Beautiful, anonymous death

Were they holy relics, or disgusting displays of hypocrisy?

A relic from the Holy Catacombs of Pancratius, originally from Prince Abbey of St. Gall, courtesy of the Historical Museum of St. Gallen, photo by David Bu.

The jeweled skeletons and ‘mummified’ corpses of catacomb saints represent one of the creepiest passages in the long history of the Catholic Church.

The Protestant Reformation unleashed the Beeldenstorm, a wave of iconoclasm across Europe and England in the 16th century. The result was the destruction of significant cultural works, including many more Northern European Renaissance paintings than were ever saved.

Altar of St. Almachus, a ‘hermit martyred in Rome.’ He was moved in 1788 from the monastery of St. Anna in Bregenz and reconstituted by the nuns of Bonlanden in 1910, courtesy Bene 16 on wiki.

In England, 90% of religious art was destroyed in the years following the Reformation. The percentages are probably similar in Germany and the Low Countries. The purge extended equally to music and literature.

The Beeldenstorm also suppressed another uniquely Catholic tradition, the display and veneration of body parts of former saints. Consider the earthly remains of St. Thomas Becket, canonized a mere two years after his death in 1170. A stone cover was placed over his tomb, with two holes through which pilgrims could kiss his casket. Shortly thereafter, his bones were moved to an elaborate, gold-plated and bejeweled shrine behind the high altar in Trinity Chapel. The anniversary of that move became a major holiday in its own right. Becket's bones attracted countless pilgrims for three hundred years, until Henry VIII ordered the obliteration of the tomb, the bones, and even his name.

In addition to lying in state in Canterbury, St. Thomas Becket's body parts were distributed through Europe in Limoges caskets like this. About 45 examples remain. This one courtesy of the British Museum.

The Counter-Reformation brought a hunger for all that missing iconography. In response, the Vatican sent out bespoke saints to the faithful. Hundreds of thousands of anonymous skeletons were exhumed from the Christian catacombs beneath Rome and sent to previously-Protestant areas. Their recipients assumed they were early Christian martyrs. 

Some came already decorated from Rome. In other cases, donors lavished thousands of dollars of jewels and gold on them. Some have jewels wired to their bones, some have wax features covering their skulls, some wear silk ‘faces’ or crocheted skin. Finishing a catacomb saint could take up to five years of painstaking, skilled work.

The jeweled skeleton of St. Benedictus, from Paul Koudounaris’ Heavenly Bodies (see below).

They were then proudly displayed in their new churches. They were focal points of veneration and symbols of the resurgent Church flexing its power.

Although the identities—even the gender—of the skeletons were unknown, it is possible they were those of real Christian martyrs. The early Christians preferred burial to the prevailing Roman practice of cremation. Martyrs were laid to rest under the city in secret. After Christianity was decriminalized in the 4^th century, the practice of catacomb burial slowly tapered off. The tombs were forgotten. In 1578, they were spectacularly and conveniently rediscovered, just in time to send dead saints out to reclaim Europe from the Protestants.

An x-ray of 'St. Aurelius' reveals missing parts. It's impossible to tell the gender of the skeleton. Courtesy Stefan Alves, from Imagem-relicário de Santo Aurélio mártir pertencente à Sé Catedral do Porto, by Joana Palmeirao.  

The arrival of these remains was usually a source of great excitement for local parishes. It offered a tangible connection between the martyrs and their own recent persecutions.

St. Aurelius' sandal reveals that he was a pre-fab job assembled in Rome. Courtesy Joana Palmeirão, 2015, Imagem-relicário de Santo Aurélio mártir pertencente à Sé Catedral do Porto.

And then came the modern age and embarrassment about what everyone knew were trumped-up saints. Today only a handful of the catacomb saints remain. It has only been since the publication of Paul Koudounaris’ Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs that they’ve regained any kind of attention at all.

The first great comic book artist

Voluptuous women, muscle-bound men... Rubens was just ahead of his time.

The Triumph of Henry IV, c. 1630, Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy the Met

The first great comic book artist was the great Flemish baroque painter, Peter Paul Rubens. Long before The Glasgow Looking Glass printed the first modern comics, Rubens was shoving dynamic action stories into oil sketches.

Rubens was the most important artist of the Flemish Baroque. But it was in his oil sketches that he was able to kick over convention and go for complete, riotous action. Rubens made these sketches because he was first and foremost an “idea man.” His busy workshop designed decorative schemes, tapestries, and altarpieces while churning out portraits, landscapes and history paintings. Since much of the finish work was done by someone else, it’s in his oil sketches that we find the ‘true’ Rubens.

Mercury and a Sleeping Herdsman, 1625-28, Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery

These sketches were usually (but not always) in color. They were studies for works in oil or other media. “Nothing reveals more clearly the ways in which his muscular and agile mind worked than the study of his more intimately scaled drawings and oil sketches,” wrote Peter Sutton. “It is the work of art that comes closest to recording the moment of conception.”

The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse, 1623-24, Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy of the Getty Museum

The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse was a sketch for the main altarpiece at Freising Cathedral. It’s a riot of action. The Virgin Mary holds the Christ Child while trampling the serpent, who in turn curls around the moon at her feet. To the left the Archangel Michael and his supporting cast drive out Satan and other ghoulish demons. Above, God the Father instructs an angel to place a pair of wings on the Virgin's shoulders. All of this is incredibly complex and would be tough to fit into a vast altarpiece. It approaches the impossible when you realize the sketch is only about 20 by 25 inches.

Head of a Negro, 1618-20, Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy the Hyde Collection. Rubens often painted stock heads that he could later insert into his vast history canvases.

Rubens was the son of a Calvinist attorney from Antwerp. Religious turmoil caused the family to flee Antwerp for Cologne. There, the elder Rubens met Anna of Saxony, wife of William of Orange, and was hired to reclaim her confiscated fortune from the Duke of Alba. If you think that sounds like the plot for a novel, it gets worse: Rubens, senior either had an affair with the princess or he was set up to take the fall. She was divorced, imprisoned, and died; he did a stretch in chokey himself.

Returned to Antwerp, the younger Rubens was educated as a gentleman, which served him in his role as diplomat and courtier. He apprenticed at age 14, and followed that with the requisite tour of Italy. Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, and that recent phenomenon, Caravaggio, all profoundly influenced his later style. 

The Defenders of the Eucharist from The Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series, ca. 1628, Woven by Jan Raes, Jacob Fobert, and Hans Vervoert, after Peter Paul Rubens, wool and silk. Courtesy Convent of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid 

Tapestry cartoons provided a large part of his workshop’s business. Triumph of the Eucharist was ordered by Rubens’ friend, the Archduchess Isabella, for the Convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid. It included 16 tapestries that covered the walls of the Convent’s chapel on feast days.

Rubens wasn’t shy about his own talent. Angling for the job of designing the ceilings for Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House in Whitehall Palace, he wrote, “my talent is such that no undertaking, no matter how large in size, how varied in subject, has ever exceeded my confidence.”