Saint Anthony of Padua

Section one

Who this figure is

His name was not Anthony. He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon on 15 August 1195 to a wealthy and noble family, and he was educated at the cathedral school of his own city. At fifteen he entered the Augustinian canons at the Abbey of Saint Vincent outside Lisbon; in 1212, tired of constant visits from family and friends, he asked to be moved to the motherhouse at Coimbra, then the capital of Portugal, to study theology and Latin in peace.

What changed his life was a corpse. Five Franciscans had been beheaded in Morocco — the first of their order to be martyred — and King Afonso II ransomed their bodies back to be buried as martyrs at Coimbra. Fernando, a comfortable Augustinian, watched the relics of five ragged friars arrive, and concluded he was on the wrong side of the story. He asked to join the Franciscans, who had been founded only eleven years earlier, and took the name Anthony, from the little chapel of Anthony the Great at Olivais where he was received.

He then did the thing he had been inspired to do, and failed at it. He sailed for Morocco, fell gravely ill, and was shipwrecked on the voyage home — landing in Sicily rather than Portugal. Too sickly to be sent anywhere useful, he was parked in a hermitage at Montepaolo near Forlì, where he lived in a cave and was probably the least promising friar in the province.

In 1222, at an ordination in Forlì, the visiting Dominicans turned up assuming a Franciscan would preach and the Franciscans turned up assuming the Dominicans would. Nobody was prepared. The head of the house ordered Anthony to say something, he objected, was overruled, and delivered an impromptu sermon that made his reputation in a single afternoon. He was sent to Bologna and Romagna to preach; within two years Francis of Assisi had personally entrusted him with the theological education of the friars, a job Francis handed over with real reluctance, because Francis distrusted study. In Anthony he found the only friar he trusted with it.

He became provincial superior of northern Italy in 1226 based in Padua, and in 1228 was sent as envoy to Pope Gregory IX, who heard him preach, called him the jewel case of the Bible, and commissioned his collection of sermons. He died on the way back to Padua on 13 June 1231, at the Poor Clare convent at Arcella, of ergotism, aged thirty-five. He was canonised on 30 May 1232 by Gregory IX at Spoleto — less than twelve months later, one of the fastest canonisations in the history of the Church. In 1946 Pius XII named him a Doctor of the Church with the title Doctor evangelicus, the evangelical doctor.

Section two

The moment in the sculpture

This is not a scene from the Gospels and it is not even a scene from a public event. It is a private moment, and to understand why the sculptor chose it you have to know what the book is for.

The figure stands in the brown Franciscan habit with the hood down, a white knotted cord at his waist, a closed dark book in his right hand with a stem of white lilies tucked against it, and the infant Christ held up in his left arm. The child is not cradled like a baby. He is a small standing boy, propped against the saint's chest, looking outward. That pose is the whole point: Anthony is not sheltering an infant. He is holding up a person.

The story behind it comes from the early lives of the saint rather than from any Gospel. Anthony, who read and preached scripture for a living, was repeatedly represented in art as sitting over an open book, and the tradition grew that the Christ Child himself had appeared to him while he was studying — the child understood as the Word he was reading about. Over the centuries the child grew in these images, the book shrank, and the composition we have here is the end product: the book demoted to a prop in one hand, the child promoted to the centre of the other.

The other tradition in this figure is that of a visitor who could not sleep. In the legends, a man who had given Anthony a room looked in on him at night and saw a strange light and a boy in the room. Whether or not one credits it, that framing is illuminating: the apparition is not described as a vision Anthony had for his own benefit, but as something an outsider observed. The iconography preserves the outsider's view — you, looking at the statue, are standing where that man stood.

The painting is restrained compared with some pieces in this collection. The habit is a flat brown with thin gold trim at the sleeves and hem, the cord is plain white with two tassels, the child is white and gold. There is no marble base, no gold plaque — just a grey stone-coloured disc. It is a working statue of a working saint, made to be prayed to rather than admired.

Section three

What the objects mean

Four things are on this figure, and every one of them is an attribute by which he can be identified from across a room. Take any one away and he becomes a generic friar.

The cord deserves more attention than it usually gets. A Franciscan's cord is not a belt. It is the oldest thing he wears, it is made of the cheapest material available, and the three knots tied in it are the three vows — poverty, chastity, obedience. Its unbleached white is deliberate: it echoes the rope with which Christ was bound.

The head, and the hood

Short brown hair, a beardless, rather young face, the hood lying on the shoulders.

He died at thirty-five, and the tradition keeps him young. The beardless face and the hood worn down — rather than pulled up like a hermit's — mark him as a preacher who lived among people, not a solitary.

The book, and the lilies against it

A small closed book with dark binding, a stem of white lilies held with it in the same hand.

The book is his own hand-copied psalter, and the most famous object in his life — see the next section for what happened to it. The lily is the standard sign of purity, and in his case it doubles as the flower of the resurrection garden, because it is usually held fresh-cut rather than growing.

The Christ Child

A small standing figure in white with gold trim, held up in the crook of the saint's arm.

The child is the answer to the book. Anthony spent his life reading scripture; the tradition says the Word he was reading turned up in the room. This is also the reason he is the patron of people looking for something they cannot find — including, in the broadest reading, God.

The white knotted cord

A thick twisted cord at the waist with two tassels hanging loose.

A Franciscan's cingulum, worn instead of a leather belt as a sign of poverty. The three knots stand for the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the unbleached white recalls the rope used to bind Christ.

Section four

What Scripture says, and what it does not

Anthony is entirely post-biblical. He lived from 1195 to 1231, and the only scripture in his story is the scripture he read — which is, in a literal sense, what the statue is holding.

The famous detail is well documented and needs no embellishment. Asked how he came to be the patron of lost things, the Church points to a psalter. Anthony was teaching students, his psalm book was precious because it was hand-copied and contained his own notes, and a novice who had decided to leave the order took it with him. Anthony prayed it would be returned. The novice came back with the book — and came back to the order as well. The psalter is said to be preserved at the Franciscan friary in Bologna.

It is a small story about a book, and its power is that it is proportioned correctly. Not a miracle of resurrection, just property returned and a man persuaded to stay. That is why the devotion travels so well: everybody has lost something, and nobody expects heaven to care about a set of keys.

The miracle stories are a separate matter, and the early lives are frank about them. He is said to have preached to fish at Rimini when the heretics there would not listen. He is said to have challenged a sceptic at Rimini to test the doctrine of the Eucharist with a hungry mule, which ignored the fodder and knelt before the sacrament. He is said to have eaten poisoned food deliberately, having blessed it, when hosts who meant to kill him questioned whether he believed the words of Mark 16:18.

The physical evidence is stranger than the legends. When his body was exhumed about thirty years after his death, the flesh had turned to dust, but his tongue was reported to be fresh and glistening — a sign, his contemporaries concluded, of the gift of preaching. The tongue, jaw and vocal cords are kept in a reliquary at the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua. In 1981 Pope John Paul II authorised a scientific team to study the remains.

The richness of spiritual teaching contained in the Sermons was so great that in 1946 Pope Pius XII proclaimed Anthony a Doctor of the Church, attributing to him the title Doctor evangelicus, since the freshness and beauty of the Gospel emerge from these writings.

Pope Benedict XVI

Section five

Why it sits on a shelf

Because people lose things, and he is the one you ask. That is not a joke, it is the strongest devotional mechanism in the Catholic catalogue: a saint attached to a universal, ordinary, mildly humiliating human experience.

The practice around him is old and slightly awkward for liturgists — the statue gets turned to face the wall while the request is pending, the promise of an offering gets made, and the whole arrangement has the flavour of a negotiation rather than a prayer. The formal version of it is the novena: thirteen consecutive Tuesdays, or a thirty-minute prayer on any Tuesday. The Tuesday devotion is very old and is kept in most of the world, and the Italian street feast for him in New York's South Village still runs to a week of processions with his relic carried through the streets.

He is also the patron of the Custody of the Holy Land, of the poor, the elderly, the hungry, and of the amputees and the disabled — the last because he is invoked against limb-loss, which is one of the more specific patronages in the whole catalogue.

In practice this statue gets a place on a shelf in an ordinary room, and it tends to be one of the first figures in a house to be spoken to rather than simply looked at. The parish church of São António is one of the most common dedications in Portugal, Brazil, Goa and Kerala, so for a great many families the figure on the shelf is a souvenir of a parish as much as a devotional object.