Horses, halberds, and other symbols of Saints

Why do images of Saint Martin of Tours almost always show him riding a horse? And why is the Ukrainian saint Josaphat Kuntsevych generally shown carrying a strangely shaped weapon?

We Catholics often use holy cards of saints and blesseds as a focal point when we want to ask these residents of Heaven to intercede for us with God. But paintings of saints are also teaching tools. That is, they include a sort of visual code, called saint iconography, to help us remember important things about that saint. This is easy to demonstrate, even using only the saints and blesseds commemorated by the Church in the month of November.

Before the advent of photography and widespread literacy, images of the saints were not designed to provide an accurate representation of the physical appearance of a particular holy person. After all, a saint’s closest friends might be long dead before someone wanted to put his image on a stained-glass window in a church. What mattered was the person’s holiness, not her height, her clothes, or the length of her nose. The Gospels themselves taught us to be more concerned with sanctity than hairstyles when they intentionally omitted details about the physical appearance of our Lord, His Mother, and all the apostles.

Therefore, a sort of shorthand evolved over the centuries to make it easy for a faithful Catholic to identify a given saint in an image, without being forced to read a biography or keep track of the recorded physical appearance of that saint.

A saint’s clothing is perhaps the easiest symbol to decipher. An image of Saint Martin de Porres (whose feast day is on November 3) will show him wearing a Dominican habit because he was a Dominican brother. Similarly, Blessed John Duns Scotus (Nov. 8) is depicted in the habit of a Franciscan priest.

How do you show that someone is a virgin or a martyr? If the saint is holding a lily, a symbol commonly used in images of Saint Joseph, the flower indicates the person’s purity. If the saint is holding a palm frond, like those strewn before our Lord on Palm Sunday, the saint died a martyr. Crowns can also symbolize martyrdom, although a crown on the head of Saint Edmund the Martyr (Nov. 20) is probably there to remind you that he was the king of England as well.

Only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of Catholic saints and blesseds are remembered by name during the liturgical year at Mass. But cities often retain a devotion to those saints who lived and died in them. All saints and blesseds, therefore, can be considered patrons of their native cities and countries or the locations where they died. Saint Andrew Dung Lac (Nov. 24) is therefore known as a patron of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people, along with the 116 bishops, priests, and laymen who also died for their faith in that country and are celebrated on the same date.

Saints are considered patrons of those people who share their state in life, whether that be husband, wife, widow, priest, brother, sister, or nun. For example, Saint Margaret of Scotland (Nov. 16) is a patron saint for wives, mothers, and queens because she was a wife, a mother, and the queen of Scotland in the eleventh century. But she is also the patron of large families, because she had eight children, and for prayers against the death of one’s children, because her husband and a son died before she did.

Saints are sometimes shown with symbols indicating their professions. Saint Albert the Great (Nov. 15) was a brilliant thinker, so he is often depicted with the tools of his trade: books of philosophy and the natural sciences. If there’s a student shown next to him, it’s probably his most famous pupil, Saint Thomas Aquinas.

It’s difficult to visually depict that a saint is a patron of a particular medical condition. How do you show that Saint Andrew Avellino (Nov. 10) is the patron of stroke victims unless you know that he died of a stroke? It is also difficult to indicate in a painting that Saint Charles Borromeo (Nov. 4) is the patron of stomach problems or obesity. Frankly, it is almost as difficult to understand why he has become known as a patron of those conditions at all. However, we do know that Saint Charles, who grew up in a wealthy family and who spent much of his life in the halls of power, was also remarkably careful to live a simple and even ascetic personal life. Contemporary paintings of Charles show him to be a thin man (with a distinctive nose), so perhaps asking him to intercede and help you control your weight problem makes sense for that reason.

There are several saints of November who are also known as patrons of seemingly unrelated conditions and occupations. It may not be obvious to non-Catholics why Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Nov. 25) is often portrayed with books, why Saint Cecilia of Rome (Nov. 22) is shown surrounded by musical instruments, and why Saint Martin of Tours (Nov. 11) is often depicted sitting on a horse.

According to tradition, Saint Catherine was a brilliant young woman of Alexandria, Egypt, who lived during the days of the early persecution of the Church. The best and the brightest thinkers in pagan society tried to talk her out of her Christian faith—and failed. For that reason, she is known as the patron of librarians, lawyers, and apologists.

Saint Cecilia has been honored for seventeen centuries as a brave and beautiful virgin martyr who faced multiple execution attempts with peaceful trust in God. Traditions also say that she “sang in her heart” and that the pipes in her bath whistled at the time of her death. These stories, which are perhaps legends, are usually offered as the reason that she is considered the patron of music and musicians. Such traditions usually have some kernel of truth hidden in them, and perhaps Cecilia had a lovely singing voice or a great personal fondness for music, and those who knew her remembered that endearing fact afterward.

Saint Martin of Tours was just Martin the soldier back in the early fourth century. He was serving in the Roman army in France and had not yet been baptized when he famously gave half of his cloak to a shivering, poor man on a cold winter’s day. By the time of his death as the bishop of Tours, Martin was universally loved because of the decades he spent selflessly serving his flock and the poor. Paintings of Saint Martin have depicted him as a soldier, leaning down from his horse to help someone in need, ever since.

Sometimes images of the saints can teach you historical details that you didn’t know. Saint Josaphat Kuntsevych (Nov. 12) was born in Ukraine and raised in the Orthodox Church. After he became a Catholic, then a monk, and then a priest, he was made archbishop of Polotsk (now Belarus). Josaphat’s attempts to reconcile Orthodox believers to the Catholic Church were successful, so successful that it caused resentment and anger. That’s why he is often depicted holding an unusually shaped pole weapon called a halberd. His enemies killed him with one.

The symbols used to depict the saints of the Church do more than teach us what a medieval weapon looks like. These symbols often point us back to key teachings about the Catholic faith. Why would painters show stories from a saint’s less-than-perfect past or include gruesome details about his death?

Through the witness of their holy lives, the saints point us toward the perfect example that they tried to emulate: Jesus Christ. They show us that it’s possible for ordinary people like us to get down from our high horses and serve the poor, use our brains to understand the faith and explain it to others, bring beauty into our fallen world through music, or be willing to face a brutal death for the sake of our faith. They transform symbols of death and pain into signs of hope and resurrection, just as our Lord did.

All the symbols of the saints are shorthand symbols pointing towards Christ, His Cross, and His Resurrection, and that is why the saints will continue to move our hearts until He comes again.