14 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 149 



as an emblem of chastity certainly adds to its fitness as a sign of 

 Porphyrio, whose name it shares. The same virtue was also a char- 

 acteristic of St. Isidore, with whom the bird is associated in Bermejo's 

 painting. 



At the end of the left arm of the saint's throne is a gigantic snail 

 (fig. 8), unusual iconographically for its great size and in that the 

 animal is shown largely extruded from the shell. The exaggerated 

 size seems due to the artist's intention to use it as a decorative up- 

 curved knob-like ending of the throne arm as well as to place it in 

 the picture for its symbolic content. The fact that the snail itself is 

 shown coming out of the shell and moving up the arm of the chair, 

 away from the direction of the lectern on which the saint's manu- 

 script is lying, suggests that the text of the manuscript is something 

 from which the meaning implied in the snail is trying to escape, or, 

 in more general terms, that tbe content of the writings and the 

 symbolism of the snail are mutually incompatible. 



The snail had two quite different connotations. It was a symbol 

 of sloth, and especially of those souls who, by their sluggishness, 

 appear to attach themselves too greatly to the good things of the 

 world and do not attempt to seek after the higher tilings of the 

 spirit. This concept may be looked upon as something not in accord 

 with the writings being penned by the saint. The snail was also 

 used in quite an opposite sense, as is so often the case with symbols. 

 It became looked upon as a symbol of Christ, for the following 

 reason. ( )ne of the earliest and most influential of the early Church 

 writers, Tertullian ( Apologeticus, xlviii), took over from the old 

 classical source of the Delphic oracle the judgment that the snail is 

 the emblem of those who die and rise again from the tomb (cited 

 by Charbonneau-Lassay, 1 () 40, pp. 930-931. as taken from Dom. H. 

 Leclercq, Dictionaire d' Archaeologie chretienne, t. 3 :2 :col. 2906). 

 The belief that the snail remained for three months in the ground 

 during the winter, and then, when the warmer weather of spring 

 began to make conditions more equable, it came out again, was used 

 as a parallel to the three days of the entombment of Jesus prior to 

 the resurrection. Furthermore, the fact that the snail shell has a lid, 

 or operculum, which it keeps closed while lying in the earth but 

 which it is able to open when it wishes to emerge and move about, 

 was seized upon as akin to the raising of the cover of the tomb at 

 the time when Christ rose from the grave. The shell of the snail 

 thus came to signify the tomb whence man shall arise on the Day 

 of Redemption. The snail emerging from the shell thus would seem 

 to imply the act of Resurrection. That the artist chose to show the 



