Achronology and the lives of saints - the case of Saint Servatius at Skive Church, Denmark

 
In a previous blogpost, I wrote about how medieval art sometimes condenses elements of a saint’s life into an achronological summary, where several key points from different parts of a saint’s life are brought into the same frozen here-and-now. This kind of amalgamation is part of what Cynthia Hahn has called “pictorial hagiography”, a term that reminds us that medieval art had a narrative function, and that a single image could convey an entire story. This kind of narrative snapshot, however, is not uniquely medieval, and it is not something we have lost in our own time, but we often tend to forget that this kind of sophisticated thinking where chronological borders melt into one another was also present in the Middle Ages.            

When last I wrote about this issue on the blog, I used an example from the Church of Our Lady at Skive, a town in Northern Jutland. The church, built around 1200, contains an impressive programme of frescoes depicting saints, a programme that was painted in 1522, a date which has been incorporated into several of the frescoes. My example then was Saint Martin, shown in bishop’s attire while cutting his cloak in half, a deed he committed when he was still a soldier. The other day, however, I came across yet another example from the same wall-painting programme, and as this example works slightly differently from the case of Saint Martin, I decided to dedicate this blogpost especially to analysing it. 

Eminen and his son Servatius, the future bishop

The saint in question is Saint Servatius of Maastricht, shown in one of the vaults of the church nave, who was venerated as a relative of Christ through his great-grandmother, Hismeria, was the sister of Anna, the grandmother of Christ. In this way, Saint Servatius was part of the extended holy family, whose members had been recorded in apocryphal literature. When Jacobus de Voragine composed his Legenda Aurea in the 1260s, he provided an overview of this extended family in his chapter on the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (September 8). While Legenda Aurea was a repository of already well-established knowledge, and therefore did not contain much in terms of new information, the popularity of the book ensured that a lot of details concerning the saints became more widely and commonly known as Legenda Aurea and its translations spread across Latin Christendom in the Later Middle Ages. These details also reached Denmark.        

The case of Saint Servatius is a particularly interesting example of how Legenda Aurea functioned as a vehicle of canonicity. By this I mean that information that had not been widely known, or perhaps not widely accepted, was transformed into established canon through the sheer popularity and reach of Jacobus’ book. Before the 1260s, the cult of Saint Servatius was predominantly, perhaps exclusively, located in Maastricht, where his relics were kept. I do not yet know the history of the legend of Servatius and his kinship with Christ, and I do not yet know how it emerged at Maastricht, but by the mid-thirteenth century, the claim that Servatius was of the Holy Family had reached Genoa and was incorporated into Legenda Aurea and established as a canonical fact. It should also be noted that this kind of historical refashioning or reimagining of the history of a patron saint was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, although not every such refashioning had the impact of Saint Servatius.

We do not know how the knowledge of the kinship between Christ and Saint Servatius reached Northern Jutland, but there were many possible routes by which that information could have travelled, be it directly from Legenda Aurea, from a German translation, through sermons, through merchants, and so on. Saint Servatius’ presence in Skive is, therefore, no surprise. What is particularly interesting is, as stated earlier, the way that the fresco in Skive combines crucial elements of his life. As can be seen in the picture above, Servatius is shown as a child wearing a bishop’s mitre. That he is intended to be understood as a child is clear when we compare his size with that of his father Eminen, standing next to him. Does this mean that Servatius was understood as a child-bishop? Probably not. Most likely, what we see here is a way of highlighting that he was a member of the holy family, but a young member of a later generation than that of his great-grandmother Hismeria and his great-grandaunt Anna. A similar way of showing the difference between generations can be seen in the depiction of John the Baptist in another section of the vault, where he, too, is depicted as a child. This kind of representation of several generations in one image is typical of the images that modern scholarship call Anna self-third, where we see the three generations of Anna, the Virgin Mary, and the Christchild. This iconography was very popular in the Later Middle Ages.         

The depiction of Servatius as a child, then, shows his kinship with Christ and as a late generation of the holy family. In other words, we see an element of the very beginning of his life, an element that in and of itself was cause for a claim to holiness. The simultaneous depiction of him as a bishop, however, points to a later part of his life – a part that would become his future when he was a child, and that was also a part of the distant past by the time this image was painted in Northern Jutland. Onlookers would, in this way, get a summary of Servatius most salient claims to holiness, his kinship and his office as a bishop, in one and the same glance.