All saints day – how to identify more than 20 000 Saints in the Catholic Church

How can we distinguish the holy figures?

We can distinguish a Saint by two aspects:

– their characteristics – referring to physical appearance and clothing;

– their attributes – the elements of various kinds that generally relate to their condition, occupation, life history or martyrdom.

the physical aspect

In most cases, the physical aspect is more or less standardized and has very few variations:

– the facial features tend to be balanced, silhouettes are slender and with a somewhat fragile appearance, as a way to suggest the life of asceticism (with few exceptions, such as St. Christopher, represented as a more athletic man);

– most of the images presented are healthy, but many representations show the Saints with some sort of the mutilation (usually resulting from their martyrdom or disease) or even suffering their martyrdom;

Guido Reni Saint Joseph with Jesus. Source wikicommons

– saints are represented mature in age, except for those who died in youth or that usually are seen as elderly people (like Saint Joseph or Saint Jerome);

– European physical types are the most predominant, in particular the Mediterranean;

St. Wilgefort crucified. Wood carving (16th century, Church of Saint Etienne in Beauvais – France)

– beards are short on the young and long on patriarchal characters (note that there is one female saint who is represented with a beard: St. Wilgeforte, the only exception to the softness that usually characterizes women’s faces);

– it is rare to find female saints depicted with visible hair (one example of a female saint with exposed hair is St. Mary Magdalene);

– it is also rare to find physical inferiorities and defacements (as exceptions to the rule we find St. Rocco with the ulcers of leprosy and St. Noemia’s deformed foot, represented like a goose foot).

The clothing

The clothing reveals more about the identity of the image, helping us define certain aspects of life- experience, status and country of origin of the Saint in question, as well as the hierarchical position that he/she occupies in the Church, if any.

We can outline some general aspects:

– saints of the early centuries of Christianity are dressed in a conventional way, with a white tunic, mantle and girded sandals;

– the Apostles are dressed in the same fashion, but barefoot (according to religious reasons, inferred in the New Testament);

– a Saint who had military activity is represented with their weapons and armours (which sometimes leads to anachronisms in the representations);

– Angels and Archangels of the celestial militia may be represented with weapons and armours, although, they are generally seen with white robes;

– clothing reflects the social status: a peasant (for example, San Isidro), a shepherd (St. Vendelin) or a King (St. Louis of France);

Baby Jesus as a Pilgrim on the Way of St. James (oil on canvas by an unknown author; dated from the second half of the 17th century; Museum of Aveiro – Portugal).

– pilgrims present themselves with the cockle hat or traveller’s hat (a typical hat associated with the pilgrims on the Way of St. James), a rod or a staff (sometimes with gourd or calabash), a short hood and sometimes a scallop schell (for the pilgrims on the Way of St. James);