Getty Museum

Saint Anthony Abbot

Date

about 1469

Medium

Tempera colors, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink

Culture

Italian

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

In the last miniature in the section of Suffrages, Taddeo Crivelli painted Saint Anthony Abbot, who withdrew to the Egyptian desert in the 300s. Dressed in the black robe of the Hospitallers' order, he appears with a small pig. The Hospitallers, founded in 1100 to aid the sick, took Saint Anthony as their patron saint. Given a papal dispensation that allowed their pigs to roam freely in medieval towns, the order took on the animal as its emblem. Alone in his cave, the saint holds his prayer beads. This, along with his ecstatic facial expression, suggests that he is in the midst of fervent prayer. As in the other miniatures of the saints in this book of hours, Saint Anthony serves as a devotional model for the manuscript's readers, who are stimulated toward pious meditation as they read the prayer to him on the facing page. Crivelli set Anthony's peaked cave in a fantastic landscape that bears little resemblance to northern Africa, but the leafless trees and the barren ground do suggest a bleak wilderness. A winding stream connects foreground and background, and vivid pinks and oranges heighten the mystical spirituality of the scene.

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