A passport to heaven. Veneration of saints in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Sibyll a Goegebuer

the search for balance The exhibition ‘From Surgeons to Plague Saints: Illness in Bruges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ explores how society in that period sought to balance the roles given to worship and to medical science respectively in the pursuit of a long and moral life and a death inspired by God. The dividing line between a rationally and an irrationally founded world view was far from fixed: it fluctuated between matter-offact and emotional responses to life’s events and evolved as science and society themselves developed. The shift in religious and medical attitudes at European level that began in the sixteenth century has been adopted as the exhibition’s leitmotif and mapped onto the situation in Bruges. The exhibition offers visitors a visual survey of the interaction between faith and medicine, based on works of art, publications, archival documents, instruments and implements, and medical and scientific information. Lasting five months, it spans two hundred years of medicine and devotion.

softening a harsh reality Ludovico Guicciardini (Florence 1521–Antwerp 1589) paid little attention in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, published in 1567, to signals of the coming social, economic and mental depression. How was this phase in history reflected in patterns of worship at the time? How did social grievances come to be grafted onto growing religious divisions? How did people anticipate impending calamity through prayer? Did religion

29 St Barbara consoling the dying, c. 1700, engraving, Austrian?, inv. V0048926, Wellcome Library, London A priest comforts a dying man. Death – holding an hourglass and scythe – keeps watch nearby. A winged man, symbolizing time, points at the words in a book. St Barbara appears at the top, alongside her attribute, the tower. She holds a chalice with the host, representing the Eucharist, in her right hand. The light of mercy beams down from her heart onto the dying woman.

and by extension religious art offer any kind of sanctuary? How was the consolation of worship used to soften the edges of a harsh reality? These are the questions explored in the exhibition.

Cities have functioned since the Middle Ages as administrative and economic centres, governed by the bourgeoisie, nobility and the Church. Saints were part of the everyday lives of virtually the entire population. Worship of God and veneration of the saints and their relics were among the daily concerns and duties of the burgher elite, the nobility, the clergy and the common people, in the towns and countryside alike. Confraternities lay at the basis of urban piety and veneration of saints. Hermits opted for a fairly radical form of isolated living – whether or not within the urban community – modelled on the lives of the saints and for the benefit of human worship. ‘Living saints’, they embodied the ideal of pious devotion. Pilgrimages meanwhile centred on the veneration of the ‘dead’ saint. Monasteries, abbeys and churches were gateways to heaven. Artists found an ideal source amid all this economic and religious activity for commissions of a predominantly devotional character. Paintings of saints and their lives, together with reliquaries, offered visible and tangible inspiration for a lifestyle governed by devotion. Scenes from the Passion of Christ or the life of Mary or the saints, accompanied in some cases by portraits of the donors, brought those who gazed at them and those who commissioned them a step closer to heaven. People prayed to saints, who were venerated as intercessors with God. They acted as mediators and protected believers from danger and disease. They are depicted in art with the instruments of their martyrdom and/ or symbolic details from their lives. Achieving eternal life purified by proximity to God and the saints in the afterlife was everyone’s goal – a mentality reflected in piously inspired art. Artefacts with a devotional character were products linked inseparably with the lifelong journey toward this spiritual purification. The people who commissioned them hoped in this way to secure themselves an eternal place in heaven. Works 29

of this kind continue to shape the way religious devotion is viewed to this day.

emotional framework Views on life and death coalesced during the Middle Ages into a coherent set of ideas that was consistently infused with a near-uniform pattern of thinking, which in turn generated a sense of belonging. Human imagination, faith and desire for salvation and support are interconnected and an emotional sense took root and proliferated in the early and high Middle

Ages that every mortal was allotted a similar fate on earth and in heaven and hell. That feeling – part of the intangible history of devotion – remained strong in the later Middle Ages and through to the seventeenth century, fortified by concrete, worldly facts as and when these arose. This emotional framework helped set the pattern of life, which became an uninterrupted preparation for the inevitable step into the afterlife. Society was convinced that this preparation was something best not embarked on alone. The hierarchy of dominant and subordinate social classes immersed the population in literary and artistic, visual messages, in religious and social exhortations and guidelines that laid out the path to be followed. Everything was instilled with the trinity of worship, the lives of the saints as edifying example and the institution of the Church, forcibly clearing the path to heaven. The course of human life was outlined in as close analogy as possible to the life of Christ and those of the saints. The complex of actions and effects at spiritual, social and psychological level functioned practically and pragmatically. A devotional attitude and allocating saints specific niches based on the particular tasks and powers they were expected to deliver, met a social need.

duality between preservation and renewal The sixteenth century touched a nerve as far as European religion was concerned. A duality arose in the religious world between preservation and innovation, which was also reflected in religious art. A similar dichotomy is apparent in the development of medical science. A lot of medieval attitudes were still embedded in religious thinking. People remained true to the original symbols, but new themes emerged too, drawn from the living tradition. Plague epidemics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drove an increase in veneration of the Eucharist. Devotion to the Cross, the symbol of unity in Christian society, increased from the seventeenth century onward under the influence of the Counter-Reformation, with particular reference to Christ’s twofold nature as God and human being. The Cross was the symbol binding earth with heaven and its worship paved the way toward a divine afterlife. Art legitimated veneration of this kind, just as processions and other customs did.

It is not always possible to achieve a strict distinction between devotional practice in specific towns or regions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: we frequently lack sufficiently concrete and specific source material to form a precise and complete picture of worship. Common devotional features are often found in several different places. On top of that, we have the problem of a lack of uniform information for particular cult locations, attributable to the fact that the site in question is not always a public place of worship, or has ceased to be. The organizational structure of the institution – not always known – played a decisive role in disseminating the pattern of religious thinking, which extended beyond the relevant place of worship alone. Intangible history, of which worship forms part, largely spreads mouth to mouth. Devotion made ample use of visual aids. Spirituality remained inseparable from the real, living world. Piety and factual reality cross-fertilized one another as and when the need arose, and it is that fact that makes it possible to identify a thread running through the world of sixteenth and seventeenth-century devotional thinking. Religious practices sent out signals to reality, setting out beacons and markers at the moment devotion manifested itself. Knowledge of the veneration of the saints linked to a location helps sketch a portrait of the time.

st barbara The veneration of St Barbara is an example of such a beacon. She was the exemplar of courage through faith in an anti-Christian climate. From the late fourteenth century onwards, she became one of the best-loved saints, even though she had been known in the west since the ninth century. The ‘Devotio Moderna’ or Modern Devotion movement placed her on a pedestal and professional groups adopted her as their patron. Veneration of St Barbara was powerfully stimulated during both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Few saints, incidentally, popped up out of nowhere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nor, after the seventeenth, did they disappear abruptly from devotional life either. The illustration of ‘A dying man, beset by demons’ from the Apocalypsis S. Johannis cum glossis et Vita S. Johannis (c. 1420–30), shows several saints who were still venerated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the context of death, and who had become part of the collective consciousness. St Barbara had her own place within these visual Ars moriendi.

She was venerated in the hope of averting accidental death without benefit of the last rites. Special mention was made of the cult of St Barbara in the seventeenth century in the records

of Sint-Janshospitaal. The outbreaks of plague in that period in Bruges led to her taking on the new function of ‘plague saint’. Virgin saints were particularly venerated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so the martyrdom of the virgin Barbara, favoured by God’s grace from birth, and her independent attitude toward men helped raise her fame and her veneration to almost dizzying heights. Her picture slotted perfectly into the religious album of the time and her veneration at Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges is wholly understandable. The hospital function has to be placed firmly in the context of being ill and dying. As an exceptional female virgin saint, Barbara will undoubtedly have had special appeal to the nuns who staffed the hospital, while the threat of plague to the city raised the human need for consolation and assistance. St Barbara offered spiritual solace.

In addition to the importance of the identity of the saint venerated at a particular location and time, the place where his or her image was specifically installed also has a significance that ought not to be underestimated. The tangible presence of a saint makes it a ‘holy’ place and legitimizes devotion. Physical heritage defines the holy character of the cult location. Even in the twenty-first century, St Barbara remains an icon against sudden death among certain professional groups. Her eternal beauty and the variety with which she is represented also help explain her exceptional popularity across the boundaries of time and locations of worship.

30 Anonymous, St Barbara, sculpture, oak, late-fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Memling in Sint-Jan – Hospitaalmuseum, Bruges

31 A dying man is tempted by demons, Apocalypsis S. Johanniscum glossis et Vita S. Johannis, c. 1420–30, ink and watercolour, inv. L0029294, Wellcome Library, London

32 Martyrdom of St Barbara, engraving by Wierix after Johannes Stradanus, inv. V0031660, Wellcome Library, London 31

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