The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

An attribute made of a hand and a wound

Thomas the apostle is normally given a lance and a carpenter's square. In this subject he is identified by neither, but by the act the title names — the demand for evidence, and the touch that answers it. It is one of a small class of episodes in which a saint is known by a gesture directed at another figure, so that neither person can be identified alone. 5 titles in this collection name the incredulity, spread across three centuries of painting, which is a fair measure of how durable a subject built on a single gesture can be.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the canvas to 1823 and gives the Museum of Fine Arts Houston as its location. The dimensions are 242.6 x 176.5 cm, a large upright. It is filed under group portraiture and religious cultural heritage, with Neoclassicism as the style and Belgian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

A nineteenth-century date on an old subject

Neoclassicism appears on 15 entries in this collection. The term names a return to the sculptural clarity and controlled gesture of antique art, and it arrives here on a subject that had been painted for three hundred years before this date. What the record establishes is the combination — a devotional episode, at large scale, handled in 1823 under a style label built for civic and classical themes. Why the artist chose it is not recorded, and nothing here supplies a reason.