Porch of the Confessors: St. Martin, Jerome, and

Gregory 1220-1230

Carved Stone

Chartres Cathedral

Analysis by:

Alicia Berdan

The Cathedrals of France

Art 4903

The Porch of Confessors is a prime example of high gothic

architecture on one of the most renowned French Cathedrals, Chartres

Cathedral. Chartres Cathedral was rebuilt from the destroyed

Romanesque church and brought about the birth of the High Gothic norm

of four part vaulting (Kleiner 470). Chartres’ transepts were erected

in 1194 after the fire that destroyed most of the city and the former

church (Kleiner 472). The sculpture of the south transept date from

1220 to 1230 after the transept was built (Kleiner 473). St. Martin,

Jerome, and Gregory are located on the jambs of the right portal on

the Porch of the Confessors on the south transept of Chartres

Cathedral (Stones 1).

The Porch of Confessors is an example of the changing forms of

sculpture from the Romanesque age to the Gothic (Kleiner 473). The

sculptures are carved in stone and recall the revolutionary

developments of Greek sculpture (Kleiner 473). These three Saint jamb

figures reveal this change in sculpture because they have more

individual personalities and break away from the rigid vertical lines

of the Romanesque sculpture (Kleiner 473). St. Martin, Jerome, and

Gregory are calmer and quieter sculptures but they have moved away

from the jam columns and have less stiff and shallow vertical accents

(Kleiner 473). The depth of these figures is immensely great in

comparison to the sculpture that is seen on many Romanesque cathedrals

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and buildings. There is a breakthrough in the detail and personality

of human faces to give more distinct attributes to these sculptures,

whereas before in the Romanesque period the faces were more

spiritually moved than particularized (Kleiner 473). Having the

sculptures of the saints placed on the door jams gives them balance

and equality because they are parallel (O’Connell 107). St. Martin,

Jerome, and Gregory have physical features and symbolic items to help

the viewer determine who they are and why they were important (Kleiner

473).

The three figures together create a great sense of balance and

peace. Each of the Saints right hands appears higher than their left.

By placing St. Jerome in between St. Martin and St. Gregory he creates

a balance of heights. St. Jerome is a significantly shorter than the

other two, St. Martin and St. Gregory’s hats are both pointed, adding

more height, where as St. Jerome’s is not, St. Jerome’s hands are

lower than the other two sculptures and he is dressed more plainly

than St. Martin and St. Gregory. Both St. Martin and St. Gregory’s

heads turn and look to the left while St. Jerome’s face tilts to the

right creating a visual stop between each sculpture. Despite the

sculptural differences the length of the clothes are the same and have

similar necklines on their robes.

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St. Martin of Tours is the sculpture located on the jam closest

to the right portal and stationed on the right side of St. Jerome.

The jam sculpture of St. Martin is ideal of High Gothic sculpture

because his body has become almost separate from the jam, his clothes

create soft folds over his body, and his head is turned slightly away

from a straight forward view (Kleiner 473). Martin of Tours was born

between 315 and 317 in Sabaria, Pannonia, which is known today as

Steinamanger, Hungary to a pagan Roman tribune (Holweck 667). Saint

Martin was baptized at the age of twenty and spent his life fighting

against the pagan men of his country (Holweck 667-668). Martin of

Tours was said to be a man of “strong [nature] and independent

character of unassuming simplicity, noble benevolence, and an

incorruptible sense of justice, sound judgment and popular eloquence”

(Holweck 668). The jamb statue of St. Martin is dressed as a bishop,

shown with a beard and halo, and has his right hand raised in a

gesture of blessing while his left hand holds a staff (Stones 1). The

halo placed behind St. Martin’s head is a “symbol of divinity or

sanctity, originally based on the nimbus that surrounds the sun”

(O’Connell 226). St. Martin is dressed in the robes of a bishop

because in 371 he was elected Bishop of Tours by the people and the

clergy (Holweck 668). In St. Martin’s left hand he holds a crosier

which is “a staff resembling a shepherd’s crook carried by bishops…as

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a sign of office” (“Croiser”). The right hand was disfigured from

times of turmoil in France, but according to Allison Stones, Martin of

Tour’s right hand is raised in a gesture of blessing (Stones 2). St.

Martin’s hand would have had the thumb, index finger, and middle

fingers raised while the others were curled to symbolize the Latin

form of the blessing of the Trinity (Gast 8). St. Martin of Tours is

said to be standing on dogs that are licking his crosier, because he

had stopped them from chasing a hare (Stones 2). Instead of dogs, St.

Martin might be standing on two stags which were the “symbol of piety

and devotion and of safety in God’s care” (Gast 19). St. Martin was an

important figure in Chartres Cathedral’s sculpture and stained-glass

(Stones 3). One of Martin of Tours’ miracles is shown on the tympanum

above the right door of the south transept and there are two

clerestory windows dedicated to him (Stones 3).

In between St. Martin and Gregory the Great is a more homely

dressed St. Jerome. St. Jerome was born in Stridon, Dalmatia in 341

and his body was brought to rest in the Sistine chapel of S. M.

Maggiore after his death in 420 (Holweck 528). St. Jerome also has a

halo behind his head to symbolize his divinity or sanctity (O’Connell

226). In his hands Jerome holds a book and a scroll which would

symbolize his scholarship and his translation of the bible from Hebrew

and Greek to Latin (Stones 4). St. Jerome is perched upon a

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blindfolded woman who is identified as a “Synagoga, the

personification of a Jewish Synagog” (Stones 4). The “Synagoga” might

symbolize to St. Jerome his translation of a Jewish Hebrew bible into

Latin and he spent much of his life in the Holy Land (O’Connell 44).

In 386 Jerome settled in Bethlehem where he finished his most

important writings and his translation of the Bible (Holweck 528).

The tilting of St. Jerome’s head towards St. Martin is signature of

the gothic architecture style in which sculpture was starting to

interact with other surrounding sculptures (Kleiner 473). St. Jerome’s

face has a more serene and kind appearance of a scholar (Kleiner 473).

The last of the three saints in this section of the porch jams is

St. Gregory the Great. St. Gregory was born in Rome in 540 and died in

604 (Holweck 446). Gregory the Great is sculpted in the papal

vestments because in February of 590 he was elected Pope and his

pontificate lasted for a glorious 14 years (Holweck 446). Upon his

head he wears a Pallium, which was an earlier version of the papal

tiara (Stones 4). St. Gregory’s head is tilted slightly to the left as

if he was lost in thought as he listened to the dove on his right

shoulder (Kleiner 4730). A dove symbolizes the Holy Spirit and was

said to have put its beak between St. Gregory’s lips while he was

writing his homilies (Stones 4). Having the Holy Spirit on St.

Gregory’s shoulder makes him a man of great importance, and he was.

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Gregory the Great is responsible of the spread of Christianity to

England when he sent St. Augustine there with forty missioners

(Holweck 446). The left hand of St. Gregory holds a scroll which is an

emblem that recognizes him for his scholarly gift of writing (Gast

19). A scroll could also symbolize the law that St. Gregory had and

created during his time as Pope (O’Connel 241).

The jamb sculptures of St. Martin, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory

helped to make Chartres Cathedral a driving force of new gothic

architecture in France. The placement of these sculptures by the right

portal on the Porch of Confessors made them important figures of

Christianity for the people of Chartres to see and remember when

attending church. Despite their few disfigurations these jam figures

will continue to be prominent examples of the beginning of gothic

architecture.

7

Bibliography

Holweck, The RT.REV.F.G. A Biographical Dictionary of the Saints. St.

Louis. B. Herder Book Co. 1924

Stones, Dr. Allison. “Chartres: Cathedral of Notre Dame”. Digital

Research Library. 2007. University of Pittsburgh. 25 May 2009.

http://images.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/i/image/image-idx?

q1=FCSP33363*;rgn1=chartres_fn;type=simple;view=thumbnail;c=chart

res

Kleiner, Fred S. Gardener’s Art Through The Ages: A Global History 13 th

Edition. Boston. The Thomas Corporation. 2009.

O’Connell, Mark and Raje Airey. The Complete Encyclopedia of Signs andSymbols. Hermes House. 2006

“Crosier.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. 26 May 2009. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crosier.

Gast, Walter E. Symbols in Christian Art and Architecture. 2000. Walter E. Gast. 26 May 2009. http://wegast.home.att.net/symbols/.

8

Patricia Piccinini

The Long Awaited

Alicia BerdanContemporary Issues in Art

October 4, 2011

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Our present is rapidly moving towards a retro-techno future where

we will see fusion of humans and animals beyond our imagination, but

perhaps not beyond the imagination of Patricia Piccinini. In this

essay I will dive into the imagination of Patricia Piccinini and take

a closer look at the contemporary sculptures she fabricates to

enlighten her viewers on a future she believes is not so science

fictional. Piccinini’s works force her viewers to face a future not

every person might be comfortable with. Yet her works bring to life a

future that is quite possible with the ever-growing understanding of

science and genetics. Through Piccinini’s works we can envision a

future with life forms that captivate our curiosities while repulsing

us with their oddities. If you are interested in how our society is

and is progressing as a hyper-nano-digi-techno-cyber-micro-

bioengineered-society, than Piccinini’s work will intrigue and inspire

you to dive deeper in what the future might hold for us (Toffoletti

1).

Born in Sierra Leone in 1965 though now living in Melbourne

Australia, Patricia Piccinini is a sculptor who works with a large

array of multimedia to create realistic future representatives of

genetic experiments (Robertson 264). She received a Bachelor of Arts

in Economic History from the Australian National University and a

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Bachelor of Arts in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts

(Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery). Piccinini is an “offspring of white settler

colonies, their frontier practices, their ongoing immigrations and

their bad memories and trouble discourses of indigeneity, belonging,

appropriation, wastelands, progress and exclusion” (Haraway). Donna

Haraway in her essay “Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s

Generations” considers Piccinini to be a sister of hers in the art

world of “naturecultures” and an engaging feminist in the realm of

science fiction. In 2003, Patricia Piccinini represented Australia at

the Venice Biennale with six sculptural groupings entitled We Are Family

(Robertson 264). Piccinini is represented by galleries from at least

three different countries: Tolarno Galleries and Roslyn Okley9 Gallery

in Australia, the Haunch of Venison in New York, Conner Contemporary

Art, and the FaMa Gallery in Verona, Italy (Piccinini).

Piccinini’s works take on a frontier of hyperrealism that gives

the viewers small ecological habitats that blur our ideas of what is

real and what is fiction (Robertson 264 and Haraway). Through the use

of resin, silicon, wood, fiberglass, clothing, human hair, and many

other forms of media she creates sculptures that immediately attracts

our attention due to their realistic and almost human nature. Inspired

by science, genetics, and future life forms Piccinini creates

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sculptures that set up the viewer to think and react to a wide range

of possible genetically human creations and mutations. Her works

references the term transgenics, which is a field of research that deals

with the mixing and combining of genetic material from many different

living organisms (Robertson 265). As humans we believe that we are

very unique and no other species comes close to having the same

traits, but Piccinini’s works have us interact with creatures that are

so closely related to us yet are bizarre and grotesque. Piccinini

inspires us to think about our everyday basic rights and what our

lives would be like if her “creatures” existed in them. Despite

Piccinini’s critter sculptures being quite visually grotesque they

have a sense of sweetness and care. In her piece The Young Family, we see

a creature much a like a rabbit-monkey-human taking care of her little

babies much like a human or animal mother. In her piece Leather

Landscape, the viewer must confront these genetic altered creatures

interacting with a young female child while nursing their own

genetically altered children. In many of her pieces we find references

to our visual representations of young human children because as a

child we accept and learn to love things more easily that we do as

adults.

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Piccinini’s piece The Long Awaited intrigued me as viewer for a

variety of reasons. Among them was the massive size of this nude obese

mermaid like creature that reclines on a bench with its’ head in a

young white boy’s lap. They appear to be waiting for something while

peacefully resting. The “mermaid” like creature has one solid body

with no separated limbs for legs that leads into a fin like form that

represents the combining of the two human feet with ten toes. It has

two arms, which have 5 fingers and no thumbs. Due to its human

qualities I naturally want to discern its gender but can reason my

self to believe that it might be male or female. The appearance of

wrinkles and white hair would reference in a human the sign of elderly

age though the viewer cannot be certain in this case. The oversized

head gives the impression of a manatee morphed with a human face. The

young white boy with brown hair is sitting on the far right side of

the bench with the mermaid creature’s head in his lap. He himself is

resting his right arm and head with closed eyes along the side of the

creature. The boy appears to be young due to his features and his feet

dangling off the bench and not being able to touch the ground.

To understand Patricia Piccinini’s work The Long Awaited you must

understand the basics of transgenics and bioengineering. By definition

Transgenic is “ relating to an organism whose genome has been altered

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by the transfer of a gene or genes from another species or breed”

(Transgenic). The organisms that are used in transgenic research bring

to light the possibilities of combining more than one species

(Transgenic). Bioengineering deals with the re-combining of DNA from

different genetic sources (Robertson 265). By combining two different

DNAs with the use of technology, humans can further the progress of

evolution faster than at a natural rate (Robertson 265). Piccinini

believes that both transgenics and bioengineering will lead humans

into a posthuman world (Toffoletti 6). The idea of a posthuman world

brings us to conceptualize about what characteristics and attributes

would identify a being that is posthuman, a being that is a

combination of different genetics (Toffoletti 6).

Piccinini’s work The Long Awaited is a visual representation of a

posthuman world. The piece deals with what a posthuman would visually

look like and how a human in a posthuman world would deal with one

(Tofoletti 6). The posthuman creature laying on the bench represents

what visually a transgenic creature would look like. It has features

that are distinctly representative of a human mixed with the features

of a manatee. Piccinini wants us to confront this posthuman and see

how we ourselves would be altered in a personal, social, and political

way. Humans love to humanize just about everything. We dress up our

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dogs, our cats; we create little houses for our gerbils and turtles.

We buy our animals gifts and have them celebrate birthdays and

holidays with us. There are political groups that fight for animal

rights and preach about the humane way treat animals. Would we give

these same rights to posthuman creatures that we scientifically

engineer or would we be scared to lose our rights and rituals to a

posthuman race?

Piccinini’s use of the boy gently interacting with the manatee-

human creates a hopeful insight of a mutual peacefulness between the

human and posthuman races. The Long Awaited gives one scenario of a

posthuman world in which as Katherine Hayles suggests will not be the

end of the human or the rise of the anti-human but the beginning of “a

shared partnership between human and non-human forms that in the

process of this engagement challenges the boundaries of the two”

(Toffoletti 12). But Piccinini knows that not all humans will be as

accepting of the posthuman race as her fabricated boy will be. By

creating this scenario with her sculpture she gives her viewers a

preview of a world she believes will come and a chance for the viewer

to think about how they would handle a posthuman world. The idea of

mutants and monster-like humans are no longer a form of myth or

fantasies but have come to be regarded as possibilities that would

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fracture our idea of a superior human race (Toffoletti 14). The title

of the piece The Long Awaited double references about how the sculptural

beings actually appear to be waiting, or how as a human race we have

long awaited the creation of a posthuman race.

Piccinini created The Long Awaited in a extremely realistic fashion

so that viewers would have a hard time distancing themselves from the

micro-posthuman environment. We are repulsed by the ugliness of the

manatee-human but then endeared by the relationship the young boy

seems to have with it. Humans do not tend to interact let alone touch

things with care unless someone or something is a receiver of their

feelings. The way in which the boy cradles the manatee-human in his

lap and hand shows us that he cares for this posthuman creature. In

this way Piccinini is forcing the viewer to have feelings towards the

manatee-human, she wants us to speak for it to change our thoughts and

invite ourselves to think what we wouldn’t have thought about before

(Kenway 50). Ultimately she wants to have the same feelings towards

this creatures as the young boy does, so that we can in the future

live a mutually beneficial posthuman lives. Her work has us ask

ourselves, will we love the failures of sciences as much as we love

the successes? (Kenway 48).

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It is up to the viewer of Patricia Piccinini’s works to decided

if as humans we will accept this posthuman world that we are so

quickly approaching, or if we will choose to ignore and believe it is

all a myth. Either way, Piccinini has given her viewers a chance to

think about our futures in this bio-engineered world we live. Perhaps

soon it will not only be our food that will be genetically altered but

our very own bodies and distinctiveness as race that will be changed.

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Works Cited

Haraway, Donna. “Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s

Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country”. Australian

Humanities Review. Issue 50. Web. 2011.

http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Australian+Humanities

+Review+-+Issue+50,+2011/5451/ch06.xhtml

Kenway, Jane. Bullen, Elizabeth. Robb, Simon. Innovation and

Tradition. The Arts, Humanities, and the Knowledge of Economy.

Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 2004.

Piccinini, Patricia. Patricia Piccinini. 27 September 2011. Web.

http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/

Robertson, Jean and McDaniel, Craig. Themes of Contemporary Art:

Visual Art after 1980. Oxford University Press, Inc. 2010.

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. Patricia Piccinini. 3 Oct 2011. Web.

http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/contact/

Toffoletti, Kim. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture,

and the Posthuman Body. I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. 2007.

18

Transgenics. Dictionary.com. 2011. Dictionary.com, LLC.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/transgenic

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Appendix

The Young Family

2002

Silicone, fiberglass, leather, human hair, plywood

80 x 150 x 110 cm

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Leather Landscape

2003

Silicone, fiberglass, leather, human hair, clothing, timber

290 x 175 x 165 cm

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The Long Awaited

2008

Clay modeling, silicone production, and hair punching

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