In memory of this legend the great processions from S. Marco, until the prohibition of processions in a.d. 1870, used to strike up the antiphon ‘Regina Coeli’, as soon as they came to the bridge of Hadrian.
For the true source of this legend there is no need to look beyond the vision of the angel at the threshing-floor of Araunah: ‘And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem.’ In the Capitoline Museum is an altar dedicated to Isis by some traveller on his safe return, and bearing the customary imprint of two feet. The devout believed these to be the footprints of the angel that appeared to Gregory, and the altar once stood in the church of Ara Coeli.
GREGORY AND THE ANGEL
Photograph by Giraudon, Paris
It is certain that at least as early as this time pictures were carried in public procession. Theophylactus[138] has described two occasions on which a sacred effigy of Christ, believed not to have been made by human hands, was carried into battle for the sake of inspiring valour and discipline into the soldiery (a.d. 586 and 588). Among the many gems in which Bede’s Ecclesiastical History[139] abounds is that picture of the arrival of Augustine and his companions in Thanet ‘bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board’ (a.d. 597). The sixteenth-century chronicler Baronius says, that the picture which Gregory carried in this plague procession of a.d. 590 was that of the Madonna, now preserved in the church of S. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline, and still believed to protect Rome from plague and pestilence. Rome has no fewer than four pictures of the Madonna attributed like this one to the hand of Luke the Physician, and all of them reputed to have wonder-working powers. Expert opinion, alas! pronounces the oldest of them a fifteenth century production.
Gregory’s procession has afforded a favourite theme for art. It is the subject of one of the frescoes in the Lady Chapel of Winchester Cathedral executed under the direction of Prior Silkstede at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The scene is also shown in a picture in the Chiesa del San Pietro at Perugia, in a modern picture by the Austrian painter Hiremy Hirsch, and in several others elsewhere. The miniature figured on the opposite page is one of two from a beautiful Livre d’Heures, of the early fifteenth century, and once the property of the Duc de Berry. It is now in the Musée Condé of the Château de Chantilly.
An Italian tradition refers the custom of saying ‘Bless you’, when a person sneezes, to the time of the pestilence of Gregory, in which all those that sneezed were said to have died. Boersch, quoting from the local chronicles of Kleinlauel and of Oseas Schadaeus, would trace its origin to the plague at Strasbourg in a.d. 591.[140] ‘And when any one sneezed, he gave up the ghost forthwith. Hence the saying “God help you”. And when any one yawned, he died. Hence it comes that when any one yawns, one makes the sign of the cross before the mouth.’ Probably the association is even older than this, for Thucydides speaks of sneezing in the plague of Athens. Sneezing and yawning were prominent features of the Sweating Sickness.