Divine Stone

St. Catherine, the second figure on the north side of the Martyrs Portal, was a princess, the daughter of the legendary King Costus and Queen Sabinella of Cyprus and Alexandria. The many Renaissance paintings of her invariably depict her as an expensively-dressed noblewoman with flowing locks topped by a coronet, as in the painting below by the Master of the Legend of St. Lucy.

John Angel breaks with this tradition, dressing Catherine in the everyday apparel of a third-century Roman matron. Rather than royal robes, she wears a voluminous mantle known as palla over an ankle-length stola. A simple head scarf replaces the customary coronet. Only one stray lock of her hair is visible. But her regal bearing betrays her noble birth. 

Her right hand rests on a broken wheel, an element in the story of her martyrdom. She lifts a small cross with her left hand, the symbol of the faith she adopted after turning away from her pagan upbringing. Her left arm is discolored with what master stonecutter Stephen Boyle suggests is gypsum pollution build up.

We are startled to see her feet resting upon a severed head. Here Angel revives the visual trope of hagiographic art known as “the persecutor underfoot,” where martyrs stand or sit triumphantly atop the image of their persecutors. In Catherine’s case, the persecutor is the Roman emperor Maxentius (c. 283-312). The Flemish painting above has another, slightly less ghoulish, example of the trope. 

The pedestal depicts two episodes in the life of St. Catherine –her mystical marriage to Christ on the left and her martyrdom under Maxentius on the right. 

The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine

What exactly is a mystical marriage?

The  idea of a mystical marriage has roots in both the Old and New Testaments. The lovers in the Hebrew Song of Songs are commonly understood as an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel. In the New Testament, the relationship between Christ and the Church is compared to a marriage by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. At several points in the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as “the bridegroom.” In Revelation, John has a vision of “the marriage supper of the Lamb,” again a metaphor for the union of Christ and the Church.

The idea of a mystical marriage between Christ and specific individuals emerges later. The religious  philosopher Louis Dupré explains that the permanence of the mystical marriage distinguishes it from the transient mystical experiences in which the faithful may experience an overpowering sense of God’s presence.

The final state of permanent union is characterized by an uninterrupted awareness of God’s presence … A divided consciousness enables the mystic to take care of ordinary duties, even to suffer and to be disturbed on one level while preserving tranquility on another … No pain or unrest enters that inner sanctuary.

Only a select few attain the high degree of holiness required to enter into the mystical marriage. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, a 19^th-century French physician who researched the topic, claimed to have identified seventy-seven such marriages in Christian history.

The mystical marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria is by far the best known and the most frequently depicted in art. Her 14^th-century namesake, St. Catherine of Siena, probably takes second place. The two Catherines are easy to tell apart, for the Alexandrian usually wears a crown and the Sienese her Dominican nun’s habit. 

Catherine’s mystical marriage is depicted on the left side of the pedestal beneath her niche. Catherine kneels before the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. (Christ appears as a child in most representations of the mystical marriage, perhaps to dispel any notions of physical intimacy.)  From his seat on the Virgin’s lap, the Christ child places a ring on Catherine’s finger as she reverently bows her head. 

An angel hovers above the wedding party, looking on benevolently. In a charming detail, a second angel perches in a niche behind the Virgin, strumming a lute and, one imagines, joyfully singing. The exquisite rendering of the lute’s bridge and strings is a testament to the painstaking work of the Ardolinos in realizing Angel’s model down to its smallest details.

The Cathedral’s Chapel of St. Ambrose houses another depiction of the mystical marriage. Set into the chapel’s reredos is a painting by Bartolomeo Ramenghi, also known as Bagnacavallo, a northern Italian painter of the early 16^th century and a student of Raphael (to whom the painting was at one time misattributed).

The Virgin sits with the Christ child on her lap, her eyes cast downward to observe the child place a ring on the uplifted left hand of St. Catherine. The Virgin grasps the child’s left foot as if to help him rotate his chubby body and extend his arm. Catherine, her hair bound by a headband studded with gemstones, reverences them both as she receives the ring. In the background, a curtain is partially drawn back to reveal a landscape.

The Martyrdom of St. Catherine

The bases of the pedestals beneath the eight major figures of the Martyrs Portal are an irregular shape with a short face on their right corners. Angel often uses this corner to emphasize an important character or to transition to a new scene. On the corner of Catherine’s pedestal, we see a shift of scene signaled by the diagonal of the angel’s winged arm and the adjacent diagonal of Maxentius’s cloak as he wraps it around his shoulder, effectively placing a curtain between the drama’s two scenes.

The right half of the pedestal is devoted to the martyrdom of St. Catherine, or at least one episode of it. The best-known account is in the 13^th-century collection of hagiographic legends and lore known as the Golden Legend – an invaluable resource for generations of visual artists, including John Angel. 

Catherine’s path to martyrdom begins with her confronting the emperor Maxentius over the execution of Christians who refuse to offer sacrifice to pagan idols. She attempts to persuade him to abandon the folly of worshiping false gods and to turn to the true god, saying:

Thou shouldst rather marvel thee of heaven, and of the earth, and of all the things that be therein, and of the sun, the moon, the stars, and of the planets that have been since the beginning of the world, and shall be as long as it shall please God… (This and other quotations are from the Caxton translation of the Golden Legend).

Maxentius is taken aback by her erudition and skillful argumentation, as well as by her beauty. As a princess, Catherine received an excellent education in the liberal arts, including the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric – the art of spoken argument. Unable to refute her arguments himself, he gathers fifty distinguished philosophers to debate with her, with the expectation that their scholarship and sharp rhetorical skills will easily overcome hers. 

Catherine’s debate with the philosophers is the scene on the right side of the pedestal. Catherine is seated with a page of text in her hands. Two philosophers stand before her. One of them points to a passage in the text. The passage is most likely a quotation from Plato’s Timaeus that Catherines cites in her counterargument to the philosophers. In the end, unable to resist Catherine’s powers of persuasion, all fifty convert to the Christian faith. Maxentius, furious, orders them burnt alive. 

Nevertheless, entranced by her beauty, Maxentius begs Catherine to live in his palace and reign alongside him and his queen. Catherine rebuffs him, saying:

I am given and married to Jesu Christ, he is my spouse, he is my glory, he is my love, and he is my sweetness, there may not fair words nor torments call me from him.

Maxentius, enraged, has her scourged with scorpions and thrown into a dungeon with nothing to eat for twelve days. But angels visit to salve her wounds and a dove provides sustenance. All who encounter Catherine, from the queen and the captain of the guard to her jailers, fall under the aura of her holiness and convert to the Christian faith. 

After twelve days, Maxentius releases Catherine from the dungeon and repeats his demand that she renounce her faith and join him at the palace or suffer a painful death. Catherine responds:

Tarry not to do what torments thou wilt, for I desire to offer to God my blood and my flesh like as he offered for me; he is my God, my father, my friend and mine only spouse.

Maxentius then devises a new horror – wheels with razor-sharp spikes. The Golden Legend’s explanation of how the wheels work is a bit confusing, but it appears that the spiked wheels face one another and rotate in contrary directions, like a giant meat grinder. But before the wheels can do their diabolical work, an angel soars down and shatters them. The damaged wheel has become Catherine’s primary attribute.

The exasperated Maxentius then has her beheaded. At the last moment, Catherine hears a voice: Come unto me, my fair love and my spouse; lo! behold the gate of heaven is open to thee. Milk, not blood, flows from her trunk, and angels transport her body to Mt. Sinai.

In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian established a monastery on Mt. Sinai on the site of the burning bush that spoke to Moses. Three centuries later, the relics of St. Catherine were translated to the monastery where they remain today. Now known as St. Catherine’s Monastery, it still houses Greek Orthodox monks and is the oldest continuously occupied Christian monastery in the world.

Postscript: Maxentius

It is probably a fool’s errand to fact-check the legends about the saints. As the great medieval scholar Emile Mâle said of the Golden Legend: “The book’s greatest charm lay less in the true than in the marvelous.” 

Nevertheless, the historical record for Maxentius describes a man so different from the monster we meet in the Golden Legend, that I cannot conclude this article without speaking up for the maligned Maxentius.

The emperor Maxentius was not a madman, nor was he hostile to Christians. According to historian Timothy Barnes, rather than persecute Christians: “Maxentius granted the Christians of Italy and Africa the right to practice their religion freely very soon after he came to power in October 305.” Further, he later allowed Christians to recover property confiscated during Diocletian’s persecution.

A recent biography of Maxentius, Simon Turney’s Maxentius: The Last Great Roman, concurs with Barnes that Maxentius put an end to the persecution of Christians and even permitted the construction of new churches and Christian cemeteries in Rome, though he never adopted the faith himself.

So how did Maxentius acquire his bad reputation?

Maxentius was a rival to another contender for full command of the Roman Empire, Constantine. When the respective armies of Maxentius and Constantine met in the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine prevailed. While beating a chaotic retreat, Maxentius drowned as he was fording a river. 

Once in power, Constantine continued Maxentius’s policy of legitimizing Christianity while vilifying the man himself, as Barnes explains:

Constantinian propaganda rapidly transformed Maxentius into a textbook tyrant who massacred his subjects, raped the wives of senators, and examined the entrails of pregnant women, infants, and lions for magical purposes.

The Constantinian propaganda apparently influenced the narrative of the martyrdom of St. Catherine, resulting in the almost comically villainous character we meet in the Golden Legend.

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Source

• “St. Catherine” in The Golden Legend, William Caxton translation, 1483. E-text by Paul Halsall. https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/
• Barnes, Timothy. Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire (2013).
• Cameron, Averil. “The Reign of Constantine” in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 12 (2005).
• Dupré, Louis. “The Christian Experience of Mystical Union” in The Journal of Religion, January 1989.
• Stracke, Richard. “St. Catherine of Alexandria: The Iconography.” https://www.christianiconography.info/catherine.html
• Turney, Simon. Maxentius: The Last Great Roman (2026).

St. Alban is the last figure on the north side of the Martyrs Portal, next to Stephen. While Stephen is the protomartyr for the entire Christian church, Alban, as the first recorded British martyr, is especially revered by the Anglican expression of the faith.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed c. 731, is one of the earliest sources for the story of Alban and one that would have been familiar to sculptor John Angel. The basic narrative follows:

The time is the general persecution of Christians commenced by the emperor Diocletian in 303. The place is the Roman province of Brittania, where Alban, a Briton serving in the Roman army, is stationed in the town of Verulamium, now the city of St. Albans in the county of Hertfordshire to the north of London. 

One night, a Christian priest fleeing persecution knocks on the door of Alban’s hut. Though duty-bound to turn the priest over to his superiors, Alban takes pity on the man and shelters him. As Bede recounts:

This man he [Alban] observed to be engaged in continual prayer and watching day and night; when on a sudden the Divine grace shining on him, he began to imitate the example of faith and piety which was set before him, and being gradually instructed by his wholesome admonitions, he cast off the darkness of idolatry, and became a Christian in all sincerity of heart.

When soldiers searching for the priest approach Alban’s hut, Alban exchanges his soldier’s cloak for the priest’s vestment, enabling the priest to escape in the guise of a soldier. Alban is arrested, court-martialed, and beheaded. 

The pedestal relates the story of Alban’s martyrdom. Front and center, we see Alban being arrested and bound with ropes. On the pedestal’s left face, the priest makes his escape as Alban makes a gesture of farewell. On the right side, we see Alban’s executioner waiting with a broadsword at the ready. The Roman soldiers are anachronistically clad in the armor and mail of medieval knights.

Here John Angel again displays his gift for reducing a narrative to its essential elements. He evidently sees no need to crowd the pedestal with depictions of Alban’s conversion or his execution. Rather than distract us with excessive detail, he has his viewers focus on the image of Alban courageously facing death, arms bound but head held high. With the Christian priest behind him and two soldiers facing him, Alban stands on the spiritual frontier between the empire of Caesar and the Kingdom of Christ. 

Above the pedestal, the full-length figure of Alban holds two objects – a sword and a bowl. His right elbow nestles the sword’s hilt. The sword refers to both his life as a Roman soldier and the manner of his death as a Christian martyr.

The bowl suggests the hospitality he extended to the fugitive priest but may also suggest something more, for a martyrdom is more than just another tragic death. The bowl may suggest a eucharistic chalice or a baptismal font, for there is something sanctified, even sacramental, about a martyr’s blood.

In addition to the basic narrative summarized above, various retellings of the story interject some supernatural interventions. A sixth century account by the Celtic monk Gildas, included in his On the Ruin of Britain, has Alban parting the waters of the River Thames à la Moses at the Red Sea:

[Alban] opened a path across the noble River Thames, whose waters stood abrupt like precipices on either side; and seeing this, the first of his executors was stricken with awe, and from a wolf became a lamb; so that he thirsted for martyrdom, and boldly underwent that for which he thirsted.

Bede recounts the fate of the executioner who struck the fatal blow: He who laid impious hands on the holy man’s neck was not permitted to rejoice over his dead body; for his eyes dropped upon the ground at the same moment as the blessed martyr’s head fell.

This gruesome detail proved irresistible to later illustrators. The Book of Saint Alban, a thirteenth century manuscript, contains a vivid example.

Angel disregards the fantastical tales, save for one story from Bede.  As Alban approached the place of execution, a spring of water sprang up at his feet. Angel has the spring running across the figure’s right foot, perhaps suggesting baptism by martyrdom. 

The spring also appears in a window at St. Alban’s Cathedral in England.

Within St John the Divine, there are four more images of Alban. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum included him among the British and Celtic saints lining the entrance to the Chapel of St. Columba. Alban appears in three stained glass windows – the aisle windows in Armed Forces and Historical Bays as well as a full-length lancet in the clerestory of the Historical Bay. And then there’s the Pilgrims Pavement medallion for St. Albans Cathedral in the south aisle of the nave. 

Why the multiple images? There are approximately 150 individual saints represented in St. John the Divine’s sculpture, stained glass, and other works of art. Most of them appear only once. When a saint appears multiple times, one wonders why.

In the case of St. Alban, one might detect the hidden hand of Bishop William Thomas Manning, who oversaw the nave’s design, construction, and consecration. Manning was a proud Englishman by birth and a patriotic American citizen by naturalization. An ardent supporter of the military, he took a leave from his fashionable Manhattan parish to serve as an Army chaplain during the First World War. It is not surprising that he should have a special regard for a soldier saint like Alban. As the chairman of the Committee on Iconography, he was certainly positioned to play favorites among the saints. The Armed Forces and Historical Bays were particularly meaningful for Bishop Manning, as discussed in a previous Divine Stone article.

The Tomb of William Thomas Manning click to read

Two last notes: 

In the stained glass images above, Alban is clean-shaven, as was standard for Roman legionnaires, while John Angel’s north portal figure sports full facial hair. Perhaps Angel was influenced by the image of Alban on the 19^th century high altar screen of St. Alban’s Cathedral, which has a passing resemblance to the figure in the Martyrs Portal.

Finally, whatever became of the priest whose life Alban saved? Some accounts say that he was quickly captured and executed, while others have him safely making his way to Wales as a missionary. In later centuries he came to be known as Amphibalus. (Since this is also the Latin name for a cloak, there may have been some confusion between the garment and man who wore it.) St. Albans Cathedral houses a shrine for St. Amphibalus, originally built in the 12^th century and badly damaged during the Reformation, but since restored and reconsecrated in 2021.

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Sources:

• Atwater, Donald. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints 2^nd ed. (Penguin, 1983).
• Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, A.M. Sellar, translator. Dover Publications, 2011 reprint of the 1907 edition.
• Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2^nd ed. (OUP, 1987).
• Gildas. On  the Ruin of Britain, J.A. Giles, translator. Dodo Press, 2007 (accessed via Project Gutenberg).
• Low, Julia. “The restoration of the Amphibalus shrine,” St Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural & Archaeological Society. https://www.stalbanshistory.org/

St. Stephen occupies the third niche on the north side of the Martyrs Portal. The story of his martyrdom is told in the sixth and seventh chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. At his first appearance in Acts, we are told that Stephen is “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit” and “full of grace and power.” When he is brought before the council of religious authorities known as the Sanhedrin, “all who sat in the council saw that his face was like the face of an angel.”

John Angel’s Stephen is nothing if not angelic, following a centuries-old tradition of representing the martyr as a beardless youth, though the Biblical account says nothing about Stephen’s age. Accordingly, Angel gives us a Stephen with full lips, large eyes, long, slender neck, and a coiffure of abundant wavy hair. His hands hold the stones that killed him and that became the attribute by which one can easily distinguish him from other saints.

Stephen was a member of the company of believers that formed in Jerusalem around the apostles during the days following Pentecost, holding “all things in common” and “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 3:44-46). As the number of believers increased, the apostles appointed Stephen and six others, to distribute food and minister to the needs of the assembled believers. They are considered the first deacons (from Greek diakonos, “servant”).

Stephen wears a garment that in later centuries became standard for deacons – a dalmatic, a calf-length, wide-sleeved tunic worn with a stole and over an alb. It is usually adorned with horizontal and/or vertical stripes and, at times, with tassels, like those on Stephen’s shoulders.

The pedestal depicts Stephen’s martyrdom by stoning, the punishment that Jewish law prescribed for blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16). It is on this charge that he is hauled before the Sanhedrin, the council of elders that nominally governed Jerusalem under the close oversight of the Roman authorities. 

Invited to speak in his own defense, Stephen at first seems to seek common ground with the elders by delivering a learned discourse on the covenant between God and the children of Israel. He touches on Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, saying nothing that his listeners might find objectionable. 

But as he concludes his testimony, Stephen suddenly becomes accusatory and confrontational. He questions the centrality of the Temple, continuing:

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels but did not keep it.

At this, the outraged elders hustle Stephen outside and stone him to death, as depicted on the pedestal.

Stephen’s pedestal differs from other north portal pedestals in that it depicts a single scene with only four characters. Most of the other pedestals display two or three scenes of a narrative and as many as ten characters. The sculptor thus compels viewers to focus their attention on the central figure, Stephen standing with hands bound and his face reflecting patient acceptance of his painful death. Two stone-throwers flank him, though the account in Acts suggests that the stoning had a larger number of participants. 

On the pedestal’s left face, a man stands alone holding the coats of the stone throwers. He is Saul, who himself will soon convert and become the apostle Paul. He will later recount: “When the blood of thy witness Stephen was shed, I also was standing by and approving and keeping the garments of those who killed him” (Acts 22:20).

Stephen is known as the “protomartyr” –the first of countless martyrs to come. Stephen was also the prototype of the death a Christian martyr should die – witnessing to his faith in the presence of his persecutors (“martyr” is Greek for “witness”), speaking truth to power, facing violent death calmly and courageously, and asking God to forgive his executioners. 

The most important thing required of a Christian martyr is to be Christlike. The prototype of a martyr is nothing less than the Passion of Christ himself, depicted in the portal’s tympanum and friezes. Luke – the author of both Acts and the gospel that bears his name – draws explicit parallels between the Acts account of Stephen’s martyrdom and the gospel’s narrative of Jesus’s execution.

Both Stephen and Jesus face the same accusations: blaspheming and threatening to destroy the Temple. Both report similar visions to their persecutors. Jesus: “From now on the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 23:63); Stephen: “I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:58). 

Likewise, Jesus and Stephen make similar statements at the point of death. Jesus: “Into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46); Stephen: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”(Acts 7:59). Stephen’s final words are “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60), echoing Jesus’s “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). 

More than a thousand years later, Stephen would be an exemplar to his north portal neighbor, Thomas Becket. After the catastrophic confrontation with Henry II that drove him to flee England, Thomas left the castle and stopped at a nearby church where, as historian John Guy recounts:

… somewhat provocatively, he put on the pallium, the defining symbol of his office as primate, and said the special mass used on St. Stephen’s Day in honor of the first Christian martyr, in which the introit was a passage from Psalms beginning: “Princes also did sit and speak against me” (Psalm 119:23).

Another image of Stephen’s stoning can be seen in the Acts of the Apostles window in St. Ansgar’s Chapel. 

For a modern take on St. Stephen, may I suggest the Grateful Dead’s “St. Stephen,” released in 1968. “Wherever he goes, the people all complain,” the song says to remind us that Stephen’s preaching was denounced as blasphemous. 

Robert Hunter’s elusive lyrics raise the question of whether the other side of the apparent courage and conviction that Stephen displays in the Acts of the Apostles account may be unspoken doubts and uncertainty about whether a painful death will have any meaningful significance:

“Lady finger, dipped in moonlight / Writing “what for?” across the morning sky…”

“Did he doubt or did he try? Answers a-plenty in the by and by.” 

“Did it matter, does it now? / Stephen would answer if he only knew how.”

The song would make a good starting point for considering the meaning of martyrdom in a world where the worst instances of human suffering can disappear from the news cycle in a matter of hours.

Fun fact: The memorial service for Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia was conducted at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Marin County, California.

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Sources:

• “St. Stephen” in The Golden Legend, William Caxton translation, 1483. E-text by Paul Halsall. https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/
• Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Acts of the Apostles: A new translation with introduction and commentary (Yale University Press, 1998).
• Guy, John. Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel (Random House, 2012).
• The author’s recollections of his trip to Woodstock in 1969.

What follows is a continuation of the elements of the north portal at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Martyrs Portal, by Senior Guide Tom Fedorek. All of the major sculptures will be dicussed in depth as the series unfolds. – RM

St. Thomas Becket greets us from the first niche on the left side of the north portal. He wears the vestments of a 12^th-century Archbishop of Canterbury.  His pallium – the T-shaped band of cloth hanging from his shoulder – was at that time a vestment reserved for archbishops. His cape-like chasuble drapes over a calf-length dalmatic with an elaborate relief on its hem. Beneath the dalmatic, an ankle-length alb and the tips of his stole peek out. His left forearm bears the short scarf known as a maniple. 

The “Life of Becket” window in Canterbury Cathedral conveys what the limestone image cannot – the lustrous splendor of medieval vestments. 

John Angel forgoes the opportunity to place a miter atop Thomas’s head, thus drawing the viewer’s attention to his face. His brow is broad. His deep-sunk eyes gaze straight ahead, unlike his north portal neighbors, who all direct their eyes elsewhere. His expression is thoughtful and alert, suggesting he is a perceptive observer and attentive listener. With fingers as long and slender as those of a concert pianist, he clutches a book.

Dropping our eyes to the low-relief on the dalmatic’s hem, we see a battle at the climactic moment when one horseman unhorses another. The victorious horseman is Thomas, and the scene reminds us that he lived a very different life prior to becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162.

The Life & Death of Thomas Becket

Thomas was born in 1118 to a wealthy Norman merchant family. (One often sees his name styled in the Norman manner as Thomas à Becket.) After a good education and a stint as a clerk in the City of London, he entered the service of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. Showing promise, he was sent abroad to study law. Upon his return, he was ordained a deacon and appointed archdeacon of Canterbury Cathedral. The position put him in frequent contact with the royal court on matters of church and state. 

In 1155, Henry II, twenty-one-years-old  and newly-crowned, appointed Thomas Chancellor of England. Over the next seven years, Thomas served the youthful king faithfully as a trusted advisor, diplomat, and confidant. He thrived at Henry’s royal court amid the councils and intrigues while also enjoying the hunting, hawking, feasting, and other luxuries.

Thomas even led troops into battle during the king’s Toulouse Campaign in 1159. The battle scene shown in low-relief on his dalmatic depicts an incident described by his colleague William Fitzstephen in his Life of Saint Thomas:

He himself [Thomas], cleric though he was, engaged the valiant French knight, Engelramme de Trie, in single combat. They charged at each other, with their horses at full speed. Thomas unhorsed the knight and took his charger. Of the whole English army, the knights of the Chancellor were always first, more daring and distinguished by their achievements, responding fully to the instruction, leadership, and instruction of their noble chief.

A turning point came in 1162 when the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury was empty due to Theobald’s recent death.

Henry sought to reclaim the centralized authority the monarchy had once enjoyed but lost during the period of civil war known as the Anarchy (1138-1153).  Among other initiatives, he hoped to establish a single system of justice by abolishing the independent ecclesiastical courts that held jurisdiction over anyone in holy orders charged with a crime. How better to achieve this end than by placing his own Chancellor on the throne of the Primate of the English Church? 

But once enthroned as Archbishop, Thomas shocked the king by resigning as Chancellor and advocating for the Church’s independence. He also went through a profound personal transformation. In his own words, he changed from “a patron of play-actors and a follower of hounds to a shepherd of souls.”

Over the next three years, the uncompromising archbishop and the hotheaded king argued rancorously over “criminous clerks” and other matters relating to the boundaries of the respective authority of church and state. After an explosive confrontation with the king in 1165, Thomas, fearing for his life, fled to France. During his exile, Thomas enjoyed the support of Pope Alexander III. 

In 1170, Becket returned to Canterbury under a tentative reconciliation negotiated by the pope. It quickly dissolved into acrimony. In an oft-quoted but probably apocryphal outburst, the exasperated king exclaimed, in the presence of his court, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” Hearing this, or other words to the same effect, four ambitious knights sensed an opportunity to gain royal favor for themselves and set off for Canterbury to assassinate the archbishop. 

Most of the pedestal is devoted to the murder, shown at the instant it occurs. The narrative is a panorama that wraps around the pedestal starting from the left side, moves across the center, and spills onto the right side. John Angel carefully follows the eyewitness accounts of the incident.

Standing before a monk holding the prayer book before him, Thomas reads the evening office known as Vespers. One knight approaches Thomas from behind the monk. Three others creep up behind Thomas. One knight strikes the first blow as an unarmed man attempts to intervene. He is Edward Grim, Thomas’s secretary, who will later write an eyewitness account. According to some accounts, as the knights departed, one sliced open Thomas’s skull and scattered his brains on the floor as a coup-de-grâce.

Grim reports that a moment before the first blow fell, Becket prayed: “I commend to God, to our lady St. Mary, and to St. Denis my cause and the right of the Holy Church.” Becket may have become devoted to Denis, the 3^rd-century bishop of Paris, during his exile in France. Angel positions the two martyred bishops directly opposite one another in the portal.

The Aftermath

As news of Thomas’s murder spread quickly throughout Christendom, he was universally acknowledged as a martyr. No sooner was he laid to rest in Canterbury’s eastern crypt than a never-ending stream of pilgrims began arriving to pray at his tomb, lured by tales of miraculous healings in the presence of his relics. Pope Alexander III canonized him in 1173, a mere 26 months after his death. 

The final image on the pedestal shows Henry on his knees as a monk scourges him. 

Henry, who was widely held responsible for the murder, performed several public penitential acts. In July 1174, he walked barefoot through Canterbury to do penance at the cathedral. As Becket biographer John Guy recounts:

There, in the presence of dumbfounded courtiers and the monks, he knelt before the tomb in the crypt and repeated his earlier confession that his “incautious words” had been the principal cause of Becket’s murder … He was then lightly scourged (probably with rods of birch or elm bound together in a bundle) receiving five strokes each from the bishops present and three from each of a hundred or so Christ Church monks … With so many strokes delivered, Henry’s scourging cannot have been severe and was more symbolic than real. The public humiliation was, however, the same, which for a royal penitent was the true penalty.

In 1220, fifty years after his martyrdom, his remains were translated to a new shrine in Trinity Chapel at the cathedral’s east end. Of the shrine, Canon D. Ingam Hill writes in his guide to the cathedral:

Its splendor was to dazzle the Christian Church in northern Europe for the next three centuries. This shrine was to draw pilgrims up the great flights of steps to kneel around the chapel in prayer and worship at the round of masses and services which were maintained independently of the normal liturgical life of the choir below until the Reformation.

Over those three centuries, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims climbed the stairs on their knees, wearing down the stone in a way that can be seen to this day.

The shrine became one of the most-visited pilgrimage sites in Europe. Some pilgrims came seeking healing, others to give thanks for it, as recorded in the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: 

And specially, from every shires ende,

Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, 

The holy blissful martir for to seke, 

To hem hath holpen whan they were seke.

(“And especially, from every town in England they travel to Canterbury to seek the holy blissful martyr, who helped them when they were sick.”)

After Henry VIII severed the Church of England’s connection to Rome, he ordered the shrine destroyed. Thomas’s bones disappeared – burned, according to one account. Nevertheless, five centuries later, Thomas Becket continues to be revered as a martyr, particularly by Christians living under repressive governments.

Today, visitors to Canterbury may pray at the Altar of the Sword’s Point – a jagged metal cross suspended above a plain altar stone, accompanied by two red-pointed swords whose shadows double their number, recalling Thomas’s four assassins. The memorial, created by sculptor Giles Blomfield in 1986, is in the chapel where Thomas was martyred. A stone marks the spot where he fell.

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Sources

• Atwater, Donald. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints 2^nd ed. (Penguin, 1983).
• Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2^nd ed. (OUP, 1987).
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook. “Edward Grim: The Murder of Thomas Becket.” https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/Grim-becket.asp
• Guy, John. Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel (Random House, 2012).
• Harvard University, Chaucer Website. “The Martyrdom of Thomas Becket.” https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/martyrdom-thomas-%C3%A0-becket
• Hill, D. Ingram. Canterbury Cathedral (Bell & Hyman, 1986).Loyola University, Loyola eCommons. “An Annotated Translation of the Life of Thomas Becket by William Fitzstephen.”https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1621&context=luc_theses

Major sculpture on the north and south sides of the Martyrs Portal. Photos: Robert F. Rodriguez

This is the first in a series of articles on the North Portal of St. John the Divine, also known as the Martyrs Portal. It discusses the historical background of the portal, the sculpture of the porch, and the figure of St. Peter on the trumeau. Subsequent articles will cover the eight major figures and their pedestals, the eight sibyls above the major figures, and the twenty-four angels in the archivolts.

Background of the Martyrs Portal

The tradition of cathedral portals flanked by free-standing sculptures of saints began in the twelth century at the Abbey Church of St. Denis, generally considered the cradle of Gothic architecture. Known as “jamb figures” (because they fill the space between each niche’s jambs, or sides), they became a standard feature of medieval cathedrals. Arriving pilgrims would gaze up at them and recognize each one by their attribute, i.e., an object associated with the life of the saint, such as the keys of St. Peter.

The idea of a Martyrs Portal at St. John the Divine appears in a proposed iconographic program for the nave and west front that architect Ralph Adams Cram submitted to the Iconography Committee on March 4, 1927. The committee consisted of Bishop William Thomas Manning, chairman, Cathedral Dean Milo Gates, three other Cathedral officials, Cram, and his intimate friend John Nicholas Brown. Cram drafted the plan in consultation with Brown, a wealthy patron of the arts. Two years earlier, Cram and Brown were among the founders of the Medieval Academy of America.

The portal we see today follows the 1927 proposal with respect to the major jamb figures and the images of the Passion on the tympanum. Cram proposed to fill the small niches above the major figures with “confessors” such as John Keble, a leader of the 19th-century Oxford Movement. Ultimately, the niches were filled with the sibyls that Cram originally proposed for the central portal. The proposal called for 30 angels in the archivolts rather than the 24 we see there today.

The principal donor for the north portal was George F. Baker, a Cathedral trustee and founder of the First National Bank of the City of New York, a predecessor to Citibank. The Laymen’s Club donated the steps leading up to the portal.

John Angel

An April 25, 1927, letter from Cram to Bishop Manning indicates that he was considering assigning the three portals of the west front to three different sculptors: the central portal to Lee Lawrie and the south to John Angel with no final decision as to the north. Cram writes that he reconsidered the three-way division of labor after viewing Angel’s superb work for another Cram project, the Princeton Chapel. He adds: “We believe that by having only two sculptors employed on the three great portals, the central door being by one man, the two flanking ones by another, we shall obtain a greater effect of unity and coherence.”

John Angel executed the north portal sculptures in the early 1930s, completing them by 1935. It is perhaps his most ambitious work. The portal’s major figures, pedestals, tympanum, and archivolts depict a total of 134 individuals.

Angel began each figure with a sketch which he then modeled in clay, first in miniature, later in full-size for casting in plaster. The plaster cast was then duplicated in stone by artisans using a pointing machine, a lengthy and painstaking process. The finished work was then transported to the Cathedral from Angel’s studio over a garage at Lexington Avenue and East 119th Street and installed in the portal. The Ardolino brothers and cousins crafted the finished sculptures, reproducing Angel’s models down to their smallest details.

This rather roundabout process was then customary for architectural sculpture. Contrast the north portal with the neighboring Portal of Paradise, which was carved entirely in situ and from the same stone as the building.

See an earlier Divine Stone post on the north portal for a link to a film of Angel modeling the figures in clay. https://divinestone.org/blog/john-angel-sculptor

As this series of articles continues, we shall have many opportunities to marvel at John Angel’s mastery. Growing up in the shadow of England’s Exeter Cathedral, he fell under the spell of its Gothic sculpture.

One critic wrote: “The aura of the Middle Ages surrounds John Angel. He almost seems to have stepped out of the medieval past, with the cloak of the later Michelangelo thrown over his shoulders.”

Indeed, his work at St. John the Divine conveys the aura of the Gothic while animating the figures after the manner of the Renaissance masters. Working within the severe limitations of the columnar setting, Angel endows each jamb figure with its own personality through a gesture, a facial expression, a tilt of the head, or a movement suggested by the folds of the drapery.

The North Porch

The portal’s tympanum depicts the Passion of Christ – the exemplar for all who answer the call to bear witness to the Christian faith with their blood.

The Crucifixion in the center has Mary and John at the foot of the cross. The cross is surrounded by a five-lobed frame, five being the number wounds in his hands, feet, and sides. Five is thus the symbol of Christ’s humanity in Christian number symbolism.

Within the porch are two doors that lead into the Cathedral. Above the doors, an entablature with a grapevine theme runs the breadth of the portal. The grapevine is likely an allusion to the passage in the Gospel of John that begins “I am the true vine, and my father is the vinedresser” (John 15:1-11). The vine may also suggest the wine of the Eucharist – the blood of Christ.

Above the entablature, there is a pediment above each door. High-relief sculptures relating to the Passion fill the two pediments.

“The Carrying of the Cross,” the left relief, conflates several of the Stations of the Cross. The fourteen stations are a Lenten liturgy in which worshippers ritually accompany Jesus on the road to Calvary, pausing for prayer at each station. Here, Angel appears to have followed a traditional form of the Stations of the Cross that merges the Biblical account of the Passion with later narratives.

In the center, we see Jesus sinking to his knees beneath the weight of the cross as two Roman soldiers look on impassively (Stations 3, 7, and 9). A woman behind him reaches out to him. She is likely his mother Mary (Station 4). Another woman kneels before him to wipe the sweat and blood from his face (Staion 6). She would be later known as St. Veronica.

In the right relief, Angel employs a pyramidal placement of the figures to fill the arched pediment. “The Judgment of Jesus” has Pontius Pilate, rather than Jesus, at the peak of the pyramid. Beneath Pilate’s feet, SPQR – a Latin acronym for “The Roman Senate and People” – reminds us that he is the governor of the Roman province of Judea.

Pilate is depicted as a weak, unprincipled man – hairless and emaciated with a cynical smirk on his thin lips. Intimidated by the angry mob, he vacillates and equivocates until finally appeasing Jesus’s enemies by releasing the criminal Barabbas.

To the left we see Barabbas grinning gleefully as the crowd howls for Jesus’s crucifixion. To the right we see Jesus with his hands bound behind his back, alone and abandoned, surrounded by the jeering rabble.

Elsewhere on the portal:

The gable above the porch bears an inscription along its edge: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16).

An angel protrudes from the wall at each foot of the gable, where the slope meets the buttress. Jophiel, the archangel of Eden, is on the left, identifiable by the flaming sword that is his attribute. Raphael, the archangel of healing and pilgrimage, bears a chalice in one hand and a traveler’s staff in the other. Archangels emerge in the same locations in the other two portals.

Atop the gable, the archangel Michael stands with his sword and scales, casting a watchful eye on Amsterdam Avenue.

And since the Tower of St. Peter designed by Cram remains unbuilt, we must try to imagine it soaring above the portal to a height of 254 feet, more than twice the West Front’s current elevation.

St. Peter

John Angel’s jamb figure of St. Peter on the trumeau depicts the saint in the traditional manner – a mature but robust man with a beard, high forehead, and piercing gaze. Angel’s sculpture captures the qualities of the man we meet in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles: strongminded, outspoken, impulsive, and fiercely loyal to Jesus.

Simon Peter was a fisherman by trade along with his brother Andrew, also an apostle. He was married (Mark 1:29-31) and had a son named Mark, or so the First Epistle of Peter suggests (1 Peter 5:13). He was part of Jesus’s inner circle along with James and John. In the Acts of the Apostles, he emerges as a leader of the growing Christian community in Jerusalem, where we last see him before the narrative switches its focus to Paul. Peter’s journey to Rome and his martyrdom in that city are not in the Biblical account but are described in other credible sources and widely accepted as factual.

The keys Peter holds in his hands are a reference to a well-known passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus bestows a new name on the apostle, originally named Simon Bar-Jona (son of Jonah). Jesus renames him Kepha, or Cephas, meaning “rock” in Aramaic and translated as “petra” in the Greek New Testament, hence the name “Petros.” This occurs when Jesus asks Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter responds: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” Jesus then declares:

You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Ma . 16:18-19).

The keys are universally understood as the attribute of St. Peter. They are also the symbol of the papacy, for Roman Catholics regard Peter as the first Bishop of Rome and thus the progenitor of the papacy.

The cock at Peter’s feet is a reference to his three denials of Jesus on the night that Jesus is arrested.

The story of Peter’s three denials is told in all four gospels, albeit slightly differently in each. After the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples all walk together to the Mount of Olives. Upon arriving, Jesus tells them: “You will all fall away, for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’” Peter responds: “Even though they all fall away, I will not.” To which Jesus answers: “Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” And Peter again: “If I must die with you, I will not deny you.” (Mark 14:26-31)

The pedestal demonstrates Angel’s genius for condensing a dramatic narrative into several key scenes.

On the left side of the pedestal, Jesus (not shown) has just been seized and bound. Peter, bravely but rashly, draws a sword and slices off the ear of a soldier as the apostle John attempts to restrain him. The incident is reported by all four gospels though only John’s account identifies Peter as the swordsman. In all accounts, Jesus rebukes Peter and, in Luke’s version, he miraculously reattaches the man’s ear.

As Jesus is taken away, Peter follows at a distance to the courtyard of the high priest’s palace, where he joins others warming themselves at a fire.

The center of the pedestal depicts Peter’s three denials, conflated into a single encounter. The young woman serving as the doorkeeper recognizes Peter’s face in the flickering fire and says, “This man was with him.” Peter denies it: “Woman, I do not know him.”

We see the woman point her finger accusingly at Peter. A curious detail: two eavesdroppers are listening in on the conversation, one behind the young woman, the other behind Peter. Their stealth suggests a sinister intent. Two more denials follow and the cock crows, as shown on the pedestal:

While he was still speaking, the cock crowed. And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, “Before the cock crows today, you will deny
me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly. (Luke 22:60-62)

The scene on the right side of the pedestal depicts an encounter between Jesus and Peter that takes place after the resurrection. Peter stands with downcast eyes and his hands folded over his heart-gestures of penitence. Jesus gently places his left hand on Peter’s shoulder. A lamb stands between them and, in a charming detail, nuzzles Jesus’s right hand. They are engaged in the following conversation (John 21:15-19):

Jesus asks Peter: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter answers: “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus responds: “Feed my lambs.” The same exchange is repeated twice more, with minor changes of wording. Jesus’s three questions reflect Peter’s three denials, and Peter’s answers affirm his devotion to Jesus and erase the stain of his momentary weakness.

The imperative to feed Jesus’s flock recalls another passage in John’s Gospel where Jesus says: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). With the command to feed his sheep, Jesus, as he concludes his earthly ministry, is passing his shepherd’s staff to Peter. But he is also imposing the obligation for Peter to lay down his life for the sheep, as the next passage makes clear:

When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go. (This he said to show by what death he was to glorify God.) And after this, he said to him, Follow me. (John 21:18-19)

“Follow me” can be understood two ways. Follow me as the shepherd of my flock, the nascent Christian community. And follow me even unto death by martyrdom.
 
The phrase “you will stretch out your hands” refers to crucifixion. A longstanding though non-Biblical tradition holds that Peter was crucified in the Circus of Nero during that emperor’s persecution of Christians in the year 64. The Roman historian Tacitus confirms that Nero did in fact persecute Christians in 64 and with extreme cruelty:

Covered with the skins of beasts, they [Christians] were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. (Tacitus, Annals 15.44).

Peter was buried in a necropolis on the hill the Romans called Vaticanus Mons. In the second century, a shrine was built over the gravesite. In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine erected a large basilica on the site, placing the altar directly over the shrine. In the 16th century, Constantine’s basilica was demolished to make way for the current St. Peter’s Basilica, whose high altar stands in the same place as its predecessor.

In the mid-20th century, excavations of the ancient necropolis were conducted deep beneath the basilica’s foundations. They uncovered a grave near a wall with graffiti reading petros eni (“Peter is here”). This and other evidence persuaded the 262nd pope, Paul VI, to authenticate it as the grave of the first. It can be visited by those intrepid enough to take the Basilica’s Scavi tour of the excavations.

St. Peter appears in stone or glass in at least a dozen other locations at the Cathedral. Particularly noteworthy are:

The clerestory window of the Missionary Bay on the south side of the nave. Wilbur Burnham’s magnificent window depicts Peter with an inverted cross, recalling the legend that Peter asked to be
crucified upside-down because he considered himself unworthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. The story first appeared in the apocryphal Acts of Peter (c. 200), whose account adds that he preached a lengthy sermon while in this inconvenient position.

Two sculptures by Gutzon Borglum: one in St. Saviour’s Chapel in a niche on the upper north wall, the other at the extreme east end of the exterior of the apse below the roofline, where red-tailed hawks have built a nest on the canopy just above Peter.

The next installment in this series will cover the four jamb figures on the portal’s north side.

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Sources:

• Cathedral Archives, Minutes of the Iconography Committee, 1925-27
• Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)
• Morciano, Maria Silvia, “A Striking Discovery,” L’Osservatore Romano, June28, 2024
• Walsh, Michael, ed. Butler’s Lives of the Saints (New York: HarperCollins, 1991)
• Watson Ernest W. “John Angel: America’s Cathedral Sculptor,” American Artist, September, 1953.