St. Eustace
Recently, in Kaftal’s Iconography of the Saints (i don’t remember which one), a picture of a family being roasted in a hollow bull got my attention.
St. Eustace and his family were roasted in a metal bull by Diocletian. His martyrdom is apparently a frequent object of stained glass in French cathedrals. Even more interesting…
Why is he a martyr and not his family? His conversion was brought about by a vision of a stag.
Does anyone else find the echoes of the Trojan horse sort of perplexing? The echoes to the golden calf in the Hebrew Bible? It is a very weird sort of punishment. I have heard the reasons that Peter was crucified upside down (because he didn not want to be confused with the crucifixion of Christ), but the reasons for roasting a man and his family alive in a brazen beast of burden sort of perplex me. When people try to rewrite some of these arch-tyrants are more “understandable” people, it’s atrocities like this that make me wonder as to the merit of such attempts.
Written by Featherina
June 11th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Posted in Academia
Tagged with anti-hero, hagiography, iconography, medieval, saints
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