How Saint Martin's Divided Cloak Became an Art History Icon

Feature image: Unknown Hungarian master, Saint Martin and the Beggar (detail), c. 1490, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest via Hungarian National Gallery

Saint Martin of Tours was one of the most beloved saints of medieval Europe, and nearly every image of him returns to the same moment, the winter day he cut his cloak in half for a stranger. A Roman cavalry soldier who left the army to become bishop of Tours, Martin died in 397 and was buried on November 11, the day that became his feast. Martinmas gave Europe its first taste of the new wine, its autumn goose, and its winter slaughter, and the saint became the patron of soldiers, beggars, and vintners. 

The image that made Martin famous comes from a single winter encounter at the gates of Amiens, where the young officer met a beggar shivering in the cold, cut his military cloak in half with his sword, and gave him one side. That night, according to his biographer Sulpicius Severus, Christ appeared to Martin in a dream wearing the half he had given away. The earliest great painted cycle of his life fills the Chapel of Saint Martin in the Lower Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. In March 1312, the Franciscan cardinal Gentile Partino da Montefiore, whose titular church in Rome was San Martino ai Monti, pledged 600 gold florins for its construction and decoration. Simone Martini painted ten scenes from the saint's life there, including the cloak story, and the cardinal himself kneeling before Martin above the entrance. The frescoes carry no signature or date and were first attributed to Simone in 1820. Most sources date them to between 1313 and 1318, though some scholars place them in the early 1320s, and the question remains open.

By the late fourteenth century, Saint Martin had become a fixture of the towering painted altarpieces of the Crown of Aragon, where a single church could commission a whole cycle of his life in gold and tempera. In Barcelona, the workshop of the brothers Jaume Serra and Pere Serra produced Saint Martin and the Beggar (c. 1375-85), one compartment from a larger Gothic altarpiece that surfaced only recently and now belongs to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The young saint turns in the saddle and reaches his sword back toward the beggar walking behind his horse. The panel's monumental scale, refined color, and expressive figures carry the influence of Sienese painting, the same school that produced Simone Martini. The Serra brothers ran one of Catalonia's most productive workshops, and their Martin shows how quickly the Italian model of the saint traveled across the western Mediterranean.

A century later in Aragon, an anonymous painter known as the Master of Belmonte pushed the scene toward pure ornament. His Saint Martin of Tours Dividing His Cloak for a Beggar, painted in the third quarter of the fifteenth century and standing more than one and a half meters tall, once belonged to a larger altarpiece dedicated to the saint and was formerly attributed to the Aragonese painter Martín de Soria. Its draperies, haloes, and horse's harness are built up in heavily gilded embossed gesso, and the walls and spindly towers of Amiens rise behind the figures. The painter gave the beggar a cross halo, the sign reserved for Christ, so the encounter at the gate and the dream that followed it collapse into a single image, and the viewer already knows who is receiving the cloak. 

While altarpieces gave Martin a public stage, the illuminated book of hours put him into private hands. These prayer books closed with suffrages, short prayers addressed to individual saints, each opened by a miniature, and Martin's cloak became one of the most familiar pages in them. In Paris around 1410, the anonymous illuminator known as the Boucicaut Master, named for the book of hours he painted for Marshal Jean de Boucicaut, painted Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak in tempera and gold on a leaf of vellum measuring just 14 by 10 centimeters. 

In Utrecht, a city that claims Martin as its patron saint, the Master of Catherine of Cleves painted the scene around 1440 for the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, one of the most celebrated Dutch manuscripts of the century. His version adds what the earlier painters left to the imagination, with Christ appearing in the sky holding the shared cloth, and frames the page with a border of gold bars strung like a necklace, two of them inscribed with the names of Jesus and Mary. 

Outside the church, November 11 marked the end of the harvest. The saint's day fell at the end of the grape harvest, so the new wine of the year, called Saint Martin's wine, was sampled the night before the feast and handed out free beyond the city gates. Geese were roasted, pigs were slaughtered for winter, and across Flanders and the German lands the day took on the feel of a bacchanal that opened the winter carnival season. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted that celebration in The Wine of Saint Martin's Day (c. 1565-68), his largest surviving picture at 148 by 270.5 centimeters, worked in glue-size tempera on fine linen. A crowd of peasants climbs over a single enormous barrel, scrambling to fill their vessels with wine, while Saint Martin himself rides at the far right edge, cutting his cloak for the beggars almost unnoticed. A roadside cross stands nearby, and the revelers pass it by. By the 1560s, Bruegel saw November 11 as a day the feast had swallowed the saint, and he painted the date as the crowd lived it.

In Spain, the scene arrived in Toledo with a calendar coincidence built into its paperwork. El Greco was commissioned on November 9, 1597, two days before the feast, to paint the altarpieces for the newly built Chapel of San José, a private family chapel tied to Martín Ramírez, a namesake of the saint. His Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597/1599) hung on one of the chapel's side altars, nearly two meters tall, and dresses Martin in gilded contemporary armor astride a white horse, turning the Roman soldier into a Toledo gentleman the chapel's patrons would have recognized as one of their own. The canvas stayed in the chapel until the directors sold it in 1906 (one Spanish study gives 1907) to the Paris dealer Boussod Valadon, who sold it the same year to Peter A. B. Widener in Philadelphia. 

In Flanders, the cloak became a village treasure. Anthony van Dyck painted Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak (c. 1618) for Ferdinand van Boisschot, Baron of Zaventem, who gave it to the parish church of Saint Martin in Zaventem, where it was installed in 1621. A local story holds that the young painter, on his way to Italy, made it for free to win over a woman named Isabella who lived near the church, though no documentary evidence confirms the romance. The panel left the church during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, was repatriated after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, and returned to Zaventem in 1816, where it still hangs above the altar. A larger canvas version, painted around 1618-20, belongs to the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

After Martin's death, the half of the cloak he kept became one of the most treasured relics in France. The Frankish kings carried it into battle, and the priests who guarded it were called cappellani, from cappa, the Latin word for cloak. The small shrine that housed it became known as the cappella, and those two words gave English the words chaplain and chapel.