The cloak cut in half

Martin of Tours is named by an act of division. The tradition has him, as a soldier, cut his military cloak in two with his sword and give half to a beggar, and painters have used that single motion as his sign for more than a thousand years: a mounted man, a blade, a divided garment, a figure on the ground. It is one of the few attributes that requires two people. A wheel can be handed to a saint standing alone; half a cloak means nothing without the person holding the other half.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1882 and gives Private Collection as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under Religion, cultural heritage in both its religious and mythological headings, Vintage and Fantasy, with Symbolism as the style and French as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

Ten Martins, and most of them are water

The name appears in 10 titles in this catalogue and only three of them belong to the saint. The rest are geography: 5 entries for a canal in Paris, one for a street, one for a waterfall near Pontoise — painted by nineteenth-century landscapists who were recording an address. It is the clearest case in this collection of a saint's name outliving its owner and being reassigned to infrastructure — and it is the reason an entry like this one has to say which Martin is meant.