Hermitary - Gallery - Art

About the images on this page

This set of hermit engravings is conspicuously not produced by the Sadeler brothers, but the identification with this school of artisans is clear. The continuity of images and settings is the same: ancient desert Christian hermits, presented in an idyllic semi-rural setting, each hermit busy in her task, always an exemplary prototype.
Here are the women hermits of the desert of whom we know so little or known only by a name, some functioning as prototypes of penitence,the most obvious being Mary Magdalene, an obverse of the Virgin Mary and a source of regular curiousity in the Middle Ages. Here, too, the counterparts of Abraham and Paphnutius, namely Maria Peccatrix (that is, "sinner") and Thais, rescued by men, though exemplary, except the latter in the eyes of Anatole France.
And who are the other women hermits? A few examples: Hermelindis was a sixth-century resident of Brabant who fled marriage to retain her virginity and live a life of abstinence, anticipating the women of the central medieval era for whom the dilemma of marriage versus eremiticism and abstinence became a central issue. Euphrosyna of Alexandria disguised herself as a man to enter a monastery and quietly reside there for nearly forty years! Sophronia of Tarentum (Spain) is known from St. Jerome's mention that she lived a life of solitude in a forest; upon her death, birds brought twigs, leves, and flowers to cover her body. Most of the hermits are oscure but their stories retain charm and exemplary eremitism.
All of the women hermits are presented in a distinctive Northern Renaissance and Flemish style that edifies, idealizes, and occasionally provokes a sense of nostalgia for an imagined medieval order lost to contemporaries, though updated for the sensibilities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book of collected engravings must have provided hours of idle reflection for its urban, professional owner, scenes of perfection exempted from the turmoil of the times.