By David Clayton

This image is of St Nicholas, who was Archbishop of Myra in the 4th century, and whose Feast is December 6th. He was Archbishop of Myra, in Lycia (in modern-day Turkey). He has been venerated throughout the Church. Because of his help to the poor, he is the saint of pawnbrokers. His insignia of three golden balls represent three purses of gold he gave secretly to a poor man who could not afford dowries for his three daughters. He attended the Council of Nicea, where, by tradition, he was temporarily barred from attendance for losing his temper and striking an Arian.

This image, which comes from a late 14th-century manuscript which is a French translation of a book called the Golden Legend, depicts another story from his life in which he raised three young men from the dead who had been killed by a butcher several years earlier. The Golden Legend is a series of lives of saints which was compiled in Italy in the 13th-century by Jacobus de Voragine, in which he pulls together the popular accounts of the saints.

St Nicholas is a saint of whom more and more was written as devotion to him increased, especially after the 10th century. The story of three boys only appears in later accounts of the life of St Nicholas and so will often be dismissed as “hagiography” today. This is meant to indicate that is part of a growing mythology surrounding the person and that it is probably not historically true. However, we do not need to accept this argument because it rests on an assumption, born of lack of faith, that accounts of miracles should be viewed with skepticism; and that word of mouth and oral tradition are not reliable mechanisms for the preservation of truth.

The fact that this particular story only appears in writing relatively late does not mean automatically that this story was an invention of the writer, which is what seems to be assumed. It is possible, alternatively, that it did happen and was preserved faithfully by oral tradition.

While we must acknowledge the possibility that details can be added in the repeated telling of a story, without evidence that the author of the book composed the story, it is as reasonable to assume that it is true, it seems to me. The question that I ask myself first is: does this narrative portray a picture of a saint that is consistent with our beliefs as Catholics about what is generally known of him as a person, and which can reasonably inspire us to greater virtue? The answer to this question, in this case, is for me unequivocally yes. As one who believes that through faith miracles happen today, I do not wonder that they happened in the past, too. Given this, why doubt the truth of the story?

In regard to the image itself, it is classed as a “miniature.” The term “miniature” is used here as a generic term for all medieval illumination and originally does not refer to its size but rather to a particular red pigment, “red lead” commonly used by artists for the foundational establishment of line and tone in the production of a painting. Red lead is a lead oxide called, in Latin, minium. Red lead was used primarily in manuscript illumination because it was preferential to use a lighter-toned line to describe form in a picture that would be seen from close up. It was not used in the same way for art used in churches, which would use bolder contrast since images would be viewed, relatively, from a distance. For this reason, the term miniature came to mean any manuscript art. Over centuries, and because illuminations are generally smaller than the art that would be used in churches, it gradually became a general term for all small-scale art. Finally, in the English language, it became a descriptor for any object of small size, not just art.

Consistent also with the idea of presenting this scene as a historical event that is, nevertheless, a heavenly reality, the artist does not place the figures in a pictorial scene or landscape that creates a sense of depth and space behind the plane of the painting. Instead, they occupy the plane of the parchment. He deliberately eliminates any illusion of three-dimensional space by filling the negative space, which surrounds the figures, with a geometric pattern. This two-dimensionality creates a symbolic quality to the image which is consistent with the idea of a heavenly realm that exists outside time and space, that is outside the three-dimension world that we occupy. Other ways of achieving this elimination of space would be to use gold leaf or a single flat painted color for the negative space. The latter two are more common in Eastern iconography, while the use of geometry is employed more regularly to the same end in the Western Gothic tradition.