Sir Edwin Landseer and the Trafalgar Square lions

The lions in Trafalgar Square, London, were created by the Victorian artist Sir Edwin Landseer in 1867. There is an interesting story behind how they came to look the way they do.

Sir Edwin Landseer 

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73) was perhaps a strange choice when it came to awarding the commission for the four bronze lions that adorn the foot of Nelson’s column in London’s Trafalgar Square. He was primarily a painter, not a sculptor, although he was certainly renowned as a painter of animals. Apart from that, he was highly favoured by Queen Victoria, which might have had something to do with it.

Sir Edwin’s problem

The main problem he had was how he was going to be able to produce a reasonable representation of a lion when he did not have a model to work from. He originally asked for a cast of a stone lion in Turin to be sent to him, but the delays involved were far too long and he needed to get to work in a hurry.

Fortunately (from his point of view, not that of the beast in question), one of the lions at London Zoo had just died, so Landseer asked for the corpse to be sent to his studio. He had worked in this way before, when painting the dead lion for the design that appears to this day on tins of “Lyle’s golden syrup”, but this time he needed the lion to appear to be alive!

It was therefore propped up in his studio for him to get all the measurements and angles correct, although he had to work fairly quickly due to the unpleasant smells that came from the decomposing remains.

When the Turin lion eventually arrived, Landseer was doubtless highly relieved – casts of stone lions are much less offensive to the nostrils than rapidly decaying dead ones – but it would appear that the sculptor of the Turin lion was not as good as Landseer had been led to believe.

The net result, given Landseer’s previous experience of painting pet dogs, plus the somewhat unreliable models that he was forced to work from, is that the lions that were erected in Trafalgar Square in 1867 are far from realistic. Their pose is more like that of dogs begging for a morsel rather than that adopted by beasts of the African plains.

However, the lions have never ceased to be popular, and it is not easy to get a photo of one without a tourist sitting on its back!

© John Welford

St Alban

The cathedral city of St Albans in Hertfordshire takes its name from Alban, who was the first English saint.

The story goes that Alban was a Roman soldier in the town of Verulamium, an important settlement on Watling Street. During a period of persecution of Christians he gave shelter to a Christian man and was himself converted to Christianity.

On being ordered to hand over the protected man he refused to do so and was executed as a result.

Is the story true? Set against it is the fact that Christians were only persecuted very rarely in Roman Britain. However, the story was first recorded early in the 5^th century, and the event would not have happened – if it did – much earlier than then. The balance therefore seems to come down on “Yes” rather than “No”.

The Abbey Church of St Alban was founded by King Offa, who reigned in the late 8^th century. Tradition has it that the place of Alban’s martyrdom became the site of the high altar of the Abbey, which was declared a Cathedral in 1877.

© John Welford

St Simon the Zealot

28th October is the official “saint’s day” of one of Jesus’s lesser known disciples, namely Simon the Zealot, so named to avoid confusion with the much better known Simon Peter. The gospels of Matthew and Mark describe him as being a Canaanite, and it is only Luke who gives him the “Zealot” title.

A zealot is someone who is willing to fight for a cause, the meaning being not far removed from that of “fanatic”. Simon may therefore have been identified with the Jewish zealots who would later fight against the Romans in the revolt that led to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. 

However, Simon could not have been both a follower of Jesus and a participant in the revolt, due in part to the date range involved, and also because Simon would by then have been a committed and elderly Christian, so Luke’s reference might have been to an earlier outbreak of “Zealotry”. The gospel was almost certainly written after the revolt of 70 AD, so the writer could have made a false assumption about the history of the Zealot movement. Another possibility is that a mistranslation is responsible.

Facts about Simon are hard to come by because, as is the case with most of the apostles, different traditions and stories abound and it is impossible to state with certainty which are more believable than others. 

 One tradition asserts that Simon and Jude worked together as evangelists, which is why they share the same saint’s day. It is also said that Simon was martyred by being sawn in half, although there are so many conflicting stories that any of them, including the one that says that he died peacefully in his bed, may also be true. 

Images of Simon often show him holding a saw, following the "sawn in half" tradition.

© John Welford

St Notburga

Born around 1265, Notburga was a young serving girl who worked for Count Henry of Rattenberg at his castle near Eben in the Austrian Alps. She came from a poor peasant family and soon became aware that the castle’s pigs were given more food in a day than her parents ate in weeks. The same was true of the poor people who came to the castle gates to beg for alms.

Notburga began passing waste food from the castle kitchen to the beggars at the gates, and if there was not enough she donated some of her own food.

This activity was noticed by Count Henry’s mother, who encouraged Notburga to continue. However, his wife took a very different view. When her mother-in-law died she made sure that Notburga was dismissed.

Notburga went to work for a local farmer, for whom she worked hard although she insisted on being allowed time off on Sundays to go to church.

Meanwhile, life for Count Henry started to go downhill. His wife died and enemies started encroaching on his lands. He could only think that his misfortunes were due to the injustice of sacking a kitchen maid who had only tried to be charitable to people worse off than herself. 

When he remarried, and his new wife said that she needed a good maid to look after her, Count Henry lost no time in getting Notburga back on the payroll. She stayed in the household for the rest of her life – which ended in 1313 – and Count Henry’s difficulties disappeared from the day she returned.

St Notburga’s day is 14^th September. She is usually portrayed holding a sickle, as used by a peasant farmer. She is a patron saint of servants.

© John Welford

St Alexis

There are many saints who are recognized by one or more branches of the Christian Church but of whom very few people have heard, and it is sometimes hard to work our why they ever gained the status they did.

One of these was Alexis, who died in the year 417. His claim to fame appears to be down to living a life of poverty but still being generous to others – which must have been true of plenty of other people down the centuries.

There was a bit more to the story of Alexis, namely that he chose to live as a beggar when he did not need to do so, and he did so out of devotion to God. He was born into a wealthy Roman family late in the 4^th century and was expected to marry an heiress to a fortune. However, he turned his back on a life of privilege and moved to Mesopotamia, where he lived in a tiny hut next to a church and lived on whatever people would give him. If he came across anyone even poorer than himself he would share what he had with them.

Seventeen years after leaving the family home he went back to it and was employed there as a servant, being unrecognized for who he was and never revealing his true identity. He slept at night under the staircase of the house that rightly belonged to him.

He lived this life for another seventeen years before he died. When this happened a parchment was found in his belongings that told the full story. He was given a dignified Christian burial. 

His sainthood was confirmed by Pope Honorius III in 1216 when Alexis’s burial site was discovered. He was reburied under the high altar of the church of St Boniface in Rome, which was then renamed as “Sant Alessio e Bonifatio”.

The saint’s day for St Alexis is 17^th July.

© John Welford

St Valentine

Just who was St Valentine? And what has he got to do with the custom of sending Valentine’s cards on 14th February? The second question is easier to answer than the first, that answer being “absolutely nothing”! The first question, however, is a completely different matter.

One problem with the story of Valentine is that there appear to have been two of them! Both seem to have been martyred during the second half of the 3rd century, and both were buried alongside the Via Flaminia, the road that led over the mountains between Rome and Rimini on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Rome’s Flaminian Gate (later called the Porto del Popolo) has also been known as the Gate of St Valentine, after a church of St Valentine was built nearby in the 4th century.

The two Valentines were a Roman priest and a Bishop of Interamna (modern-day Terni, about 65 miles northeast of Rome).

But how likely is it that there were really two men with the same name and similar stories? It is far more probable that different stories were told about the same person, and that the differences were enough to persuade some people that there were two martyrs named Valentine.

And what were those stories? The answer to that question is “absolutely nothing than can be relied upon”. Stories of saints seem to have become interchangeable, and there is no certainty that a tale of a miraculous cure (for example) that has been assigned to Saint A could not just as easily have been performed by Saint B – or simply be pure invention on the part of a story-teller who wanted to pass off a random piece of animal bone as a holy relic and needed a convincing story to make his case.

In the case of Valentine, it appears that his stories are interchangeable with those applied to four saints - Marius and Martha and their sons Audifax and Abachum – who may or may not have been Persians who went to Rome to attend to the burial of bodies of martyrs and ended up being martyred themselves. The legends attached to this quartet are highly dubious, and are no less so when assigned to Valentine.

So there really is nothing to associate Valentine with lovers or falling in love. He was assigned the feast day of 14th February, and there was a tradition that this was the day on which birds began to pair up – on the assumption that the average sparrow or pigeon keeps a calendar. Given that this was an appropriate day for young people to start thinking about choosing a partner, the name of St Valentine became attached to the business of sending cards and flowers to one’s intended or partner.

The obscure Roman martyr – whoever he was – was entirely innocent of the whole business!

© John Welford

Aaron, brother of Moses

As with many Old Testament characters, how much of what is said to be known about Aaron is fact and how much is myth is open to doubt.

He was reputed to be the elder brother of Moses, the first high priest of the Israelites and the founder of the priesthood. He acted as the spokesman of Moses during the latter's dealings with the Pharaoh of Egypt and was co-leader of the Israelites during their journey to the Promised Land.

While Moses was receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, Aaron gave in to the demands of the people for something to worship and allowed a golden calf to be made. Despite this act of rebellion, Aaron and his sons were ordained as priests after the Ark of the Covenant had been constructed and Aaron became hereditary high priest.

Several miracles were attributed to Aaron, including the blossoming of his rod into an almond tree. He was said to have lived to the age of 123.

© John Welford