.php?lng=en&type=1&id=969
Deriving from T.'s Doubting is his role in various stories of the Assumption of the BVM in which, in the miraculous absence or blindness of the other apostles, he both is allowed to witness the Virgin's ascent and receives from her as tangible proof the cincture that she was wearing and that previously had been given her by the apostles. Herewith, mostly from Tuscany, where in the city of Prato veneration of an object believed to be the _Sacra Cintola_ in its entirety is at least as old as the thirteenth century (the one at Le Puy is said to be only a piece of the Virgin's belt), some visuals of T. either receiving this relic or else passing it on to the priest who in legend erects a chapel to house it:
a) Two panels from an exterior pulpit (1358-60) by Niccolò di Cecco del Mercia and his son on Prato's cathedral (the predecessor of Donatello's exterior pulpit on the same building), now in the Museo dell'opera del duomo in Prato:
http://tinyurl.com/mak5yk
http://tinyurl.com/ndl5d3
b) A manuscript illumination in an early fifteenth-century (ca. 1414) breviary for the Use of Paris (Châteauroux, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 282v):
http://tinyurl.com/ljp8cp
The scene underneath is a Dormition of the BVM:
http://tinyurl.com/l6v5m9
c) An altar painted by the Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli in ca. 1451 for the high altar of the church of San Fortunato in Montefalco (PG) in Umbria and now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana:
http://www.wga.hu/art/g/gozzoli/1early/05cintol.jpg
http://www.wga.hu/art/g/gozzoli/1early/061cinto.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/kou8ft
d) A panel painting from ca. 1458 by Filippo Lippi, now in Prato's Museo civico:
http://www.palazzo-medici.it/mediateca/it/immagine.php?id=71
http://www.restaurofilippolippi.it/opere/scheda_27.htm
2) Heliodorus of Altino (d. ca. 405). We know about H. chiefly through the writings of St. Jerome. Seemingly a former army officer, he was one of a group of studious Christians in Aquileia (including St. Chromatius and the translator Rufinus) whom Jerome met when he was staying there in the early 370s. Having accompanied Jerome to Syria and Palestine and there getting a taste of the ascetic life, he returned to the upper Adriatic to engage in pastoral work and to look after a niece and nephew who were dependent upon him. H. participated in the anti-Arian council of Aquileia as bishop of Altinum, today's Altino (VE) in the Veneto. Jerome's Letter 60, addressed to him, is an elaborate funerary oration in consolation for the loss of his nephew Nepotianus. H. and Chromatius supported Jerome's work of Bible translating and are thanked in prefatory letters addressed to them jointly.
According to Venetian tradition, enshrined e.g. in not the awfully believable Acta of St. Liberal of Altino (BHL 4905, etc.) H. retired to an island in the lagoon. In the later Middle Ages it was believed that he had brought from Jerusalem various relics belonging to the diocese of Altino, including an arm of St. James whose hand later wound up in the possession of the German emperors. After the Lombard invasion, the seat of the diocese of Altino in exile was on Torcello, once the most populous of Venice's islands. A sarcophagus said to hold H.'s relics is still displayed in Torcello's former cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta; he himself is depicted, in the act of blessing, in the thirteenth-century apse mosaic above the main altar:
http://www.araldodeluca.com/DATA/POSITIVI/preview/998.jpg
http://digilander.libero.it/ortodossia/eliodoro.jpg
Distance view:
http://tinyurl.com/46a8w6
3) Leo II, pope (d. 683). L. succeeded his fellow Sicilian, pope St. Agatho, and was in office for slightly less than a year. During his brief pontificate he confirmed the acts of the Third Council of Constantinople. L. dedicated to St. Stephen the diaconal church in Rome's Greek quarter into which pope St. Zachary in the following century placed a relic of St. George and which in time became San Giorgio in Velabro. He also renovated the church of Santa Bibiana on the Esquiline and brought there from the cemetery of Generosa the relics of the martyrs Simplicius, Faustinus, and Beatrice.
A view of the much rebuilt San Giorgio in Velabro showing its twelfth- or thirteenth-century belltower and the portico as restored following the bombing of 1993:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SanGiorgio.jpg
Santa Bibiana was rebuilt by Bernini in the early seventeenth century. The columns in the nave are said to have come from the fifth-century church. Some are visible here:
http://tinyurl.com/24bde9
Marjorie Greene provides a somewhat clearer view of the base of the last column on the left in the first of her Santa Bibiana photographs here:
http://medrelart.shutterfly.com/468
The principal church of Assoro (EN) in Sicily is dedicated to L. A late fourteenth-century reconstruction of a building perhaps dating to 1186 (when the priory to which it once belonged was founded), it underwent a series of rebuildings from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. A page of views is here:
http://www.comunediassoro.it/pages/leone.htm
Exterior views (belltower; south porch):
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/198/198-06-07-51-8899.jpg
http://www.ciclopiclub4x4.it/974n.JPG
http://www.sicilysicily.it/arte/gruppo_1/images/Assoro_gradinata.JPG
http://www.foto-sicilia.it/go-foto.cfm?id=18699
Though the interior is chiefly baroque:
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/198/198-05-37-58-4769.jpg
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/198/198-05-43-21-5058.jpg
, the presbytery is fourteenth-century (with later appointments):
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/198/198-05-41-25-7218.jpg
A page of views of the church's restored fifteenth-century painted crucifix:
http://www.comunediassoro.it/pages/gagini.htm
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with more visuals for Thomas the Apostle)
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