BARTOLOME BERMEJO'S "EPISCOPAL SAINT" 

 A STUDY IN MEDIEVAL SPANISH SYMBOLISM 



By 

 HERBERT FRIEDMANN 



Director, Los Angeles County Museum 

 (With Eleven Plates) 



Since the earliest records of his self -consciousness, man has tended 

 to look upon himself as more than a mere physical being, as a bipartite 

 but yet coordinated union of body and soul. Early in his ascent from 

 savagery to civilization he began to choose natural objects from his 

 surroundings as symbols to convey thoughts or feelings that his lan- 

 guage was as yet unable to convey. Much later this long-ingrained 

 habit of "talking in symbols," coupled with the very slow rise of 

 literacy, was accentuated by man's submergence of objective interest 

 in the world about him with the rise of the religiously inspired alle- 

 gorical and mystical approach that dominated Europe during the long 

 centuries of the Middle Ages. Natural objects, animals, plants, stones, 

 the elements, were not considered interesting in themselves but were 

 looked upon chiefly as the bearers of meanings significant to man, and 

 it was the chief task of scholars to decipher these hidden messages 

 and not to waste time upon their carriers. 



It was not until the dawn of the Renaissance that a new interest in 

 the natural world began to assert itself. We must realize that the 

 proliferation and growth of all the natural sciences that we know 

 today would never have come about without this all-important, orig- 

 inally gradual but accelerating mental reorientation from mysticism 

 to objectivity. One of the most fascinating but least explored chapters 

 in the history of science is this transition from the allegorical and the 

 symbolic to the observational and the direct approach to nature. Be- 

 fore this chapter can be written with satis fyingly sympathetic under- 

 standing, we need to explore and to elucidate more fully what each 

 specific object really meant to the people who used them, and to trace 

 the alterations in their use and the additional and often unharmonious 

 implications that came to be attached to them. The study of symbolism 

 is a vital part of the history of the emergence of natural science, to 

 the elucidation of which it is hoped the present paper may make a 

 small contribution. 



SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS, VOL. 149, NO. 8 



