Exploring the iconic meaning of the image through which ‘God spoke to St Francis’

The San Damiano Cross: An Icon of the Crucifixion by Madeleine Stewart

(Conard Press, €12.00 / £10.50; ISBN 978-1-9161432-0-3; orders to conardicons.com)

Madeline Stewart, who is an accredited expert on icons and their interpretation lives in Northern Ireland, but mentally she is a well-travelled global person through her explorations of icons of the Orthodox tradition. She gives a wonderful demonstration in this little book of just how they should be understood and used in devotions.

These images, as we all know from experience, often suffered from the failure of art experts trained in western ideas of art interpretation to do them full justice. (I am thinking here of those young graduates in art history whom we so often encounter in religious shrines which have developed into tourist attractions across Western Europe.)

This book will, I think, be an eye-opener in the matter of icons for many readers, short as it is. Her interest in the San Damiano cross began when she was asked by her sister, a Franciscan sister, to give a short talk to a pilgrim group who were visiting the Franciscan shrine at San Damiano in Assisi, where St Clare established her first community.

When St Francis himself had his mystical experience in 1205 the church was badly neglected and nearly in ruins. He felt urged to follow the divine injunction, “Francis, go and repair my church”. This he took to mean the little church in which he knelt; only later did he realise the call was to repair the universal Church.

Preserved

The cross is now preserved in another chapel, a facsimile hanging at San Damiano. It has been described by some scholars as Romanesque, yet its entire inspiration, as Madeleine Stewart decodes it, is entirely Eastern, entirely and correctly Orthodox.

She recounts how her initial talk merely developed initial ideas that she pursued at greater length on returning to Ulster with the aid of the computer programs that she had used in her architectural practice, and the practical help of other more skilled computer experts in handling the interpretive task she found she had taken on.

She recounts all this in a straight forward but simple way, for she is dealing with a complex tradition hardly known to most people in the Western Church. She was able to understand what it must have looked like originally. Over time it has suffered serious damage involving a total loss of a portion at the foot of the cross and its replacement by a tile, suggesting that overzealous veneration by pilgrims in past centuries were responsible. But drawing on her knowledge of the icon tradition she has been able to reconstruct and restore the losses. It is a wonderful art history detective story.

“Icons, and particularly an early and complex icon, like the San Damiano cross,” she writes, “can look strange, and even unattractive, to the Western eye. Eyes used to realism, in a material sense, of Western renaissance art, and in modern times, to the highly individual works by artists regarded as great, can easily fail to recognise the beauty of icons; rarely do they see the integrity of the theological truths which they portray.”

(Oddly, in an aside, she remarks on the use of a cockerel as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection on an Irish penal cross, most of which it seems were made and sold to pilgrims at Lough Derg at the start of the 19th century).

When her sister asked her to give that talk to a group of modern Irish pilgrims she had no realisation of the journey into love she was setting out on.

“It is my hope that this presentation on the cross will give you, as it did me, a greater appreciation of this unique and holy icon and assist you in your prayer and meditation as you spend time with your crucified Lord.”

I myself have only one reservation about this short, but brilliant book, and that is it needs to be far longer and to be properly supported by a mainstream publisher (such as Thames and Hudson) to reach the far wider audience it deserves.

But for now, this is a wonderful happily accessible book on an intriguing topic which can be warmly commended to every reader.