Which Saint is that again?

The Transfiguration, St Jerome and St Augustinec. 1500Tempera on panel, 28 x 36 cmGalleria Pallavicini, Rome

from the Web Gallery of Art http://www.wga.hu/index.html


Hi everyone - we are, of course, going to be looking at LOTS of wonderful art, and the great majority of it will be religious in nature. Religious paintings tend to be loaded with symbolism, not least because the common folk were often illiterate, so needed a visual cue to know which saint they were looking at, what scene they were seeing depicted, etc.

Here are a couple of sites that are very useable for sorting out which saint is which.

http://www.aug.edu/augusta/iconography/index.html

For example, if you're wondering who the patron saint of Milan is, you can enter "Milan" in the search engine and come up with several images of St. Ambrose. You'll also see a brief discussion of the iconography (i.e., the visual sacred symbols) associated with Ambrose, in this case a riding whip, often with three cords to symbolize the trinity. If you were trying to figure out who Jerome and Augustine are in the above Botticelli, you could look them up, too.

If you really like this kind of stuff, you can also check out a much more complete website of saints at:

http://www.catholic.org/saints/

Note, for example, that there are 773 entries (!) under "M" alone. But again, this is fully searchable -

Jeff