The Pelican, tearing open her breast to feed her young with her own blood, was an early symbol of our redemption through Christ.
One or both of these emblems are frequently found in ancient crosses and crucifixes; the lamb at the foot, the pelican at the top, of the cross.
The Dragon is the emblem of sin in general, and of the sin of idolatry in particular; and the dragon slain or vanquished by the power of the cross, is the perpetually recurring myth, which, varied in a thousand ways, we find running through all the old Christian legends: not subject to misapprehension in the earliest times; but, as the cloud of ignorance darkened and deepened, the symbol was translated into a fact. It has been suggested that the dragon, which is to us a phantasm and an allegory, which in the middle ages was the visible shape of the demon adversary of all truth and goodness, might have been, as regards form, originally a fact: for wherever we have dragon legends, whether the scene be laid in Asia, Africa, or Europe, the imputed circumstances and the form are little varied. The dragons introduced into early painting and sculpture so invariably represent a gigantic winged crocodile, that it is presumed there must have been some common origin for the type chosen as if by common consent; and that this common type may have been some fossil remains of the Saurian species, or even some far-off dim tradition of one of these tremendous reptiles surviving in Heaven knows what vast desolate morass or inland lake, and spreading horror and devastation along its shores. At Aix, a huge fossilised head of one of the Sauri was for a long time preserved as the head of the identical dragon subdued by St. Martha; and St. Jerome relates that he had himself beheld at Tyre the bones of the sea monster to which Andromeda had been exposed—probably some fossil remains which in the popular imagination were thus accounted for. Professor Owen told me that the head of a dragon in one of the legendary pictures he had seen in Italy closely resembled in form that of the Deinotherium Giganteum. These observations have reference only to the type adopted when the old Scripture allegory took form and shape. The dragon of Holy Writ is the same as the serpent, i. e., personified sin, the spiritual enemy of mankind.
The scriptural phrase of the ‘jaws of hell’ is literally rendered in the ancient works of Art by the huge jaws of a dragon, wide open and emitting flames, into which the souls of sinners are tumbled headlong. In pictures, sin is also typified by a serpent or snake; in this form it is placed under the feet of the Madonna, sometimes with an apple in its mouth; sometimes, but only in late pictures of the seventeenth century, winding its green scaly length round and round a globe, significant of the subjugation of the whole earth to the power of sin till delivered by the Redeemer. On this subject I shall have much more to say when treating of the pictures of the Fall of Man, and the subjects taken from the Apocalypse: for the present we need only bear in mind the various significations of the popular Dragon myth, which may shadow forth the conquest over sin, as in the legends of St. Michael and St. Margaret; or over paganism, as in the legends of St. Sylvester and St. George; or sometimes a destroying flood, as in the legend of St. Martha, where the inundation of the Rhone is figured by a dragon emerging from the waters and spreading around death and pestilence,—like the Python of the Grecian myth.
The Lion, as an ancient Christian symbol, is of frequent recurrence, more particularly in architectural decoration. Antiquaries are not agreed as to the exact meaning attached to the mystical lions placed in the porches of so many old Lombard churches; sometimes with an animal, sometimes with a man, in their paws. But we find that the lion was an ancient symbol of the Redeemer, ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah:’ also of the resurrection of the Redeemer; because, according to an oriental fable, the lion’s cub was born dead, and in three days its sire licked it into life. In this sense it occurs in the windows of the cathedral at Bourges. In either sense it may probably have been adopted as a frequent ornament in the church utensils, and in ecclesiastical decoration, supporting the pillars in front, or the carved thrones, &c.
The lion also typifies solitude—the wilderness; and, in this sense, is placed near St. Jerome and other saints who did penance, or lived as hermits in the desert; as in the legends of St. Paul the hermit, St. Mary of Egypt, St. Onofrio. Further, the lion as an attribute denoted death in the amphitheatre, and with this signification is placed near certain martyrs, as St. Ignatius and St. Euphemia. The lion, as the type of fortitude and resolution, was placed at the feet of those martyrs who had suffered with singular courage, as St. Adrian and St. Natalia.[10]
When other wild beasts, as wolves and bears, are placed at the feet of a saint attired as abbot or bishop, it signifies that he cleared waste land, out down forests, and substituted Christian culture and civilisation for paganism and the lawless hunter’s life: such is the significance in pictures of St. Magnus, St. Florentius and St. Germain of Auxerre.
The Hart or Hind was also an emblem of double signification. It was a type of solitude and of purity of life, and was also a type of piety and religious aspiration, adopted from the forty-second Psalm, ‘Like as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul for thee, O God!’