Wilgefortis

Important results of the research from 1997 ff (see references therein) have not yet been incorporated in the following article!

Sorrow, too: Ontkommer ( Dutch), Wilgefortis (derived from " virgo fortis " ) and otherwise noted, was a fictional saint whose legend was brought wrongly using paintings of clothed in a tunic of Christ on the cross connection. As Wilgefortis it was 1583/86 was added to the Roman Martyrology, but now deleted. The story, worship and iconography of Santa or Santa Hulpe help, repeatedly blended and confused with the incorrect sorrow - Wilgefortis theme, requires a separate representation.

Legend

Since the mid-15th century saint legends tell of her, she was the daughter of a pagan converted to Christianity king who fought against the forced marriage of the Father. Your fervent prayers for blemish was answered: you grew a beard. The enraged father had them crucified. Before she died there, they announced yet for three days their faith and converted to Christianity so many, among them her father, who ruefully built a memorial church, and let it set up a precious equipped factory image. At this, further reports of miracles and legends, one of which is especially well outbound from Lucca Spielmann Legend of importance socialize:

Before the image of a once fiddled in distress game man whom the Holy paid with her precious shoe thrown down. The accused then of stealing Geiger proved his innocence by pleading got before the picture, thrown again by the Holy the second shoe he. The legend inspired, inter alia, Justinus Kerner in 1816 to his ballad The Geiger at Gmünd. But also in Grimm's fairy tales she found as the holy woman Kummernis precipitation.

Pictorial tradition

The origin of the legend and the history of their iconography is dependent on and intertwined with the early and high medieval image type of the clad Christ on the cross, and especially with the Volto Santo of Lucca.

How to Byzantine or Ottonian crucifixion representations, the Holy sorrow on the cross is more upright than hanging, always shown bearded, crowned and girdled. Late and post-medieval representations of thought certainly been originally the saint of legend. In them it is therefore shown with unfixed feet and only one shoe, also kneeling before the altar Geiger now comes into the picture.

Dissemination

The oldest traces of late medieval textual tradition point to the southern Netherlands. Also a pilgrimage to a holy image of the Wilgefortis in Mainz Cathedral is preserved. In southern Germany and the Alpine countries, the veneration of saints has continued up through the Baroque period also. Even in recent times, the pilgrimage church in Freising has provided her Wilgefortis - patronage to the fore again.