‘A Rough Rude Sea’

This fourteenth-century Latin illuminated manuscript, written in the Italian textura script, was made in Naples, Italy. It is a copy of The Lives of Seventy-two Fathers of the Church and Anchorites, an early medieval collection of saints’ lives. The ink and coloured wash drawing of the manuscript is in the style of the Neapolitan master Roberto d'Oderisio, perhaps by his hand.

The scene is from the life of St Martinian of Palestine. Legend recounts Martinian’s withdrawal to the wilderness, not far from the city of Caesarea, at the age of eighteen. He lived there for twenty-five years as a hermit and ascetic. Later, seeking yet greater solitude and relief from carnal temptations, he became a recluse on an uninhabited island.

Then one day a powerful storm destroys a nearby ship; a woman, clinging to a piece of the wreckage, floats to the island—yet another carnal temptation!

In the scene, framed by two ornamental trees, Martinian encounters the woman. Nimbed, and wearing a cap and monk’s habit, he kneels on the shore at the right of the composition. At left, the ship lists in the sea, its sails torn, its mast broken, its crow’s nest fallen toppling over the stern, as the winged head of a personified wind blows a flailing rope ladder. Beneath the shattered hull of the disabled vessel float the ghostly corpses of several drowned sailors, all stripped naked by the violent waves. At centre, beneath another personified wind, the woman, with both hands raised, is seated on a plank. Her feet dangle in the water.

Martinian’s damsel in distress shows us how some aboard the ill-fated Alexandrian freighter in Acts—perhaps even Paul himself—might have paddleboarded to safety by obeying the centurion's command: ‘jump overboard ... and make for the land ... on planks and ... pieces of the ship’ (Acts 27:43–44).

References

Butler, Alban. 1866. ‘St Martinianus, Hermit at Athens’, in The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, vol. 2: February, 12 vols (Dublin: James Duffy)

Paul’s Shipwreck is by the Dutch painter and calligrapher Ludolf Backhuysen I (1630–1708) who worked primarily in Amsterdam and became famous for his drawings and paintings of seascapes.

Backhuysen’s rendering of the scene is indeed striking. The crippled ship lists at an angle just to the right of centre, buffeted by whitecaps and apparently bereft of crew. The abandoned crow’s nest is pushed askew by the contrary winds, the twisted mainsail beneath it; ‘the forepart’ of the ship here appears to be quite ‘stuck fast’, ‘unmoveable’, and ‘the hinder part ... broken with the violence of the waves’ (Acts 27:41). A menacing sky dominates the entire upper half of the painting and dwarfs the struggling survivors in the foreground.

The painting captures what follows the centurion’s command to those who could swim ‘to throw themselves overboard first and make for the land, and the rest on planks or on pieces of the ship’ (27:43–44). Passengers and crew have already ‘all escaped to land’ (27:44). Backhuysen’s survivors, now ashore, pull rescued cargo to higher ground. Left of centre, one man seems to be hoisting something on his shoulder; at far right, two men drag behind them a large bundle across the beach at the water’s edge.

Yet Backhuysen’s painting is also at odds with the biblical text. The narrative is clear that everything of value—the grain, the ship’s other cargo, even its tackle—had been thrown into the sea by the crew before the ship ran aground (27:18, 19, 38).

Backhuysen’s scene is a salvage operation. But according to the narrative of Acts, there is nothing left to salvage.

References

Broos, B. P. J. 2017. ‘Bakhuizen [Backhuysen; Bakhuisen; Bakhuyzen], Ludolf’, Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, available at https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T005827

This illumination from a Latin minuscule manuscript of the Pauline Epistles, with commentary by Petrus Lombardus, was written and illuminated in León, Spain, at the Cistercian monastery of Saints Facundo and Primitivo in Sahagún. According to the colophon, the manuscript was produced in 1181 at the order of the abbot Guterius, who presided over the monastery from 1164 to 1182.

In the illumination, framed in the initial P of Paulus, Paul, faintly nimbed, appears seated in a sailing boat on the water with his hands bound and a rope around his neck. Two men stand at right, one holding the rope that binds him. Between them and Paul stand the ship’s mast and sail. A third man, seated, holds a rudder in his right hand. The Apostle’s name is the first word of the enlarged letters of the phrase, ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus’, Paul’s typical self-presentation in the openings of his letters.

The illumination suggests the literary synergy of Acts and the Pauline Epistles in the canonical construction of the figure of the Apostle Paul. The Epistles provide only autobiographical snippets about Paul’s life and work: for a narrative representation of the Apostle, commentators have always relied on Acts, where Paul is the principal protagonist for the entire latter half of the book.

The illumination is a scene from Paul’s fateful voyage recounted in Acts 27, which has no explicit referent anywhere in Paul’s letters. Yet though he says nothing of itineraries, fellow travellers, rescues, or recoveries, among his many hardships Paul claims to have suffered not one but three shipwrecks (2 Corinthians 11:25), no doubt setting an ancient record for maritime survival: for most victims of shipwreck in antiquity, their first was also their last.

References

Eleen, Luba. 1982. The Illustrations of the Pauline Epistles in French and English Bibles of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 23 n.129, 77, 85–86, 91–94; 99–101, fig. 168