PAINTING THE VIRGIN
Legends, wrote Martin Luther, the great 16th century reformer “are lies : pure, hardy,
powerful lies.” And went on to add, even more vehemently : “Convoluted, unadulterated,
doubt-sowing and devilish.”
And yet legends, especially those rooted in religious beliefs, have always had a way of
surviving. One knows that well from one’s own culture. Even within the Christian
Church, which Luther set out to reform, virtually nothing changed as far as faith in
legends went. Hagiographies continued to be written; the lives of the saints, complete
with all the attendant visions and miracles, continued to be believed in; pilgrimages to
holy places kept becoming more intense, for there was healing there, and solace. If
current scholarship in the west is regarded, Christian saints and their legends are
enjoying what can almost be called a renaissance.
“Saint lives”, as a writer notes, “are in vogue among scholars in the way Arthurian
literature was in the 1970’s and 1980’s,” with female saints, ignored for so long, coming
in for special attention, considering the ongoing re-envisioning of women’s history.
Growing interest in the past and the conviction that the history is not condemned to
withdraw into the fleeting preoccupations of the present and, also that it is still possible
to speak of something other than ourselves.
In this context – that of legends and lives of saints – something that holds special
interest for me is the legend which speaks of St. Luke, author of the third gospel and of
the celebrated Acts of the Apostles, as being the first painter to have drawn a likeness
of virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. An enormous amount has been written about the
saint. One says that he lived in the times of Jesus Christ, was a companion of the
Apostle Paul, is considered as the most literary of the New Testament writers, and was
perhaps a physician by training. It has been conjectured that, having neither child nor
wife, he accompanied Paul on a number of his missionary journeys, in fact till the
Apostle’s martyrdom. Tradition speaks of him as dying at the ripe old age of 84.
Because of his profession, over time he started being seen by physicians as their patron
saint. But tradition also speaks of him as the official portraitist of the Virgin. How and
when the story of his having painted the Virgin with the infant Jesus in her lap grew, no
one is certain about. But one knows that by the sixth century, at least Byzantium – now
called Constantinople, and then a stronghold of Christian power – there was widespread
belief in this. Scholars have been speculating about the possible sources of this belief
and it is generally surmised that it might be linked to the fact of a Byzantine empress
having founded three major churches in one of which “an image of the virgin painted by
St. Luke” was installed.
The virgin’s mantle and girdle were worshiped in two of these churches : the third
gained fame as housing the icon of the virgin. It is all a bit obscure, but one knows that,
as time went by, the belief that saint Luke having painted the Virgin remained constant.
By the 11th century, the saint’s name was firmly connected with the famous Hodegetria
icon.
The iconography of the painter and the painted – the Virgin nursing the child – was
complete. Serious doubts have been raised about the historical possibility of the saint
having seen the Mary or Jesus as an infant. But a legend, born no one knows where,
had grown, come to stay and entered the lives of the devout. Evidently, because it
fulfilled a deep, emotional need. Painters of the Northern Europe fostered the legend of
painting by Saint Luke through their works and other paintings.
However, the Syrian Christians of Kerala, whose community is believed to have been
founded by saint Thomas in the first century, claim that they still possess one of the
sacred icons showing the Virgin painted by St. Luke. According to them, St. Thomas
himself brought the image to India.
-DR. NAVRAJ SINGH SANDHU, www.navraj@gmail.com