Title

Saint Paul

Anonimous

Generic classification

Object

Date

Century

Cultural context / style

Dimensions

Material

Technique

Iconography / Theme

Provenance

Current location

Inventory Number in Current Collection

Inscriptions / Marks

FR[ATRE]S / VIDE / TE Q [UOMOD]O / CAU / TE ABV / LETIS (Saint Paul's scroll) 

(Harvard Art Museums)

Object history

This sculpture, which is actually the shaft of a column, represents St. Paul and, like another one depicting the archangel St. Michael, also preserved at the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, comes from the monastery of San Facundo y San Primitivo de Sahagún (León). Both came to the institution as a bequest from Lucy Wallace Porter (1876-1962), American photographer and wife of Harvard University archaeologist and art historian Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933). The role played by this historian in the arrival of Romanesque works in the United States is interesting; his work for the study and dissemination of Romanesque art along the Camino de Santiago is well known; it is worth noting how his studies opened the way for other research and showed in international academic circles certain medieval treasures of the peninsula, until then not as well known as Spanish works of art from more recent historical periods. These contributions, and their subsequent dissemination -which was greatly helped by the photographs that accompanied his studies, some of them taken by his wife Lucy-, promoted the interest of collectors, museums and antique dealers in certain works that ended up in U.S. collections.

Among the pieces collected by Porter in his work Spanish Romanesque Sculpture were these sculptures from the monastery of San Facundo de Sahagún (León), which the American scholar had the opportunity to see in the locality during one of his study trips (Porter, 1928, vol. II, p. 8, fig. 120); they later entered his private collection (the Harvard Museum indicates that they came to the Porter collection through an unidentified antiquarian based in Madrid). Years after his death, it was his wife, Lucy Wallace Porter, who bequeathed these statue-columns to the Fogg Museum at Harvard University.

Regarding the cloister of the monastery of San Facundo y San Primitivo de Sahagún (León), Ambrosio de Morales noted: "In this Monesterio there are in the cloister three or four pieces of a jasper, or purple porphyry, which being where water and wind can greatly damage it, and being very old of five hundred years, it has its luster and full radiance, as if it was put there yesterday. And other columns of marble and jasper, which are where these are without any luster. These are small hills of six feet with lumps carved on them" (Ambrosio de Morales, 1792, p. 52).

Already in the early years of the 20th century, Manuel Gómez-Moreno, in the Monumental Catalog of the Province of León, offered more details about these sculptures in Sahagún: "Near the monastery church, like posts in the corners of a haystack, there are two small columns of dirty marble, companions of the Virgin of the Museum of León, also from here, with deteriorated reliefs, perhaps of the Savior, since it has a rod like a cross and a dragon at its feet, and St. Paul with the sword. Morales mentioned them, but without determining their placement. XIII Century. Another companion of the previous ones, with a bishop whose head is missing: it is in the orchard of D. Rodrigo Torbado". These would be the sculptures in question, although the one that Gómez-Moreno interpreted as, perhaps, an image of the Savior, would be the archangel St. Michael, as already indicated by R. Steven Janke (1989, pp. 176-177) and Ángela Franco Mata (2010, p. 249).

Gómez-Moreno was in Sahagún in 1908 and already in that visit he appreciated the degree of abandonment and deterioration in which the dependencies of the old Benedictine monastery were found: "Of architecture there is something Romanesque, especially the old and enormous church of the monastery of Sahagún reduced to few remains, where the most notable are its ogival adaptations..." (Lorenzo Arribas and Pérez Martín, S., 2024, II, p. 804); the truth is that it was not these columns that caught the attention of the historian from Granada, but the tombstone of Alfonso Ansúrez, which he described and reproduced photographically in his Monumental Catalog of the province of León. Curiously, this lauda was also acquired by Arthur Kingsley Porter during his stay in Sahagún, and likewise, reproduced by the scholar in his work: Spanish Romanesque Sculpture, as he also did with these statues-columns that occupy us. The lid of the sarcophagus of Alfonso Ansúrez ended up in the Fogg Museum, although, in this case, the efforts undertaken by Ricardo de Orueta, from his position as Director General of Fine Arts during the Second Spanish Republic, allowed its restitution to Spain, which is why the tombstone is currently preserved in the National Archaeological Museum. It was an operation formalized in exchange for the sculptures columns from San Pelayo de Antealtares (Santiago de Compostela), currently in the Fogg Museum.

To elucidate the specific place where this column that houses the image of St. Paul was originally located is a very complex task, given that the ancient Benedictine monastery of Sahagún is buried under the modern constructions of the present town and the remains that have come down to us are scarce. In any case, Franco Mata pointed to the disappeared chapter house of the monastery as the space from which this work would come, and even suggested the hypothesis that it was found at the entrance to the chapter house, showing, as an example, the entrance door to the chapter house in the monastery of Santa María de Benevívere (Palencia), now disappeared, but of which we preserve the engraving made by Jenaro Pérez Villaamil printed in 1842(BNE, ER/1716 (4)) (Franco Mata, 2010, pp. 116-119).

Description

St. Paul is depicted bald, with a beard and a stern expression, wearing a tunic, carrying the sword of his martyrdom, as well as the phylactery that brings him closer to the monastic life and where the text of St. Paul's epistle is found: FRATRES VIDETE QUOMODO CAUTE ABVLETIS (Eph. 5:15). 5:15), glossed by St. Augustine in his Sermon 167: "VIDETE QUOMODO CAUTE AMBULETIS; NON UT INSIPIENTES, SED UT SAPIENTES; REDIMENTES TEMPUS, QUONIAM DIEZ MALI SUNT" (FRANCO MATA, 2010, p. 250).

Locations

• ca. 1925

  monastery

  Monastery of Saints Facundo and Primitivo, Sahagún (Spain)

• ca. 1925 - 1933

  private collection

  Arthur Kingsley Porter, Cambridge (United States) *

• 1933 - 1962

  private collection

  Lucy Wallace Porter, Cambridge (United States) *

• 1962 - present

  museum

  Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge [Massachusetts] (United States)