2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I49 



The painting (fig. 1) with which this study deals is a small one 

 (18| x 10j inches), painted on a panel about 1480 by Bartolome 

 Bermejo. It came to the Art Institute of Chicago a number of years 

 ago as part of the M. A. Ryerson collection. The figure portrayed 

 has not been identified, and none of several suggested solutions is 

 convincing. The saint, richly robed and mitred and with a radiant 

 nimbus, is seated on a narrow, high-backed throne at a desk on which 

 is a manuscript he has been writing. In his upraised right hand is a 

 quill pen ; his attitude is that of a writer pausing to think about what 

 to put down next in his text. The decorative inscriptions carried by the 

 figures embroidered on the saint's pluvial identify them as prophets, 

 but this hardly enables us to identify the wearer. 



Iniguez (1935, p. 302) identified the saint as St. Augustine, but 

 Post (1938, p. 874) considered that the habit beneath his cope and 

 the garb of his two companions in the background of the painting were 

 Benedictine. Post, a better art historian than an iconographer, went 

 on to say 



the bird behind his desk may be intended as the raven that is one of 

 St. Benedictine's emblems. The Satanic dragon who snarls in the 

 lower right corner would be suitable to Benedict instead of his fre- 

 quent attribute of the aspergillum by which he discomfited the devil, 

 but it must be remembered that the crushed dragon is the constant 

 symbol of a saint who was appropriated by the Benedictines, Ma- 

 carius. Sto. Domingo de Salos, also a Benedictine, and the subject 

 of Bermejo's extant picture in the Prado. likewise won many vic- 

 tories over the arch-fiend. The bird certainly looks more like a 

 barnyard fowl than a raven, and may signify still another Bene- 

 dictine saint — another Domingo — Sto. Domingo de la Calzada, 

 whose ordinary emblems, as tokens of his most stupendous miracle, 

 are a cock and a hen. . . . 



However, the bird is neither a raven nor a barnyard fowl but is a very 

 accurate, naturalistic rendition of a European swamp-hen or purple 

 gallinule, the Spanish name for which is calamon and the classical 

 name porphyrio. The bird has appeared in art very rarely, and then 

 chiefly in faunal and floral compositions by artists such as Roelandt 

 Savery. Jan van Kessel, and Jan Brueghel the Elder, or in decora- 

 tive tapestries of natural subject matter. Illustrating this here are a 

 detail from an early 17th-century painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder 

 (fig. 2) entitled "Noah's Ark," now in the Walters Art Gallery, Balti- 

 more, and a detail from a French Gobelin tapestry of about 1764 to 

 1771 (fig. 3) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York (S. H. 

 Kress collection). 



In the painting by Bermejo the porphyrio (fig. 4) is standing on 

 the floor behind the desk, in the passage between the saint's room and 



