Saint Fiacre

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Holding a shovel in one hand, Saint Fiacre is presented as the patron saint of gardeners. According to the legend of this seventh-century saint, Fiacre earned the right to establish a hermitage and a hospice for the poor after single-handedly clearing an entire forest in one day. Famed for growing many different kinds of vegetables and herbs in his garden in Meaux, France, he made and dispensed many herbal remedies. Credited with miraculous cures, Saint Fiacre was particularly renowned for curing hemorrhoids. Devotion to the saint and his relics was predictably strong at the monastery he founded near Brie in the diocese of Meaux. Alabaster was quarried near Meaux during the later Middle Ages. Just before 1500, the city's bishop commissioned an alabaster enclosure decorated with reliefs for the choir of his cathedral, and a century later an Italian chronicler remarked that alabaster statuettes "a foot and a half high" were for sale in this city. As a result, it was long believed that this sculpture’s materials were sourced locally. Technical analysis, however, has revealed that the stone comes from Nottingham, England, which was famous for its alabaster carvings in the fifteenth century.

Medieval Art and The Cloisters

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum's collection of medieval and Byzantine art is among the most comprehensive in the world. Displayed in both The Met Fifth Avenue and in the Museum's branch in northern Manhattan, The Met Cloisters, the collection encompasses the art of the Mediterranean and Europe from the fall of Rome in the fourth century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. It also includes pre-medieval European works of art created during the Bronze Age and early Iron Age.

Metropolitan Museum of Art