St. Agnes of Rome (BK 006) Postcard

St. Agnes of Rome (d. 305) was a beautiful upper-class, cradle-Christian virgin martyred during the last persecution of the Christians, the Great Persecution by the Emperor Diocletian. Only 12 or 13 years of age—very young by today’s standards but of marriageable age in ancient Rome—Agnes was pursued by numerous suitors including the governor’s son. Rebuffed by Agnes who maintained “I am already promised to the Lord of the Universe” and “He chose me first and He shall have me,” her offended suitors sought her humiliation and death. Ultimately, Agnes was sentenced to death and beheaded. Church Fathers like SS. Ambrose and Jerome would later point to her in their writings as a model of consecrated virginity and female chastity. + St. Agnes is one of only seven women--mostly virgin martyrs-- mentioned by name in the first Eucharistic Prayer of the Canon of the Mass. + In art, St. Agnes was an early recipient of a distinguishing attribute in non-narrative art, that is, a visual identifier in, say, portraiture derived from the featured figure’s life story. The lamb is Agnes’s principal attribute and derives from puns on her name. In Greek, Agnes is Άγνη from agnos (αγνός) meaning pure or chaste; in Latin agnus means lamb. Alternatively, or additionally, her attribute derives from a vision her parents had of their daughter eight days after her martyrdom. In this vision, Agnes, surrounded by a multitude of other virgin martyrs in Paradise, was accompanied by a lamb, a surrogate for Christ, standing at her right side. St. Agnes is the only one of 22 virgins processing toward an enthroned Madonna and Child in the 6th-century Byzantine-style mosaics on the north lateral wall of the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy, to be visually differentiated by attribute, her lamb. + Since the 16th century, two lambs have been blessed by the Pope on St. Agnes’s feast day (January 21). Once shorn in summer, their wool is woven into pallia, the ecclesiastical vestments that the Pope bestows on newly appointed metropolitan archbishops as symbol of their office. + Finally, although St. Agnes shunned marriage for herself, she is patron saint of engaged couples. According to folklore, having prayed to St. Agnes in a bedtime ritual on January 20th, an unmarried girl will dream of her future husband that night. This belief inspired the 1819 Romantic narrative poem set in the Middle Ages entitled “The Eve of St Agnes” by English poet John Keats (1795-1821). This poem, in turn, inspired several other works of literature and art, including the c.1863 painting of the same name by English artist John Everett Millais (1829-1896). + Feast: January 21