l6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I49 



animal in the act of emerging certainly stresses this idea, as the 

 shell itself would have been sufficient to convey the tomb symbolism 

 and would also have been ample as a naturalistic motif to serve as 

 a part of the decoration of the throne. Furthermore, the artist has 

 given the head of the snail a strikingly tripartite appearance as if 

 to further emphasize the trinitarian number involved in the three 

 months of hibernation and the three days of entombment. For a 

 fuller discussion of the symbolism of the snail, both mundane and 

 spiritual, the interested reader may be referred to Charbonneau- 

 Lassay (1940, esp. pp. 930-931). 



It is in this sense of a "resurrection" symbol that the snail appears 

 in an inconspicuous place in the lower right foreground of Perino 

 del Vaga's altarpiece The Nativity (figs. 9, 10) in the National 

 Gallery of Art (S. H. Kress collection). The inconspicuousness 

 of it in that picture, where it remains unnoticed by the majority of 

 viewers, is in striking contrast to its enlargement and placement in 

 Rermejo's panel. 



A further pictorial connection between the symbolism of the snail 

 and the torn!) of Christ exists in Rermejo's painting. The decora- 

 tion on St. Isidore's pluvial that appears immediately above and 

 behind the snail shell depicts a domed tomb-like structure, an ompha- 

 los, supported by pillars. As was clearly pointed out by Smith (1950, 

 p. 76) in his study of the use and symbolism of the dome as an 

 architectural design, "... the Christians at Jerusalem came to asso- 

 ciate the ideas of an omphalos with the domical tomb of Christ, the 

 ciborium over the altar and the Mount of Calvary. . . ." 



The crushed, snarling dragon (fig. 11) is an old and widely used 

 symbol of wrath and evil, and, as such, occurs in religious art with 

 numbers of saints as a sign of one of the vices they overcame by 

 their piety and good deeds. Thus, to take but a single example, St. 

 Servatus is usually shown seated at a desk with a dragon under his 

 foot. Other saints that quickly come to mind in this connection 

 are Margaret, Martha, Philip, and Sylvester, and the archangel 

 Michael. St. George of Cappadocia is usually shown in the act of 

 transfixing the dragon with his lance. The dragon is thus of no 

 special significance, other than in its general connotation, in this paint- 

 ing by Rermejo. 



Recause of the richness of symbolic creatures portrayed in this 

 picture, the rarity in religious art of one of them, the porphyrio, the 

 unusual use and magnitude of the snail largely extruded from its 

 shell, and the rare use by Spanish artists of the motif of the caged 

 bird (and especially the caged goldfinch), one wonders how and 



