About Saints Oil Paintings

The object is the caption

A painted saint is a puzzle that came with a printed answer. For most of the period covered here, the people standing in front of these pictures could not read the label, and there was usually no label. Painters solved it with an object: Catherine has her wheel, Lawrence his gridiron, Peter the keys of the kingdom, Sebastian the arrows. The object is the caption, and the convention was stable enough across four centuries and half a dozen countries that a viewer in Antwerp could read an altarpiece painted in Seville.

That convention is the axis of this catalogue. Entries are grouped by the emblem a figure carries, not only by the name a museum record gives, because the emblem is the part a reader standing in front of the panel can actually use.

Where the emblem stops working

An attribute identifies, but it does not prove. The palm of martyrdom belongs to hundreds of figures and settles nothing on its own. A book is carried by roughly half the calendar. Two saints named Catherine, one of Alexandria and one of Siena, are told apart by a wheel and a crown of thorns, and a worn panel can lose either.

The rule followed here is to keep the museum's wording and the reading of the picture side by side rather than let one quietly overwrite the other, and to leave a hedged identification hedged instead of tidying it into a certainty.

What this catalogue leaves alone

This is a record of pictures, not a devotional resource and not a reference on canonisation, cult or relic. Feast days, the history of a cause, and the theology behind a legend are all outside the remit. When a legend is needed to explain why a figure holds what they hold, it appears in a sentence and stops there.

Who publishes this

Saints Oil Paintings is published by Art & See and supported by it. There is no subscription here, no paywall, no advertising and no donation form: the catalogue is paid for by the sale of hand-painted reproductions, and that is the whole of the arrangement.

Buying a reproduction of a painting catalogued here is what keeps the catalogue being written — the sourcing, the checking against collection records, and the work of keeping saints oil paintings free to read. Where an entry links to a reproduction, that link is marked as commercial, because it is.

What that money does not buy is the entry itself. No painting is catalogued because it sells, no wording is chosen to move a sale, and nothing is left out because it would be inconvenient to one. Where the two purposes pull against each other, the record wins.

Published by Art & See.

Art & See runs four other catalogues on the same principle — one subject each, kept separate because a reader looking for one is rarely looking for the others:

• Jesus Oil Paintings — the Gospel narrative, episode by episode
• Angels Paintings — angels, archangels and the celestial hierarchy
• Horses Paintings — the horse in Western painting, by discipline
• Vincent van Gogh Paintings — the catalogued work, place by place and year by year