A lion from Skibet Church, Denmark

 

Today is the feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, whose main attribute is the lion, and on whose feast was performed the great litany, letania maior, a catalogue of saints invoked in the performance of the mass. As an evangelist, Mark belongs to the oldest register of saints, and therefore one of the truly universal saints of the medieval kalendars. 

This year, I had hoped to put together a blogpost on Saint Mark, but as I have been preoccupied with various commitments, I have decided to leave Saint Mark for later, having now convinced my readers that there is a lot to return to. Instead, I will make use of his leonine attribute to share my encounter with one of several glorious medieval lions that can be found throughout the medieval church spaces of Denmark. I encountered this lion in May 2019, my last spring in Denmark, when I joined some colleagues on a trip to Skibet Church near Vejle in Jutland.  

The church was built around 1200, and originally had a broader nave. The main feature of interest in the church is a spectacular restored fresco from the early thirteenth century, which covers the Eastern end of the nave. Unfortunately, as the nave has been narrowed at a later point, there are several details missing, and the general scene and its meaning remains a matter of contention. Despite the unresolved questions, the scene is an absolute delight to behold, and a forceful testament to quality of church art in medieval Denmark. And as always is the case with medieval art - be it wall-paintings, sculptures, illuminations or any other medium - there are several details in which one can get lost when perusing the scenery. One such detail is a lion.

The lion might not appear very leonine to our modern eyes, but it follows the established conventions of how lions commonly were depicted in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries in Latin Christendom. It appears to serve a mainly decorative function, as an architectural feature, a corbel uniting the pillar with the vaulting in the timeless architectural backdrop depicted in the scene. There might be additional layers to how we understand it, as medieval images could carry several meanings at one and the same time, but because the scene remains somewhat obscure to us, it is unclear how we should interpret this lion. As it is now, it serves as a reminder that the iconographical conventions of Latin Christendom also were in place in medieval Denmark, and that although very few Danes could be expected to have ever seen a lion, it was such an established part of the semiotics of the Middle Ages that it is ubiquitous in the sacred spaces even as far as the Nordic world.

There is also another lion from roughly the same period hiding in the architecture of Skibet Church, but that is another blogpost.