The Rider on the White Horse
1922; College Art Association; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043079.1922.11409721
ISSN1559-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Byzantine Studies and History
ResumoN a relief from the tomb of the Blessed Albert of Pontida (Fig. 2) which Professor Arthur Kingsley Porter1 found in the sacristy of San Giacomo, Albert's old Cluniac priory, at Pontida, near Bergamo,2 occurs a significant subject, the identification of which is the starting point of this study in iconography. The relief represents St. James Major as the lord of the dead, a rare aspect of his cult except upon the pilgrimage-road to Compostella. Iconographically it is, so far as I know, unique. He is the rider on the white horse of the Fourth Miracle (dated 1080, but written c. 1130), who carried the living and the dead. Professor Porter wished to date the relief shortly after 1095: I am not quite sure for my part that it should not be put later, at any rate after the death of another Piedmontese saint, the Blessed Albert of Vercelli, who had been on the pilgrimage to St. James, who died in the Holy Land in 1214, and who came to be associated with Elijah and the Carmelite order and revered even by Mohammedans. The reason for this later approximation will presently appear. Professor Porter very justly notes the parallel between the relief and the third horseman of the Apocalypse,3 who is painted only in a Spanish series of manuscripts that range from the eighth to the eleventh century or later and exist at Urgell, Madrid, Paris, and elsewhere, and are transcriptions of the Commentary of a Spanish monk Beato of Liebena. The relief belongs absolutely to the Compostellan cycle and is a plastic parallel to The Vision of Thurkill, in which the souls were weighed in the Basilica of the Apostle by St. Michael. Here St. James recombines the two aspects of Horus which were usually split and divided between himself and St. Michael. The three naked souls waiting in a palm tree are the souls expectant in the Paradise of God; on the northernmost door of the Pórtico de la Gloria of Master Matthew they sit in rich leafage. Further, they are equivalent to those souls unborn who sit in trees and sing, and the tree is the date palm in which Carpaccio set his St. Ursula with a row of cherub-heads for the cluster of fruit. This part of the relief seems to be derived directly from sculpture on a capital. The theme belongs, as said, to the pilgrimage—“MIGRAVIT AD ASTRA,” says the epitaph—and goes back ultimately perhaps to Egypt, with which the Spanish connection was always close. The priory of San Giacomo was burned in 1373 and the relics translated to S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo: but the horseman went too. He rides between two bishops, high in the north porch. Indeed, he stayed permanently on North Italian sepulchral monuments, like that of Bernabo Visconti in Milan and those of the Scaligers in Verona.
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