Last week I visited Skive Church in Northern Jutland, a beautiful stone church built around 1200 and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. What brought me there were the early sixteenth-century wall paintings covering the vaults of the nave and the choir, which is an impressive catalogue of saints similar in selection and execution to the wall paintings of Roskilde Cathedral, which likely were painted by the same workshop of artists. There are many beautiful details in the iconographic programme of Skive Church, but here I want to touch on one particular issue that really struck me as I was examining the various figures, namely how medieval art often employs achronicity to convey a saint's life in a single image. This use of achronicity is a very effective way of telling a saint's story through an assemblage of key aspects of that story. In so doing, the medieval artists fused various times, or perhaps rather various temporal moments, into one unit. The result is similar to what we often find in liturgical offices, where past and present commingles in a way that effectively - to use a beautiful phrase by Henry Parkes in a 2014 article - collapses time. In Skive Church I saw this particularly clearly in the depiction of Saint Martin of Tours.
Vor Frue Kirke, Skive, c.1200
Martin and Roch
Skive Church, Northern Jutland, early fifteenth century
The story of Saint Martin was widely known in the Middle Ages, as he was one of the oldest of the major non-biblical saints in the calendar, and as his cult was disseminated throughout all of Latin Christendom. In short, Martin was a Roman soldier of Pannonian origin who converted to Christianity, abandoned the army and settled as a hermit in some old ruins outside of Tours. When the bishopric of Tours became vacant, Martin was approached to become the next bishop, a position he very unwillingly accepted. His unwillingness later became the foundation for a story about how he hid among geese so as not to be found, but the geese made such a fuss about it that he was found. This story is neither in the first life of Martin by Sulpicius Severus (before 397) nor in any of the miracle accounts recorded in the sixth century by Gregory of Tours, Martin's successor and most efficient promoter. The most famous story from Severus' Life of Martin is arguably the story of how he divided his cloak while he was a soldier in order to give half of it to a beggar. This scene - usually featuring an equestrian soldier cutting his cloak with a sword - is found in many media of art throughout the medieval period. This scene is also used in the depiction of Saint Martin at Skive Church.
What struck me about Saint Martin at Skive, however, was that it was not the soldier on horseback who divided his cloak with his sword, but the bishop in full regalia who performed this act of charity. In terms of the legend of Saint Martin, this is a historical impossibility since Martin only became a bishop at a much later stage in his life. But in the narrative, achronic logic of medieval art, it makes perfect sense. The people attending services in the church who knew the story of Saint Martin - and such people were most likely in an overwhelming majority to those who did not - would easily recognise Martin from his particular act of charity, and they would know that he is to be remembered as a man of the church rather than a soldier saint. Because even though Saint Martin was a soldier, his story is only concerned with this aspect of his life to a minor degree. His most iconic act took place in this period, but it was also this act which prompted Martin to leave the army, as he afterwards had a vision of Christ praising him for his Christian charity. To put it in a different way, the deeds of Martin were carried out mainly as a bishop and his Christian acts were predominantly enacted as a man of the church. This is unlike soldier saints such as Mauritius and the Theban Legion who were martyred as soldiers and therefore enacted their sainthood as soldiers. This means that in the painting at Skive Church, Martin's role as an ecclesiastical saint is emphasised, and his saintliness is not given a militaristic tinge, so as to make clear his saint-type as a bishop and confessor, not a soldier and martyr.
In this way, we see how achronicity serves to summarise the key points of a saint's story - in this case by fusing one specific act with the profession he held at a later point - and at the same time provide the correct typology for the saint in question. Various temporal points in Saint Martin's life are merged into a symbolic, achronic here-and-now. It is, however, not timeless - at least not in the way liturgical narrative is often timeless by fusing past with the present and sometimes even with an apocalyptic future through references to Judgement Day - because both of the aspects represented in this image are of the historic, past Martin. However, there is still a sense of timelessness in what we see here as well, because this achronic representation of a historical person is also there to serve as a reminder that he, the saint, is always present and ready to receive the supplications of the faithful. In other words, while the image itself represents two separate stages of the past, it also contains in itself the promise of aid in the present as well as in the future, forever and ever, in saecula saeculorum.
This is, in short, a reminder of how wonderfully complex and sophisticated medieval art could be.
Bishop Martin dividing his soldier's cloak
Skive Church, Northern Jutland, ealry fifteenth century
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