Saint Dominic of Guzmán

The dog with the torch

Dominic is identified by a black cloak over a white habit and by a set of signs that are unusually verbal for this system. A star is given to him; a lily; a rosary; and a dog carrying a lit torch in its mouth, which arrives through a play on the name of the order he founded — the Latin for dogs of the Lord sounds like the Latin for Dominicans. That is a rare case of an attribute produced by a pun rather than by an event, and it stuck.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1685 and gives the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain as its location. No dimensions are recorded in this entry. It is filed under cultural heritage and religious cultural heritage, with Baroque as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

The name that reached the map

3 titles in this catalogue contain the name Dominic, and all three name the saint. The name travelled further than the titles show: the same collection holds a portrait whose title records Saint-Domingue, a colony, which is what happens to a name once an order carries it across an ocean. The habit and the torch stay with the person; the syllables go on without him.