Roaring Lions and Angry Birds

This article examines how precious Italian manufactured fabrics with Oriental-inspired beast-fight patterns were traded across Europe, worked into liturgical textiles, and appeared on paintings with Christ’s Passion. The ferocious beast-fight motifs resonated with Christ’s violent fate and His ultimate death on the cross, as the motif is also found in the Scriptures and the texts of the liturgy. Interestingly, such patterns adorn the garments of an array of mainly positive characters including even the Virgin Mary. The beast-fight patterns evoke the eschatological struggle between violence and goodness as well as the emotional turmoil it caused with those involved in the Passion drama. This article reconsiders the narrative role of beast-fight textile patterns in paintings of Christ’s Passion and His martyred followers, focusing on their geographical shift from the East to the West, the material transition from textiles to pictorial images, as well as its potential to capture the dramatic character of the scene

Character (mathematics · Clothing · Motif (music · Narrative · Painting · Passion · Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies